SHE DIED ON A TUESDAY MORNING IN HER SLEEP. AT THE RANCH IN HURRICANE MILLS — THE SAME 3,500 ACRES SHE AND DOOLITTLE STUMBLED ONTO DECADES AGO LOOKING FOR A PIECE OF COUNTRY. THERE WAS NO BIG FUNERAL. THEY BURIED HER IN THE FAMILY CEMETERY, ON HER OWN LAND — RIGHT NEXT TO DOO. About a hundred people came. That was it. The girl from Butcher Hollow, Kentucky. Coal miner’s daughter. Married at thirteen. Mother by fourteen. She wrote songs the way other women wrote diary entries — except hers got played on the radio. “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’.” “The Pill.” “Rated X.” Every title a grenade tossed at Nashville’s front door. Every one a hit. They banned her from the airwaves. She kept singing. She outlived her husband. Outlived two of her children. Outlived most of the men who told her she couldn’t. Sixty years a member of the Grand Ole Opry — no woman before, no woman since. The day before she died, she told her daughter Doo was coming to take her home. He did.
Introduction She Died on a Tuesday Morning in Her Sleep She died on a Tuesday...