The song Loretta Lynn sang to her husband as he was dying was called “Wouldn’t It Be Great.” She wrote it in 1985. Eleven years later, in 1996, Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn was dying, and she sang it to him.
She told that story herself in 2018, when she recorded the song one more time:
“It was the last song that I sang to my husband that I wrote before he passed away. In fact, he was going when I sang this song.”
Twenty-six years after that, she would be buried beside him.
A song that was never simple
“Wouldn’t It Be Great” isn’t a sweet love song, and Loretta never said it was. “My husband liked to drink a lot, and that’s where that song comes from,” she explained. That was the marriage she wrote about her whole career: a hard one, and a lasting one.
She married Doo in 1948, when she was 15 and he was 21. In 1953 he bought her a $17 Harmony guitar from Sears. He pushed her to sing, and he later drove her from radio station to radio station to promote her first single, “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl.” They stayed married for 48 years, until he died on August 22, 1996, at age 69.
She recorded the song more than once. It first appeared on her album Just a Woman. She cut it again with Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette on the 1993 trio album Honky Tonk Angels. Then in 2018 it became the title track of Wouldn’t It Be Great, produced by her daughter Patsy Lynn Russell and John Carter Cash. Patsy said it showed “just how masterful my mom is with writing down her feelings.”
The last summer
A stroke in May 2017 slowed her down and pushed that 2018 album back. But she didn’t stop. Her final album, Still Woman Enough, came out in 2021.
In the summer of 2022, at 90, Loretta Lynn was finishing a book called A Song and a Prayer: 30 Devotions Inspired by My Favorite Songs. “Mom worked all summer to complete this book,” Patsy said. Some of it was her own thoughts about Heaven, written down close to the end of her life.
She was still writing songs, too. “She had so many irons in the fire,” her daughter Peggy said on the Today show.
On the morning of October 4, 2022, Loretta Lynn passed away peacefully in her sleep at home on her ranch in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee.
Laid to rest beside Doo
Three days later, on October 7, about 100 guests gathered for a private graveside service on the ranch. Loretta was buried in the family cemetery next to Doo. A handful of fans waited at the gate with flowers as the hearse passed.
The book came out the next spring. Patsy said her mother’s words about Heaven brought the family comfort. “It gave us hope to see her again and for her to know that she’s going to see us again.”
That first Mother’s Day without her, Peggy made homemade banana pudding. It was her mom’s favorite thing in the world.
What’s the first Loretta Lynn song you remember hearing?