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Tacoma played a key role in launching country great Loretta Lynn’s career

By Debbie Cockrell, The News Tribune
Published: October 5, 2022, 7:47am

TACOMA — Country music legend Loretta Lynn, known for her Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, beginnings made famous in her “Coal Miner’s Daughter” song and later book and movie, launched her music career not in Nashville, but Tacoma.

Lynn died Tuesday at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, at age 90.

As documented in her book, TNT archives and various music history sites online, Tacoma was home to another future country superstar’s TV show on which she made her debut.

Lynn at the time was living with her husband, Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn, and children in Custer in Whatcom County.

Buck Owens, living in Puyallup at the time, hosted Lynn in 1960 in an appearance on his weekly TV show the “Bar-K Jamboree.” The show broadcast out of Tacoma on KTNT, of which The News Tribune, in a different incarnation and under different ownership as the Tacoma News Tribune and Ledger, owned and operated.

Owens’ show was a precursor to his eventual nationally syndicated “Hee-Haw,” TV show, co-hosted with Roy Clark, years later.

In an interview with The News Tribune in 2006, former Tacoma band mate of Owens, Ray “Shotgun Red” Hildreth, recalled the “Bar-K Jamboree” with Lynn appearing.

“Loretta Lynn used to come down and do the TV show with Buck and us,” Hildreth said. “She was living near Blaine then, and Cole Shelton and I were doing a show at the Circle. After (taping) the TV show, we’d get Loretta to come down and do a Saturday matinee at the Circle.”

The Circle was one of a collection of country music clubs — “honky-tonks” — at that time on Pacific Avenue.

Following Lynn’s debut on Owens’ TV show, the story goes, lumber baron Norman Burley of Vancouver, B.C., invited her to go to Vancouver and record for his Zero Records label.

“As soon as Burley’s business partners heard Lynn sing, they immediately sent her to Hollywood to record the album. The label printed some 3,500 copies of a 45 with ‘I’m a Honky Tonk Girl’ on the A-side, and ‘Whispering Sea’, on the B-side,” according to a recounting of the events at tacomamusichistory.org.

“Honky Tonk Girl” was inspired by a woman she met during her time in Washington state.

In an interview with American Songwriter, Lynn recalled, “‘Honky Tonk Girl’ came from a lady who kept coming into the little club. Doo got me a job working for five dollars on Saturday nights, a little club. She came every time I worked. She told me that her husband had left her for another woman. She’d sit there and cry. She picked strawberries with me during the time when strawberries were ripe. And when strawberry picking was over, she kept coming to the club and crying. And I wrote ‘Honky Tonk Girl’ from that.”

Released in 1960, the album rose to No. 14 on the Billboard country chart, with the help of her touring cross-country with her husband to promote it, and the rest was music history.

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