NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) – When Loretta Lynn was growing up in Butcher Hollow in Kentucky in 1930s, her home in the coal mining community was always filled with music, either from her own voice echoing through the trees or the sound of the Carter Family’s songs.
The country icon’s Appalachian musical roots are explored on a new “American Masters” documentary on PBS as well as her first new studio album in a more than a decade, “Full Circle,” both debuting Friday.
Lynn, who was the second of eight children in her family, said her daddy played the banjo and her mama played the guitar and nearly everyone in the “holler,” as she pronounces it, could sing or play as well.
“I was singing when I was born, I think,” said the 83-year-old singer during an interview in Nashville, where she was taping a new music video with Willie Nelson. “Daddy used to come out on the porch where I would be singing and rocking the babies to sleep. He’d say, ‘Loretta, shut that big mouth. People all over this holler can hear you.’ And I said, ‘Daddy, what difference does it make? They are all my cousins.'”
The documentary, “Loretta Lynn: Still a Mountain Girl,” chronicles Lynn’s remarkable rise from a “Coal Miner’s Daughter” to a country superstar who wrote frank songs about her upbringing and her experiences as a wife and mother.