Loretta Lynn: The Songs Country Radio Tried to Ban

By the mid-1970s, country radio had banned enough Loretta Lynn songs that she could joke about it from the stage. At the 1975 Academy of Country Music Awards, she told the crowd she wouldn't be performing "The Pill," her song about birth control, because "they won't let me." The line got a laugh, but it wasn't really a joke. Stations across the South and Midwest had pulled the record outright. It became a hit anyway, one of several Lynn songs that radio programmers tried to keep off the air and country audiences bought regardless.

That's the throughline of Lynn's writing career: she wrote about her own life, plainly, from the point of view of a married, working-class woman, at a time when almost nobody in country music was doing that on the radio. When the subject made programmers uncomfortable, she generally didn't back off it. She wrote it anyway and let the audience decide.

A childhood that became her signature song

Lynn was born in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, the daughter of a coal miner, and her birth certificate, uncovered by an Associated Press investigation in 2012, puts her birth year at 1932, three years earlier than she'd claimed for most of her career. She married Oliver "Doolittle" Lynn in 1948, making her not quite sixteen at the time rather than the thirteen years old her memoir had long claimed, though still remarkably young by any standard. It's a strange thing to have to correct about your own life story decades into a career built partly on that story's mythology, and it's worth mentioning here because it happened in public and Lynn's own account had shaped how millions of people understood her.

What the corrected timeline doesn't change is the song it produced. "Coal Miner's Daughter," released in 1970, is a direct, unadorned account of her father and her childhood in Butcher Hollow, and it became her signature record, a number one hit and later the title of both her 1976 autobiography and the 1980 film based on it. Lynn described writing it as something closer to remembering out loud than composing, the facts of her childhood arriving in order and the song following behind them. If you're a songwriter convinced your own ordinary life isn't interesting enough to write about, "Coal Miner's Daughter" is a good record to sit with. Lynn didn't invent anything for that song. She just told the truth about where she came from.

Her first number one, written from a place other women recognized

Lynn's first number one, "Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)," released in 1966 and co-written with Peggy Sue Wright, is a wife telling her husband exactly what she thinks of him coming home late and expecting affection anyway. It's blunt, funny, and entirely from the wife's side of an argument country radio mostly hadn't heard put that directly. Lynn had moved to Washington state with her husband as a teenager and started performing and writing not long after, and by the time this song hit, her writing voice was already fully formed: direct address, plain language, no apology for the subject matter.

You Ain't Woman Enough, written in ten minutes

In 1966, a woman came to Lynn backstage before a show, upset that another woman was trying to take her husband. Lynn went to her dressing room and, by her own account, wrote "You Ain't Woman Enough (To Take My Man)" in about ten minutes. It became a number two country hit and the title track of her second album. It's a useful detail for any songwriter who assumes a song needs to be labored over to be good: sometimes the fastest version, written closest to the actual conversation that sparked it, is also the truest one.

Writing the songs radio didn't want to play

Over the next decade, Lynn wrote a string of songs that took on subjects country radio generally avoided. "Rated X," released in 1972, is about the way divorced women got treated as automatically available once their marriage ended, a subject Lynn wrote about after watching it happen to women around her. Some stations wouldn't play it. It still became her sixth number one. "The Pill," recorded in 1972 but held from release until 1975 because of how much resistance was expected, is a wife celebrating birth control giving her control over her own body after years of pregnancies, sung with the same blunt humor as her earlier hits. Stations across the country banned it outright. It reached the country Top Five anyway.

What Lynn proved with these songs, repeatedly, is that a large country audience wanted to hear its own life reflected honestly, even when the people controlling the airwaves decided that life was too controversial to broadcast. If you're a songwriter softening a true subject because you're worried about how it'll be received, Lynn's catalogue is worth remembering: the songs that got banned are also the ones that became hits.

A friendship cut short, and duets that gave her a second voice

Lynn and Patsy Cline met in 1961 while Cline was recovering from a serious car accident; Lynn, still new to the business, dedicated a radio performance of Cline's "I Fall to Pieces" to her, and the two became close friends and label-mates at Decca under producer Owen Bradley. Cline died in a plane crash less than two years later, in March 1963, and Lynn recorded a tribute album, "I Remember Patsy," in 1977. Later in the decade, Lynn found a different kind of musical partnership with Conway Twitty, recording five number one duets between 1971 and 1975 and winning Vocal Duo of the Year five years running. It's worth noting that Lynn's writing voice, so specifically female and first-person on her solo records, adapted easily into a duet format without losing what made it distinct. A strong voice on the page tends to survive a change in format.

What's worth taking from her career

Lynn was the first woman named CMA Entertainer of the Year, in 1972, and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2008. She kept recording into her eighties, including 2004's "Van Lear Rose," produced by Jack White, which won her a Grammy for Best Country Album more than four decades after her first hit.

The lesson in her catalogue isn't complicated, but it's one a lot of songwriters talk themselves out of following: write the true thing, even the version of the true thing that makes people uncomfortable, and trust the audience to meet you there. Country radio spent a decade trying to decide which parts of Loretta Lynn's life were acceptable to put on the air. The audience kept buying the parts radio didn't want them to hear. If you've got a true story you're not sure anyone wants to hear yet, go find your co-writer.

Sources: Songwriters Hall of Fame: Loretta Lynn, Rolling Stone: Loretta Lynn Story Shaken Up by Age Revelation, Library of Congress: Coal Miner's Daughter, American Songwriter: 5 Loretta Lynn Songs That Were Banned, American Songwriter: Behind the Meaning of "You Ain't Woman Enough", Biography.com: Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn's Friendship