Can you believe it? The greatest patriotic song in American history wasn’t written on cheap sheet music, but scrawled on a crumpled brown paper bag on the passenger seat of an old truck. 1970. Loretta Lynn – a 21-year-old woman, mother of four, who had never been to a recording studio – was traveling from Kentucky to Nashville. She wasn’t writing about fame. She was writing about her coal miner father. A man who had lived a life covered in dust, never owned a decent pair of dress shoes, and who had passed away before he could hear his daughter sing about his life. Loretta fought to hold onto memories that were considered “meaningless.” But wasn’t she not just protecting her father’s memory? She was using music to build him the most magnificent funeral – an idea that the impoverished land of Butcher Holler had never been able to achieve. And so, “The Coal Miner’s Daughter” was born. A situation involving poverty, yet it changed the entire world of music.
Introduction: Loretta Lynn was still very young when the story of her childhood began turning into a song. Long before…