Country music luminary Loretta Lynn dies aged 90
Loretta Lynn, America's groundbreaking country titan whose frank lyricism delving into women's experiences with sex, infidelity and pregnancy touched the nerve of a nation, has died. She was 90 years old. She "passed peacefully in her sleep" at her ranch in Tennessee Tuesday morning, her family said in a statement sent to AFP. Lynn saw a number of her edgy tracks banned by country music stations, but over the course of more than six decades in the business, she became a standard-bearer of the genre and its most decorated female artist ever. Born Loretta Webb on April 14, 1932 in small-town Kentucky, Lynn was the eldest daughter in an impoverished family of eight kids, a childhood she immortalized in her iconic track "Coal Miner's Daughter" -- a staple on lists of all-time best songs. "We were poor but we had love / That's the one thing that daddy made sure of," Lynn sang in the hit recorded in 1970 -- later the theme song for a 1980 movie about her life starring Sissy Spacek, who won an Oscar for the role. At just 15 years old, the artist married Oliver Vanetta Lynn, who she remained married to for nearly 50 years until his death in 1996. They moved to a logging community in...