How Loretta and Doolittle Lynn Drove 'I'm a Honky Tonk Girl' to Radio Stations and Reached the Opry

Before she was famous, Loretta Lynn was Loretta Webb. She was born on April 14, 1932, in Butcher Holler, Kentucky, the second of eight children of a coal miner.

At fifteen she went to a pie social. A young man just back from the Army, Oliver Lynn, was the highest bidder. He went by "Doolittle," "Doo" or "Mooney." The two married on January 10, 1948, only about a month after they first met. She was fifteen and he was twenty-one.

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A long way from Butcher Holler

Doolittle had heard there were better jobs in Washington state, so the couple moved there. Loretta was seven months pregnant with their first child. They settled near Custer, about 3,000 miles from her family. She later said she felt lost being so far from home.

Children came quickly. Betty Sue was born in 1948, Jack Benny in 1949, Ernest Ray in 1951 and Clara Marie, called Cissie, in 1952. By twenty-two Loretta was raising four children.

Doolittle believed in her singing before she did. He bought her a $17 guitar from Sears, a gift for their anniversary. She later explained that he bought it because he thought she sang well. He also pushed his shy wife to write songs and sing them in public.

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During the 1950s she sang in local places such as Bill's Tavern in Blaine and the Delta Grange Hall in Custer. She formed a band, the Trailblazers, which included her brother Jay Lee Webb.

A television contest and a Canadian label

Her break came on television. Buck Owens, a Texas-born musician who had moved to Washington in 1958, hosted a talent contest on KTNT, a station in Tacoma. The station also aired a show called the BAR-K Jamboree. Loretta won the contest, and the prize was a wristwatch.

Norm Burley, a wealthy lumberman from Vancouver, British Columbia, saw her perform on the show. Burley was the main money behind a new Vancouver label, Zero Records. Songwriter and producer Don Grashey served as its president. Loretta signed with Zero on February 2, 1960.

That February the label sent her to Western Recorders in Los Angeles. Grashey produced the session, and Speedy West played steel guitar. She recorded four of her own songs, including "I'm a Honky Tonk Girl" and "Whispering Sea."

She wrote "I'm a Honky Tonk Girl" after meeting a woman at a club whose husband had left her. Loretta said she wrote it in about twenty minutes. Burley paid the costs. Loretta later said, "He furnished everything, the gas and everything."

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Taking the record to the stations

Zero released the single in March 1960, with "Whispering Sea" on the other side. The small label pressed about 3,500 copies, and most were mailed to disc jockeys and reviewers. One account says Doolittle mailed them himself, with Loretta's photograph inside.

Then the Lynns got in the car and visited stations in person, stopping wherever they saw a radio tower. Burley paid for the trip. They drove an old Mercury and kept going for about three months, all the way to Nashville.

Money was short. Loretta remembered that they "slept in the car and ate baloney and cheese sandwiches in the parks."

It worked. "I'm a Honky Tonk Girl" reached the national country charts by June 1960 and peaked at No. 14 on Billboard's country chart that summer. Part of its appeal was that it sounded so different from what Nashville was making at the time.

Arriving in Nashville

The Lynns got to Nashville in the fall of 1960. They slept in their car in front of the Opry's building on their first night, and, as the story goes, they were so short of money that they shared a doughnut for breakfast. Several accounts date her first Grand Ole Opry appearance to Saturday, October 15, 1960. The Country Music Hall of Fame gives an earlier date, September 17.

Years later she said she remembered almost nothing about singing that night. In her words: "I remember patting my foot, and that's it. I don't remember even singing."

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Things moved quickly after that. The Wilburn Brothers got her released from her Zero contract and persuaded Decca Records to sign her. When Decca's Owen Bradley offered her a contract, Burley let her go. She became an official member of the Opry on September 25, 1962.

Oliver "Doolittle" Lynn died on August 22, 1996. Loretta Lynn died at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, on October 4, 2022, at age 90.

Why it still matters

Loretta Lynn's career did not begin with a big label or a publicity campaign. It began with a small Canadian company, a box of records and a couple willing to knock on station doors themselves. A great many people helped her along the way. Her first hit, though, got its start on the road.

Watch the story

This video is a narrated, dramatized retelling with a synthetic voice and AI-generated images; the article above sticks to the documented record. The video loads from YouTube only when you press play.