In May 2017, just weeks after her 85th birthday, Loretta Lynn suffered a stroke at her ranch in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. The shows on her calendar were postponed, and the touring life that had carried her since the early 1960s came to an end. It had lasted fifty-seven years.
Eight months later, on New Year’s Day 2018, she fell at home and broke her hip.
For most performers, that would have been the final chapter. For Loretta Lynn, it became the start of a quieter one, lived almost entirely on the land she loved, and it still had music in it.
The Ranch Where Doo Was Buried
Hurricane Mills was never just a house. Loretta and her husband, Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn, had turned the property west of Nashville into a working ranch with a museum and a replica of the Butcher Holler cabin in Kentucky where she grew up. It became one of the best-known roadside stops in country music.
It was also where Doo was buried after his death in 1996. She had married him at 15. Their marriage was hard, and Loretta never pretended otherwise in her books or her songs. But she never stopped claiming him, either. On August 22, 2022, the anniversary of his death and only weeks before her own, she posted a short message to her fans:
“I lost him 26 years ago today. My biggest fan, my true love, my Doo.”
“We Girl Singers Gotta Stick Together”
The stroke did not end her recording career. In 2018, she released Wouldn’t It Be Great. She then stepped back in 2019 and 2020 to focus on her health.
On March 19, 2021, a few weeks before her 89th birthday, Loretta Lynn released Still Woman Enough, widely billed as her 50th studio album. It was co-produced by her daughter Patsy Lynn Russell and John Carter Cash, the son of Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, at the Cash Cabin studio. The vocals were gathered over a span of years, so it is best understood as the work of a lifetime partnership rather than a single session after her illness.
The title came from Loretta’s 2002 autobiography. Patsy later recalled telling her mother back then that the phrase sounded like a song. Nearly two decades later, the two of them finally wrote it together. It became the only new original on the album, an answer to her own 1966 hit “You Ain’t Woman Enough.”
According to Patsy, the song was not planned as a duet. It was Loretta who decided, when she went in to sing her part, that she wanted Reba McEntire on it. She added Carrie Underwood after seeing her perform “You Ain’t Woman Enough” on an awards show. Tanya Tucker and Margo Price joined her elsewhere on the record.
“We girl singers gotta stick together,” Loretta said when the album was announced.
A Quiet Morning at Hurricane Mills
On Tuesday, October 4, 2022, her family shared the news:
“Our precious mom, Loretta Lynn, passed away peacefully this morning, October 4th, in her sleep at home at her beloved ranch in Hurricane Mills.”
She was 90.
Three days later, on October 7, Loretta Lynn was laid to rest on the ranch, next to Doo, in a private family ceremony. The public goodbye came later that month, on October 30, when friends and fellow artists gathered at the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville to sing her songs back to her.
The girl from Butcher Holler had spent most of her life on buses, stages, and highways. At the end, she stayed in one place: the ranch with the little cabin that looked like home, beside the man she had married at 15.