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SHE MARRIED HIM ON HER THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY — SEVEN YEARS AFTER IT STARTED, WHEN HE WAS STILL SOMEONE ELSE’S HUSBAND AND STILL HER BOSS. Anne Murray and Bill Langstroth became involved in 1968. He co-produced and co-hosted CBC’s Singalong Jubilee in Halifax, the show that gave her first steady professional singing work, which made him the man her early career ran through. He was also married, with two young children, and by her own account nearly fifteen years older. She knew all of it. Writing about that stretch decades later, she said she was “falling in love, fast, and powerless to do anything about it.” They kept it out of public view for seven years, and those were the same years everything else went right. “Snowbird” made her the first Canadian solo woman to earn an American gold record in 1970, and the country promptly decided she was its wholesome girl from a coal-mining town in Nova Scotia. Langstroth’s divorce came through. On June 20, 1975 they married, and it was her thirtieth birthday. Decades later she put the whole thing into her own memoir, and she did not soften a word of it.

Anne Murray, Bill Langstroth, and the Love Story Behind a Career Breakthrough Anne Murray’s rise was never just about a…

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THE MAN WHO BOUGHT LORETTA LYNN HER FIRST GUITAR WAS THE SAME MAN SHE WROTE “FIST CITY” ABOUT. Doolittle Lynn spent seventeen dollars on that guitar because he was convinced she sang as well as anyone on the radio. He pushed her onto her first stages. When her tiny label had no money behind “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl,” he mailed out copies by the thousand and drove her station to station until deejays put it on the air. As she put it in her memoir, without Doo and his drive there would have been no Loretta Lynn, country singer. He was also a heavy drinker who cheated on her for years and hit her, and she never once cleaned that up. She wrote “Fist City” about a woman making eyes at him while she was on stage singing. She and her sister Peggy Sue turned two marriages to drinking men into “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’,” her first number one. They were married forty-eight years, until he died in 1996. Asked why she stayed, she named the six children first. Then she added the part that refuses to make any of it simple: “I loved him and he loved me.”

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The Man Who Bought Loretta Lynn Her First Guitar Was the Same Man She Wrote “Fist City” About Before Loretta…

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FOR TWO AND A HALF YEARS IN ATLANTA, THE BEST COUNTRY SINGER OF HIS GENERATION SOLD MIRRORS AND SHOWER DOORS, AND NOT ONE CUSTOMER WHO CALLED IN AN ORDER KNEW WHAT THAT VOICE WAS FOR. Vern Gosdin was born in Alabama in 1934. The story usually told is that he walked away from music in the early seventies. He said he was pushed — too many contracts he could not honor. So he opened a glass company. It was good to him, he said. His heart was not in it. He came back, and it took another twelve years to land. He was fifty-three when the record came out. The title song, written with Max D. Barnes, puts a man who has just fought with his wife into a bar next to an old man whose wife is in the ground. The old man’s point is not that the younger one has no right to hurt. It’s that he still has somebody to go home to. It won Song of the Year in 1989. Then his own third marriage ended, and he made Alone — one album, front to back, about one woman leaving. Asked about it later, he said something good comes out of anything bad if you look hard enough. Then: “I got ten hits out of my last divorce.” He meant it as gratitude. It also reads as an inventory. A man who had spent two and a half years cutting glass knew what a broken thing is worth if you handle it right. He died in Nashville in 2009, at seventy-four, in the same town as the building where they keep the plaques. His name is not on one.

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Vern Gosdin: The Voice That Came Back From the Glass Shop For a while, Vern Gosdin was not living the…

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HE WAS THE ONE WHO BROKE THEIR MARRIAGE VOWS. BUT LORETTA LYNN SAVED HER ANGRIEST WORDS FOR THE WOMEN WHO CAME NEAR HIM. Doolittle Lynn’s drinking and infidelity were never secrets Loretta tried to bury. She admitted their marriage was turbulent, and she turned his behavior into songs like “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’.” But in 1968, when Loretta heard that a woman was pursuing Doo while she was away touring, she did not write a quiet song about betrayal. She wrote “Fist City.” The warning was aimed directly at the other woman. The song reached No. 1, turning Loretta’s private jealousy into one of country music’s fiercest declarations of possession. That is what makes the story uncomfortable. Loretta knew her husband was not innocent. Yet instead of walking away, she defended the marriage, fought the women around him, and remained with Doo for 48 years—until his death in 1996. Was “Fist City” the sound of a woman reclaiming her power? Or was Loretta fighting the wrong person while the man who betrayed her remained the prize?

