Photograph by: Jason Lang, Vancouver Courier
Most people know Loretta Lynn's story from the Oscar winning film about her life, 'Coal Miner's Daughter', but there appears to be a bit of a discrepancy about how she got her start that varies from the movie/autobiographical version of events.
And now that alternative version of Loretta's iconic career is being remembered and honored in Vancouver, British Columbia.
According to The Vancouver Courier, there's a little old bungalow in South Vancouver, Canada that used to have a chicken coop that was converted into a party place back many, many years ago. Much of the history of that party coop is lost to time, but Rob Howatson, the writer of The Vancouver Courier piece, was able to interview several people, including Loretta herself, about the coop.
The Coop, which no longer exists, was once a real happening place where many country musicians would go to play when they had nothing else to do. One fateful day, a very young Loretta Lynn headed over the border to Canada and attended a jam session at the coop where she was discovered by two music execs.
Mike Harling will be at the plaque party. He was the first writer to track down the former location of the Chicken Coop in 2002 after his friend, sports historian Fred Hume, told him that Kentucky-born Lynn had a connection to the city through local football pioneer and sawmill owner Norm Burley. “Loretta lived in Washington State in the 1950s and she played any gig she could get, on both sides of the border, before she moved to Nashville and made it big,” says the soft-spoken Harling. “The First Lady of Country likes to say that Burley discovered her when he saw Loretta sing ‘Whispering Sea’ on Buck Owens TV show out of Tacoma, but in fact it was two music producers from Thunder Bay, Ontario who spotted her at the Coop and signed her to Zero Records.”
This story is different than the Coal Miner's Daughter story and even what Loretta herself says happened. One of the two music execs who claimed to have discovered Loretta was more than a little bitter about it all.
Don Grashey was the president of the tiny label when it began, and his longtime business partner Chuck Williams was the vice-president. They were stunned when Lynn published her first autobiography, Coal Miner’s Daughter in 1976 and it contained only a passing mention of Grashey and no word about The Coop. Harling interviewed the two veteran record men a few years before they passed away in 2005 and Grashey, a Canadian Country Music Association Hall of Famer, was still bitter. “I would like her [Lynn] to tell the truth, instead of the bullshit that was in the movie and in her book. Norm Burley did nothing. He was just a shareholder who had some money. That’s all he was, y’know. I did all the god darned work. I signed her and I produced her and I published her songs and I promoted her god darned record [I’m A Honky Tonk Girl] to number 14 on the Billboard and I got nothing out of it, but a bunch of bullshit.”
It's a pretty interesting story to read.
All that he said, she said, he said aside, the coop no longer exists, but the house still does and on September 16, a plaque across the street will commemorate this little known piece of country music history where Loretta Lynn was or wasn't officially discovered.
Recent Comments