Coal Miner's Daughter - Background

Background

The film was adapted from Loretta Lynn's 1976 autobiography written with George Vecsey. Loretta Lynn was one of eight children born to Ted Webb (Levon Helm), a coal miner raising a family despite grinding poverty in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, pronounced by locals as "Butcher Holler". She married Oliver Vanetta (Doolittle) "Mooney" Lynn (Tommy Lee Jones) when she was 15 years old. A mother of four by the time she was 19 (and a grandmother by age 29), Lynn began singing the occasional song at local honky-tonks on weekends as well as making the occasional radio appearance.

At the age of 25, Norm Burley, the owner of Zero Records, a small Canadian record label heard her sing on one of her early Northern Washington radio appearances and gave the couple the money needed to travel to Los Angeles, to cut a demo tape from which her first single "Honky Tonk Girl" would be made.

After returning home from the sessions, Mooney suggested that they go on a promotional tour to push the record. He took his own publicity photo, and he spent many late nights by writing letters to show promoters and to radio disc jockeys all over the South. After Loretta received an emergency phone call from home telling her that her father had died, she and Mooney hit the road with records, photos, and their children.

After the funeral and after dropping the kids at Loretta's mother's house in Kentucky, Loretta and Mooney embarked on an extensive promotional tour of radio stations across the South.

En route, and unbeknownst to the pair, Loretta's first single, "Honky Tonk Girl", had hit the charts based on radio as well as jukebox plays and earned her a spot on the Grand Ole Opry. After 17 straight weekly performances on the Opry, she was invited to sing at the Ernest Tubb Record Shop Midnite Jamboree after her performance that night. Country superstar Patsy Cline, one of Loretta's idols had recently been hospitalized from a near-fatal car wreck, and so Loretta used her time to dedicate Patsy's newest hit "I Fall to Pieces" to the singer herself as a musical get-well card.

Cline was in fact listening to the broadcast that night from her hospital room and sent her husband Charlie Dick down to Tubbs' record shop to fetch Loretta so the two could meet. A long and close friendship with Patsy Cline followed, ended only by the tragic death of her idol in a plane crash on March 5, 1963.

Extensive touring, keeping up her image, overwork and a great deal of stress from trying to keep her family and marriage together caused a nervous breakdown, however after a year off at her ranch in Hurricane Mills, TN she was back out on the road in fine form as the First Lady of Country Music.

Some months later, Mooney drives Loretta at breakneck speed out to what we discover is a proposed site for a new house. They argue about where to put the bedrooms, and finally, Mooney somewhat jokingly says if they can't settle the issue about where to put the bedrooms, he's going to go live in a treehouse up at the top of a hill. The film ends with Loretta performing the title track as well as her signature song to a sold out crowd, and we hear a medley of Loretta Lynn hits performed live over the credits which does not appear on any album. She was only 45 years old at the time of release.