Loretta Lynn, coal miner’s daughter who transformed country music, dies at 90

Loretta Lynn, the firebrand singer and songwriter who transformed coal into diamonds by exploring her dirt-poor childhood in eastern Appalachia in her career-defining 1970 hit “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” died on Tuesday. She was 90.

In a statement, her family said that she died from natural causes at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee.

Lynn was arguably the single most important female figure in postwar country music. “Coal Miner’s Daughter” lent its title to her bestselling 1976 autobiography and the subsequent hit feature film for which Sissy Spacek won the lead actress Academy Award in 1980 for her gritty portrayal of Lynn as a woman who charmingly but forcefully countered centuries of patriarchal attitudes through her music.

“Loretta forever changed the notion of what a country ‘girl singer’ should or could be,” wrote the late music journalist Chet Flippo. “She wrote about hitherto forbidden topics: Birth control! Female power! Self-determination! And she attracted a lifelong audience of women listeners who had never been directly addressed before by country music — either the music industry or the radio industry.”

Lynn quickly became