Loretta Lynn: Song Analysis

Loretta Lynn was born Loretta Webb on April 14, 1932 in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky. She was the second of eight children. Her hometown was a small, rural coal-mining community in which her father earned a living for the family as a worker in the mines. As faith was a major part of her family’s lifestyle, she spent every Sunday as a child singing in church. This is where her love for music and performing was born. Just before her sixteenth birthday, Loretta married Oliver Lynn, with whom she had four children by the time she turned twenty, and then two children after that. Throughout the early years of the marriage, Loretta was the stereotypical house wife of the olden days; she cleaned the house, cooked the meals, and raised the babies. She

She did not avoid singing about difficult topics, like the Vietnam War in her song “Dear Uncle Sam”. Loretta also received plenty of backfire from her song “The Pill”, written about the liberating effects that oral contraception had on a wife and mother who was simply fed up with her husband and his behavior. At first look, the message of the song seems rather simple, but when deeper evaluated, there is a great deal of significance behind the lyrics of the

A line that struck me was “I’m tearing down your brooder house // ‘Cause now I’ve got the pill”. This spoke volumes to me about the empowerment that women felt after birth control became accessible to them. Conducting background research on the history of and initial responses to birth control helped me to better understand the story behind the song. I was able to pick up on the emotions in the lyrics more easily as well. It is quite evident that “The Pill” was a landmark work sung by Loretta Lynn that impacted women and feminism in a multitude of ways, paving the way for other women’s rights activists in the 1970’s and even still