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When Loretta Lynn Turned Jealousy Into “Fist City” Loretta Lynn never pretended her marriage was perfect. She spoke openly about…

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ON OCTOBER 4, 2022, A 90-YEAR-OLD WOMAN DIED IN HER SLEEP AT HOME IN HURRICANE MILLS, TENNESSEE, IN A HOUSE ON LAND SHE HAD OWNED FOR FIFTY-SIX YEARS. Doo had been dead twenty-six of those years. She had stayed married to him for forty-eight, which is a different fact than being happy for forty-eight. Loretta Webb was born in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, in 1932, the second of eight children of a coal miner. She married Oliver Lynn in January 1948, at fifteen. For most of her life she said she had been thirteen, and she said 1935 instead of 1932, and a birth certificate in Frankfort eventually said otherwise. She had four children before she turned twenty. In 1953 her husband bought her a seventeen-dollar guitar and she taught herself on it. Then she did the unusual thing. She wrote her own songs — which women in country music of that era were mostly not asked to do — and she wrote them about the parts of a woman’s day that nobody had decided were material yet. A husband coming home drunk and expecting something. Another woman circling. Divorce. Too many children too fast. Birth control. Country radio kept banning her. Stations pulled the drinking song, the divorce song, the song about a girl’s first time, and in 1975 they pulled “The Pill” hardest of all. She had twenty-four number one records anyway. In 1972 she became the first woman the Country Music Association ever named Entertainer of the Year. Her father spent his life in the Van Lear mine and died at fifty-two, a stroke, his lungs full of what he’d been breathing since he was a boy. She was called a coal miner’s daughter for the next fifty years, and let herself be. She got ninety years. And a town with her own name on the gate.

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Loretta Lynn and the Town That Kept Her Name On October 4, 2022, Loretta Lynn died in her sleep at…

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THEY CALLED HIM NO SHOW JONES. HE EARNED IT — HUNDREDS OF CONCERTS PAID FOR AND NEVER PLAYED. WHEN NASHVILLE FINALLY THREW HIM A FAREWELL, THEY NAMED IT AFTER THE INSULT. The complaint against George Jones was never made up. He drank, he vanished, he left arenas full of people staring at an empty stage. By the nineties, country radio had moved on to younger faces and smoother records, and plenty of people in that town felt he’d used up every chance he was given. He knew. He wrote about it — the pain of being pushed off the playlists of a format he helped build. He kept touring anyway. Kept singing. The radio just stopped reaching back. So he booked his own goodbye: November 22, 2013, Bridgestone Arena, a farewell concert on his terms. He died on April 26, seven months before it. They held the show anyway. 112 artists came — Garth Brooks, George Strait, Alan Jackson, Miranda Lambert, even Megadeth. Four hours, fifty songs, and his empty rocking chair sitting on the stage. They called the night Playin’ Possum: The Final No Show. The one show he’d never have missed was the one he couldn’t make. Is that Nashville honoring him too late — or exactly on time?

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George Jones and the Night Nashville Turned “No Show” into a Farewell George Jones carried a nickname that was never…

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IN DECEMBER 1984, “NOBODY LOVES ME LIKE YOU DO” BECAME ANNE MURRAY’S NINTH NUMBER ONE COUNTRY HIT IN AMERICA. TWENTY-THREE YEARS LATER SHE SANG IT AGAIN, WITH THE DAUGHTER SHE HAD ONCE BEEN AFRAID OF LOSING. When that single topped the chart, Dawn Langstroth was five years old. It was a duet with Dave Loggins, a straightforward love song, and it stayed that way for more than two decades. Dawn spent years fighting anorexia nervosa, and none of her mother’s records made the slightest difference to it. In January 1999 the family stopped keeping it inside. Dawn agreed to speak publicly, the two of them gave interviews side by side, and Anne played a benefit that month for Sheena’s Place, the Toronto centre that had supported them. Dawn came through it, and started writing and recording under her own name. In 2007 they recorded “Nobody Loves Me Like You Do” as a duet for Duets: Friends & Legends, the last album of new material Anne Murray ever released. Not a word of the lyric changed. For anyone who knew what that family had been through, it stopped sounding like a love song. The daughter Anne had once been afraid of losing was the voice answering her own, line for line, all the way to the end.

