In the summer of 1996, Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn told his wife he couldn’t hear the music anymore. Loretta Lynn thought he was tired of it. She was wrong, and four years later she carried that moment into one of the hardest songs she ever recorded, “I Can’t Hear the Music,” from her 2000 album Still Country.
The man who handed her the guitar
Loretta Webb was 15 when she married Doo on January 10, 1948, about a month after they met at a pie social in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky. He was 21. They moved to Washington State, where he kept hearing her sing while she rocked the babies and did the housework.
In 1953 he bought her a $17 Harmony guitar. He also brought home copies of Country Song Roundup, a magazine that printed the words and chords to the latest jukebox hits. Loretta looked through it and decided she could write songs of her own. Once she started, Doo became her manager, driving her to honky-tonks and small radio stations to get her heard.
It was never an easy marriage. He drank, he ran around, and the two of them fought hard. Loretta turned much of it into hits like “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),” “You Ain’t Woman Enough” and “Fist City.” She later laughed that Doo would try to work out which line in a song was about him, when nearly every line was.
Four years at his bedside
In 1992, Doo had quadruple bypass surgery. Doctors found he was also diabetic, and over the next few years the disease cost him both feet, and later both legs up to the knees.
Loretta had just made the Honky Tonk Angels album with Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette and was busy on the road. She stepped back and stayed by his side. Before he got too sick, they took two trips out West in their motor home. On the last one, his feet were so bad he couldn’t get out to hook up the camper or pay at the campground, so Loretta did it herself. She said the smile he gave her made the whole trip worth it.
Years later, she said losing him was harder than sitting by his bed. At least at his bedside, she was doing everything she could.
What she got wrong
In his final weeks, Doo told her he couldn’t hear the music anymore. For a woman whose life had become music, and whose career he had started, it sounded like a rejection. She assumed he was tired of hearing it, and maybe tired of hearing her.
“I thought he didn’t want to hear me.” (Loretta Lynn, to the New York Times in 2000)
It took a while before she understood that he was going deaf. About two weeks before he died, she took him to get a pair of tiny hearing aids.
Oliver Lynn died of congestive heart failure on August 22, 1996, at their ranch in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. He was five days short of his 70th birthday. They had been married 48 years.
A year she couldn’t account for
Three days after he died, Loretta left Hurricane Mills for Nashville. When she told a friend it felt like she had been there a couple of months, the friend told her it had been a year. After more losses, including her longtime producer Owen Bradley and her friend Tammy Wynette, she asked her manager to put her back on the road.
A song she cried all the way through
In 2000, Loretta released Still Country, her first album in more than a decade. Doo runs all through it, in songs like “Table for Two,” written for her by Vince Gill, and “On My Own Again.” The hardest one to make was the song about his last weeks. She wrote “I Can’t Hear the Music” with Kendal Franceschi and Cody James, and it turns that moment around. He could no longer hear her. Now, without him, she couldn’t hear the music the same way.
They cut it at Randy Scruggs’ studio in Berry Hill, Tennessee, and she cried through the whole session. To get her through the lines, Scruggs told her to think about something she really wanted. She hadn’t eaten all day, so she settled on a Snickers bar and promised herself one as soon as she finished the chorus. She said that if you listen closely, she comes into the last chorus stronger than the first.
She kept the arrangement upbeat so listeners wouldn’t spend the whole song in tears. It came out as a single in March 2001.
The one she wouldn’t sing on stage
For decades Loretta sang “Fist City” and “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin'” with a grin, songs about the worst nights of her marriage. The song about losing him was different. When the album came out, she said she couldn’t bring herself to perform it in concert yet. She joked that she might do it someday once she’d gone crazy, then added that maybe she already had. She rarely sang it live.
Seventy-three years after the wedding
On January 10, 2021, what would have been their 73rd anniversary, Loretta’s Instagram shared a clip of her singing “I Can’t Hear the Music” live in 2000, cut together with old footage of her and Doo. She was 88. In the caption she called him her biggest fan, the real force behind her career, and the only man she ever loved.
“We fought hard and we loved hard.” (Loretta Lynn, 2021)
Loretta Lynn died on October 4, 2022, at her home in Hurricane Mills. She was 90, and she never remarried. Years earlier, talking about the man who had hurt her, pushed her and believed in her more than anyone, she said that if he were still here, she would be sitting by his bed right now.