[citation needed] The couple's marriage, which began when he was 21 and she was 15,[3] has been described by historians and music scholars as "one of the great legends of the twentieth century"[4] and "one of the most compelling tales in American popular culture.
Of Irish descent, born in Butcher Hollow, near Paintsville, Kentucky in Johnson County, Oliver Lynn was an uneducated resident of a town based around the coal mining industry.
He earned the nickname "Doolittle"—which his wife Loretta shortened to "Doo"—because he was regarded by locals as a lazy person who didn't "do much."
During the early years of their marriage, as described by Loretta Lynn in her autobiography Still Woman Enough:I married Doo when I wasn't but a child, and he was my life from that day on.
As chronicled in the movie Coal Miner's Daughter, Lynn was instrumental at this stage of his wife's career, during which the couple dutifully set out across the country to promote her debut release "I'm a Honky Tonk Girl".
The song managed to climb into the top twenty of the country charts, and the couple ended their trip in Nashville with a performance at the Grand Ole Opry.
Music scholar Martha Hume wrote:When you shake all the stardust off this tale, what you must begin with is an uneducated child from one of the most isolated cultures in the United States who was given in marriage to a man some six years her senior, a man who was a violent and sometimes brutal alcoholic, who was similarly uneducated and without any job skills to speak of.
Add to that a migration to the state of Washington, where the child had no friends or relations; the arrival of four babies; regular—and reportedly mutual—domestic violence; and an income so unstable that there were times when the family had nothing to eat but dandelion greens, and you have a situation that might well have led to murder.
But what actually happened was so improbable, so unimaginable, that the lives of Loretta and Mooney Lynn became one of the great legends of the twentieth century.