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When Anne Murray Sang “Nobody Loves Me Like You Do” Again In December 1984, “Nobody Loves Me Like You Do”…

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LORETTA LYNN BECAME A MOTHER AT 16. DECADES LATER, SHE ADMITTED SHE AND HER DAUGHTER HAD ALMOST RAISED EACH OTHER. Betty Sue was Loretta’s first child. She arrived before Loretta had finished growing up herself. While most girls her age were thinking about school dances and the future, Loretta was keeping house, working in the garden and caring for a baby. Three more children followed quickly. Betty Sue became the feisty little “boss” of her younger siblings, while her young mother tried to build a home from almost nothing. Looking back, Loretta said, “In many ways it felt like we raised each other.” As the years passed, their bond changed. Betty Sue became a songwriter, helped her mother with the ranch and worked beside her in entertainment. But more than that, she became the person Loretta called every day. Not simply a daughter. A best friend. When Betty Sue died in 2013, Loretta had already survived poverty, a difficult marriage, the death of her son Jack and six decades in the music business. None of it prepared her for losing her firstborn. “Part of my heart died when she left us,” Loretta later wrote. Loretta became a mother at 16. But when Betty Sue died, she learned that no matter how old a child becomes, a mother never stops seeing the baby who first gave her that name.

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Loretta Lynn and Betty Sue Lynn: A Mother-Daughter Bond That Grew Up Together When Loretta Lynn became a mother at…

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ON OCTOBER 4, 2022, A 90-YEAR-OLD WOMAN DIED IN HER SLEEP, IN HER OWN BED, ON LAND SHE OWNED IN HURRICANE MILLS, TENNESSEE — A FEW HUNDRED FEET FROM A CABIN SHE HAD BUILT AS A COPY OF THE ONE SHE WAS BORN IN. Doo had been gone twenty-six years by then. They had been married forty-eight. Of the six children, she had already buried two. Loretta Webb was born in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, in 1932, one of eight. The walls of the cabin were papered with pages torn from a Sears catalog. She married a twenty-one-year-old veteran a month after meeting him. She was fifteen. She told it for fifty years as thirteen, and it took a wire-service reporter going through Kentucky state records in 2012 to correct her. She had four children before she was twenty. She was a logging-camp housewife in Custer, Washington, when her husband handed her a guitar. In 1960 she cut “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl” for a label nobody had heard of. Then she and Doo got in a car and drove the country, station to station, handing the record across the desk and asking the man behind it to please play her. Twelve years later, the men behind those desks were refusing. “Rated X.” “The Pill.” Pulled from playlists, banned outright in places. She kept turning them in anyway. The records sold regardless, because the women buying them had heard nobody say those things out loud before. In 1972 country music named her Entertainer of the Year. No woman had ever held it. The song that gave her a name was about her father, who worked the mines and did not live to see fifty-two. She wrote it eleven years after he died. She sang it for the next fifty, and said near the end that she’d have given anything for him to hear it once.

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Loretta Lynn and the Long Road Home On October 4, 2022, Loretta Lynn died in her sleep at 90 years…

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JACK LYNN NEVER CHASED HIS MOTHER’S FAME. HE STAYED HOME WITH THE HORSES — AND DIED IN THE RIVER RUNNING THROUGH HER OWN LAND. Jack Benny Lynn was Loretta Lynn’s eldest son, but he never followed her onto a stage. While his mother’s name filled theaters across America, Jack worked as a blacksmith and cared for the horses at the family’s Hurricane Mills ranch. Loretta once described him as the child she felt “most sentimental about.” On July 22, 1984, the 34-year-old set out on horseback and attempted to cross the rain-swollen Duck River. He never made it home. Searchers later recovered his body from the river on the family property. Loretta was on tour and recovering in an Illinois hospital after collapsing from exhaustion. Doolittle traveled from Tennessee to tell her in person. Their daughter Patsy later remembered, “She tore to pieces. They were very close.” Loretta had bought Hurricane Mills as a place where her family could remain close. But the land meant to hold them together became the place that took her son. Fame had taught Loretta how to survive almost anything. It could not teach a mother how to bury her boy.

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Jack Benny Lynn Never Chased Loretta Lynn’s Fame Jack Benny Lynn grew up in the shadow of one of country…

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