Loretta Lynn, an Eastern Kentucky legend and a country music star, was born Loretta Webb in Johnson County’s Butcher Hollow in 1935. One of seven children, she married at 13 and was a mother of four by the time she was 17. She overcame her poor environment to win every major country music award and become a 2003 Kennedy Center honoree.

Lynn was born in a small coal-mining community, as she emphasized in her 1976 biography, "Coal Miner’s Daughter." After she married Oliver "Mooney" Lynn, the couple relocated to Washington State, where Lynn raised four children while she began performing her own material. Her first single, "I’m A Honky Tonk Girl," released in 1960 on the tiny Zero label, was in the classic barroom mold. This brought her to the attention of Owen Bradley, the legendary producer who had worked with Patsy Cline.

Her early-sixties recordings showed the influence of Kitty Wells in their brash lyrics of loving and losing. Soon, however, her vocal style softened, while her original material turned to unusual (for the time) topics, including "Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)," "You Ain’t Woman Enough," and "The Pill," a song in support of birth control. All of the songs were written from a woman’s point of view; although their sound was classic Honky-Tonk, their message was unusually liberated for her audience of the mid-sixties and early seventies.

It is also noteworthy that Lynn wrote her songs from the point-of-view of a wife, a figure not often encountered on the honky-tonk landscape which was primarily peopled by wayward husbands and "honky-tonk angels." This heavy dose of reality, in a medium that seemed to thrive on fantasy, pointed the direction for many of the more progressive song-writers of the seventies and eighties. Her autobiographical song, "Coal Miner’s Daughter" from 1970, expressed the pride and anguish of growing up dirt poor in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky.

The early seventies saw her teamed up with Conway Twitty on a series of successful duets, including "After the Fire Is Gone" and "Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man." Her autobiography, published in the mid-seventies, was instrumental not only in cementing her image as a "true country woman," but in reasserting country music’s roots at a time when many acts were trying to cross over onto the pop and rock charts.

One of country music’s pioneering female performers and songwriters, Loretta Lynn has a classic country voice that is perfectly suited for her to-the-point lyrics with their uniquely woman’s point of view. Perhaps the only country singer who has taken on a wide variety of issues, from birth control to the Vietnam war to wife abuse, Lynn has made an important contribution to widening the subject matter and audience for country music.

Beginning in the 1980s, Loretta Lynn moved in a more mainstream direction and, as her career blossomed, she wrote two bestsellers: "Coal Miner’s Daughter" (1976) and "Still Woman Enough" (2002).

A third book appeared last year. "You’re Cookin’ It Country: My Favorite Recipes and Memories." In this book, Lynn shares more than 120 of her favorite recipes, from the dishes her mother cooked as she was growing up to the meals she prepared for her family. Also included are 35 stories relating to food set down in Loretta’s engaging, heavily-vernacular style: "Daddy’s favorite dish was possum..."

"You’re Cookin’ It Country" has been popular with Loretta Lynn fans around the world. It’s now available, along with dozens of other regional cookbooks, at the Jesse Stuart Foundation Bookstore, 1645 Winchester Avenue in downtown Ashland. For more information, call (606)326-1667 or visit our website: JSFBOOKS.COM.