Nashville Rats

Why Loretta Lynn Quit Songwriting at Her 1970s Peak

The reliably ugly history of music business flim-flam is a ceaseless vortex of bad faith and naked greed, and this particular instance is one of the most egregious.

The late, brilliant Loretta Lynn was an unparalleled figure in country music. No other artist, male or female, had such a deliciously blunt, outspoken and cagey grasp on both honky tonk songcraft and the nation’s contemporary socio-cultural climate.

With hits like “Dear Uncle Sam,” “Fist City,” “The Pill,” “Wings Upon Your Horns” and “Rated X,” Lynn outdid like-minded seekers Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard, and she delivered multiple, jolting doses of raw truth-telling so controversial that country radio frequently refused to air them. She was, in a word (one that’s seldom applicable), unique.

When she hit Nashville in 1960, her debut disk had already reached #14 on the country singles chart and she almost immediately got suckered in the worst possible way. Enter the Wilburn Brothers, Dirty Doyle and Terrible Teddy (as Fred Maddox called them), a highly popular Opry staple with their own weekly television show and publishing company, Sure-Fire Music.

The Wilburns’ made her their featured girl singer, on air and the road, helped get her a deal with Decca and signed her to a contract that awarded them the copyright of every number Lynn delivered.

The singer, who’d never ridden in an automobile until she was 12, married at 13 and had four children by age 18, was clearly at a disadvantage when the Sure-Fire paper was cooked up. During negotiations, she was, in fact, counseled by the same lawyer who represented Sure-Fire. They screwed her. Royally.

By the time she’d handed them a staggering 114 songs, Lynn, after more than a decade of this crap, did the only thing she could. She quit writing altogether.

While she would occasionally pull an original out of the bag, Lynn began recording talented country iconoclast Shel Silverstein’s songs, and launched an ongoing battle with the Wilburns that, since the agreement stipulated only a change of ownership could trigger reversal of terms, lasted until 2004 when Teddy finally kicked the bucket.

The Wilburn’s level of predatory avarice, worsened by the fact that one of contemporary country’s most accomplished and original composers was effectively silenced, is perhaps the most contemptible, if not downright criminal, caper in Music City’s very dirty history.

Lynn, of course, still managed to reach never before seen heights of success, becoming the first woman handed the CMA’s “Entertainer of the Year” award in 1972, the first country artist to pen a New York Times best seller in 1976 and have an Oscar winning film made from it four years later.

That finally delivered the Wilburns a little karmic kick in the pants. Following the movie’s premiere, which entirely omitted any depiction of the brothers, Dirty Doyle slunk home in a black mood.

“He was crushed,” his wife Marge Bowers said. “But he was man enough to let it go. We all love Loretta Lynn, but I don’t know how she can say they didn’t make her career.”