Loretta Webb originally got married when she was just 15 years old to 21-year-old Oliver Vanetta Lynn. They met at a pie social. They would go on to have six children and would stay together up until his death in 1996. However, her marriage to Oliver was not sunshine and rainbows. It was extremely complex and filled with infidelity, abuse, and turmoil. Yet, Loretta stayed by his side through everything. Why?
Oliver, whom Loretta called ‘Doo’, was very physically abusive. “Every time Doo smacked me, he got smacked twice,” she says. On one occasion, he even smashes a jar of green beans because his dinner was late. His acts of rage were usually prompted from days or nights of heavy drinking.
Loretta Lynn and Doo- a complex marriage
Loretta and Doo / Hal Goldenberg/New York Post Archives /(c) NYP Holdings, Inc. via Getty Images“Complex” was actually an understatement. At one moment, she emptied a whole skillet of cream corn over his head. One time she also struck him. She remembers it saying, “I heard teeth hittin’ the floor and thought, ‘Ooh, I’m dead. He not gonna put up with this.’ But he laughed.”
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One of the reasons Loretta may have stayed with him is because she owes the start of her musical career to him. He’s the one who gave Loretta a guitar that was $17 from Sears, the same one she would use to compose her own songs. He’s also the one who was pushing her to perform. “You’re just as good or better as most of them girls that are singin’ and makin’ money, so let’s make us some money,” he would tell her. “I had never sang in front of anybody until my husband pushed me out there,” she says back in 2010.
She cared so much about him through it all
Loretta and Doo / Adam Scull/New York Post Archives /(c) NYP Holdings, Inc. via Getty Images“Whatever else our marriage was back in them days … without Doo and his drive to get a better life, there would have been no Loretta Lynn, country singer,” Loretta says now. He was also the inspiration behind many of her songs. “I’ve never written a song that my husband wasn’t in. Every song I wrote, but he didn’t know which line he was in,” she says.
Their troubled marriage gave her enough things to write about and turn into a composition. One song that Doo inspired was called “Fist City.” The country songstress says it’s about “a real woman in Tennessee who was making eyes at Doolittle while I was a-singing on the stage. I let her know she was gonna get a mouthful of knuckles if she kept it up.”
Infidelity was not enough to make her leave
Loretta Lynn / The Michigan DailyIn terms of his cheating, Loretta simply says, “If you can’t fight for your man, he’s not worth having.” She is still confident that he loved her and she loved him back. Loretta says she ultimately put up with it and stayed because of the six children they had together. Sometimes, she would be on the road and he would bring other women into their home. But, she still stuck by his side.
Loretta would end up taking care of Doo while he was on his death bed. He would pass away in 1996 at the age of 69 and she says that loss has left a void in her life, even after everything. “I think I see him everywhere I’m at, and everything at home and everywhere I’m goin’,” she says.
Loretta Lynn's decades-long marriage to husband Oliver "Doolittle" Lynn was the stuff of country legend, in both good times and in bad.
Lynn, who died on Tuesday at age 90, married the man she called "Doo" at age 15. By the time she was 20, she had given birth to four of their six children.
Their enduring union, which lasted for 48 years until Doo's death in 1996, weathered all sorts of storms, including his cheating and drinking — much of which was chronicled in her honky-tonk hits, including "Don't Come Home A' Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)," "You Ain't Woman Enough (To Take My Man)" and "Fist City."
"[We had] lots of ups and downs," Lynn told PEOPLE in 2010, but as she once famously said, "He never hit me one time that I didn't hit him back twice."
Lynn was a teenaged coal miner's daughter when she met her future husband — a moonshine runner six years her senior — at a pie social.
"Sometimes my husband tells me, 'I raised you the way I wanted you to be.' And it's true," Lynn wrote in her 1976 memoir Coal Miner's Daughter. "I went from Daddy to Doo, and there's always been a man telling me what to do."
Still, she has credited her late husband with kick-starting her career; it was he who bought Lynn her first guitar, and Doo who helped spread her music to local radio stations. He even served as her talent manager for many years.
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"If it wasn't for Doolittle, there would be no career," Lynn wrote in Coal Miner's Daughter. "I wouldn't have started singing in the first place, and I wouldn't have had the inspiration for some of my best songs, in the second place. And I never could have run my business. So in a real sense, Doolittle is responsible for everything we got."
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Though Doo's indiscretions provided inspiration for many of Lynn's lyrics, the country singer told Entertainment Weekly in 2004 that she "didn't understand" why her feminist songs were being championed.
"They'd say, 'You're the first woman to do this'... I might have been. But I had to do it," she said. "Doolittle believed in me, and I'd have made him proud of me or [I would have] died."
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Lynn also said that although Doo wasn't exactly portrayed in the best of lights in some of her songs, he didn't mind at all.
"He'd take the money the songs would make and run all the way to the bank, so he was happy!" she told PEOPLE in 2016. "[Despite] little fights, he meant everything to me. Still does."
When their tumultuous love story hit the silver screen in the 1980 film Coal Miner's Daughter, Tommy Lee Jones played Doo while Sissy Spacek took on the role of Lynn.
She described their marriage as such in her memoir: "In most ways, Doo has been a good husband. He's worked hard all his life to get things for me and the kids. I don't want to say he's never fooled around, or gotten drunk, or whipped me into line a little, because that ain't the truth. There were plenty of bad moments in our marriage, but I've always respected my husband's common sense… I feel safe when he's around."
In real life, the pair shared six children: Betty Sue, who died in 2013, Jack Benny, who died in 1984, Cissy, 70, Ernest Ray, 68, and twins Peggy and Patsy, 58.
Doo died in 1996 at age 69 of complications from diabetes and heart failure.
This past January, the singer paid tribute to her late husband on their anniversary with a sweet post on Instagram.
"74 years ago, my life changed forever when I married Doolittle," she wrote. "We had 48 years together and I sure wish he was still here! I miss him."