The song was called “Wouldn’t It Be Great.” Loretta Lynn wrote it in 1985 for Oliver “Doo” Lynn, the man she had been married to since she was 15 years old. It was the last song she ever wrote for him while he was alive. And for a woman famous for saying exactly what she thought, this was the one song she kept away from him.
A Girl of 15 and the Man Who Believed in Her
Loretta met Doo at a pie social in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky. She was 15. He was 21. They married in 1948, and by the end of that year she was expecting the first of their six children.
It was Doo who bought her first guitar. It was Doo who pushed her to sing in public, lined up radio spots for her, and worked as her manager for years. Without him, the world may never have heard of the coal miner’s daughter.
But Doo drank, and he ran around, and the marriage was rough almost from the start. In her 2002 memoir, Still Woman Enough, Loretta tried to explain why she stayed.
“Doo was my security, my safety net.”
She also wrote that he was a good man and a hard worker, but that he was an alcoholic, and the drinking affected their marriage the whole way through.
The Songs That Fought Back
Loretta didn’t hide any of it. She put it on the radio. “Don’t Come Home A’ Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind).” “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man).” “Fist City.” Those songs came straight out of her own house, and women all over America heard their own kitchens in them.
In those songs, Loretta always had the upper hand. She set the rules. She drew the line. She dared anybody to cross it.
1985: The Song That Asked Instead
By 1985, Loretta and Doo had been married 37 years. That March, she went into Emerald Sound Studio in Nashville with producer Jimmy Bowen and recorded a song she had written by herself.
“Wouldn’t It Be Great” didn’t threaten Doo. It didn’t warn him. It asked him. Just once, she wanted to hear him say he loved her on a day he hadn’t been drinking. She wanted to come first, ahead of the bottle.
The song went on her album Just a Woman and came out as a single that October. It only reached No. 72 on the Billboard country chart. Radio barely noticed. But Loretta never let it go.
Years later, she was plain about where it came from. Her husband drank a lot, she said, and that was the whole root of the song. Then she added the part that says the most.
“I always liked that song, but I never liked to sing it around Doo.”
Think about that. This was the woman who sang “Fist City” to the entire country. She could tell millions of strangers about the trouble in her marriage. But this quieter song, the one that simply asked to be loved, was the one she didn’t like singing with her husband nearby.
She kept the song alive anyway. In 1993, she recorded it again with Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette on their album Honky Tonk Angels.
The Years at His Bedside
Doo’s health began to fail in the early 1990s. Loretta stepped back from her career and stayed home to care for him, nursing him for about four years. He died of congestive heart failure on August 22, 1996. He was 69. They had been married nearly 48 years.
She never remarried.
Twenty-Two Years to the Day
Two decades later, Loretta was working on a new album at Cash Cabin Studio in Hendersonville, Tennessee, with her daughter Patsy Lynn Russell and John Carter Cash producing. Then, on May 5, 2017, she suffered a stroke, and the album was put on hold.
She fought her way back. When the album was finally ready, the first song released from it was “Wouldn’t It Be Great,” the old song she wrote for Doo, in a brand-new recording. Loretta was 86. The release date was August 22, 2018, exactly 22 years after the day Doo died.
The full album followed on September 28, 2018, and it carried that song’s name as its title.
Patsy said the song had always meant a great deal to her, and that it showed what her mother could do with a pen.
“It shows just how masterful my mom is with writing down her feelings.”
A Question That Never Got Its Answer
In 1985, the song was a wife pleading with a husband who was still right there in the house. By 2018, there was no one left to answer it. The same words sounded different now. They belonged to a woman looking back on nearly half a century with a man she loved, fought with, nursed, and buried, still wondering what it would have been like to hear him say it, sober, just once.
Loretta Lynn died on October 4, 2022, at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. She was 90. She gave the world plenty of songs with fire in them. This one had something harder to find: the toughest woman in country music admitting what she had wanted all along.
Have you heard the 2018 version of this song? What did it make you think of?