SHE WATCHED HER MOTHER SCRUB CLOTHES ON A WASHBOARD UNTIL HER FINGERS BLED. YEARS LATER, LORETTA LYNN PUT THAT WOMAN INTO A SONG — AND MADE HER IMMORTAL. Loretta Webb was born in a cabin on a hill in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky. Her father, Ted Webb, mined coal at night and farmed corn by day. Her mother, Clara, did everything else. She scrubbed the family’s clothes on a washboard until her fingers bled. At night she rocked the babies and read the Bible by the light of a coal-oil lamp. Loretta married at fifteen. She had four children before she turned twenty. In 1969 she sat down at home and wrote it all out — the cabin, the coal dust, the washboard, the lamp. She called it “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” It went to No. 1 and became the song her whole life would be named after. But the coal miner in that title never heard a note of it. Ted Webb died in February 1959, at fifty-two — ten years before his daughter wrote the first line. Clara lived. She saw the song reach No. 1. She saw the movie made from it in 1980, and watched Sissy Spacek win an Academy Award for playing her daughter. In November 1981, Clara was admitted to a Nashville hospital. Loretta was midway through a two-week engagement in Las Vegas. She cancelled the last three nights and went to her. Clara died on November 24. She was sixty-nine.
The Woman Behind Loretta Lynn’s Most Famous Song Long before Loretta Lynn became a legend, she was Loretta Webb, a…