Country music legend Loretta Lynn has died at age 90, her family confirmed Tuesday.
“Our precious mom, Loretta Lynn, passed away peacefully this morning, October 4th, in her sleep at home at her beloved ranch in Hurricane Mills,” the family said in a statement.
Lynn, who was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988, broke barriers in the industry. The singer-songwriter was known for taking pride in her rural Kentucky background and sang about life and love.
“I’ve stayed the way I started out,” Lynn said in 2011, according to Rolling Stone. “I’m proud that I didn’t change. When I go into a town that people first started loving me, and first started talking about me, I still got those people. Some passed away. But most are still there. And they come to see me every time I go. And that’s good.”
Some of her most popular songs were “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man)” — and some were banned. The country queen had estimated that 14 of her songs were forbidden from being played on the radio during her career, including a song called “The Pill,” about birth control.
But she wasn’t quick to call herself a feminist. “I’m not a big fan of Women’s Liberation, but maybe it will help women stand up for the respect they’re due,” Lynn wrote in “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”
She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by then-President Barack Obama back in 2013.
“Her first guitar cost $17 and with it this coal miner’s daughter gave voice to a generation, singing what no one wanted to talk about and saying what no one wanted to think about,” Obama said of Lynn at the time. “Now, over 50 years after she cut her first record … Loretta Lynn still reigns as the rule-breaking, record setting Queen of Country Music.”
Lynn’s husband of 48 years, Oliver Lynn, died in 1996.
She is survived by her younger sister Crystal Gayle, her children Patsy Lynn Russell, Peggy Lynn, Clara (Cissie) Marie Lynn and Ernest; 17 grandchildren; four step-grandchildren; and a number of great-grandchildren, according to The New York Times.
