From the March 2016 Uncut issue (Take 226). We meet the Queen of Country at her haunted mansion in Tennessee and take a look back at her incredible career…
Welcome to Hurricane Mills, the second most haunted house in Tennessee and, for the past 50 years, home to supernatural talent. Loretta Lynn. Here, the Queen of Country Music looks back on her glittering career, her wayward husband, and her legendary friends — from the Cash family to… Jack White – and the spirits that surround her to this day.
There’s no doubt about the path to Loretta Lynn’s estate in Middle Tennessee. Five miles along the highway that bisects the Volunteer State from east to west, there are popular billboards featuring the Queen of Country Music wearing a red cowboy shirt. Her head is tilted to one side, her well-groomed brown curls grazing her collarbone, while the treasure invites you to “visit the legendary Loretta Lynn at Hurricane Mills.”
In fact, more than 500,000 people come through the doors of the pre-war Lane Palace every year. Lynn remembers a Sunday afternoon in 1966 when she and her late husband, Oliver “Doolittle/Money” Lanegot lost on the back roads of Humphreys County. “I saw this house and said, ‘Do, I want that house over there,'” Lin explains. However, there was one problem: The house housed an entire town, including a grist mill, a post office, a waterfall, a warehouse, and a gas station. But What Loretta wants, Loretta generally gets, as evidenced by the magnet on the restaurant’s refrigerator in her airy open kitchen that says, “When Mama’s Not Happy, Nobody’s Happy Is That Right?” With rhinestones and she says with a chuckle: “What do you think?”
The couple wasted little time in making a down payment for the 3,500-acre city. Money was no longer an object for the singer, who grew up poor in Paintsville, Kentucky. She released two albums that year. Take a walk in your country, which reached No. 2 on the Billboard charts, and a wicked autobiography You are not woman enoughwhich reached number one, and whose title song became Lynn’s biggest hit to that point. Based on the foreplay Doe was having with another woman, “You’re not woman enough (to take my man)It was a turning point for Len. The song’s down-to-earth lyrics crackled with female empowerment and righteous indignation — something unheard of in country music in those less enlightened times. Lynn continued to refine the theme in songs like “Don’t Come Home to Drink (With Love on Your Mind)“,”””Your Skua is on the warpath“,”X rating“and”Fist city“, where women not only stood by their men, but stood against them. Perhaps the most extreme thing of all was”The pill“—suggesting that, through birth control, women had the same rights as men. It was clear that Lynn was drawing from her own life and marriage in her increasingly daring songwriting. “I wasn’t doing anything, what do you call it? “Revolutionary,” she insists. “I was just saying what other people were really thinking, but I wasn’t talking about it publicly. It turned out that I was the first to write it as women lived it.”
Today, Lin wears a bright pink shirt, tight velvet pants, and black sequined house slippers. Lynn no longer lives in the pre-war mansion, but in a smaller estate across the lane. And here she sits in an oversized red leather sectional. As we talk, Lynn turns her head toward a larger house across an asphalt driveway. “It’s silly, I know, but I fell in love with the house because it reminded me of the house inside me.” Gone with the wind. But you know, this place wasn’t actually a farm. But I’ll tell you one thing, it’s haunted.
In fact, Lane Farm is ranked as the second most haunted place in Tennessee. Located high on a hill, this 14-room building was built in 1845 and was used as a hospital in the Civil War. According to records at nearby Middle Tennessee State University, it was also the site of a Civil War battle on July 22, 1863, where 19 soldiers lost their lives. They are all buried in a cemetery near the church on the property — one of three cemeteries on the 6,500 acres. In the old part of the house is the “Brown Room”, where Len’s eldest son, Jack Benny LaneHe fell asleep and experienced his own visitation after returning home one night and sleeping on his bed with his clothes on. He is awakened by someone trying to take off his shoes: a soldier wearing an American Civil War uniform.
Does any of this bother Lynn? “No. And she says, ‘If you’re good with ghosts, they’re good with you.’
Find the full interview from UNCUT March 2016/Take 226 in the archive