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On January 10, 1948, 15-year-old Loretta Webb married (21 Year old) Oliver Vanetta “Doolittle” Lynn[3] (August 27, 1926 – August 22, 1996), and the two soon relocated to northern Washington in the Pacific Northwest. The happiness and heartache of her early years of marriage would help to inspire Lynn’s songwriting.

In 1953, Doolittle bought her a $17 Harmony guitar.[5] She taught herself to play the instrument, and over the following three years, she worked to improve her guitar playing. With Doolittle’s encouragement, she started her own band, Loretta and the Trailblazers, with her brother Jay Lee playing lead guitar.

She often appeared at Bill’s Tavern in Blaine, Washington, and the Delta Grange Hall in Custer, Washington, with the Pen Brothers’ band and the Westerneers. She cut her first record, “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl”, in February 1960.

The Lynns had six children together:

Betty Sue Lynn (November 26, 1948 – July 29, 2013)
Jack Benny Lynn, (December 7, 1949 – July 24, 1984)
Clara Marie “Cissie” Lynn (born April 7, 1952)
Ernest Ray “Ernie” Lynn (born May 27, 1954)
Peggy Jean and Patsy Eileen Lynn (born August 6, 1964; twin daughters named for Lynn’s sister Peggy Sue Wright and her close friend Patsy Cline)

Two years after her twins Peggy and Patsy were born, Lynn became a grandmother at age 34. She has 27 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren as of August 2017.

The Lynns were married for almost 50 years until Doolittle died at age 69 in 1996. In her 2002 autobiography Still Woman Enough and in an interview with CBS News the same year, she recounted how her husband cheated on her regularly and once left her while she was giving birth.[19] She and her husband fought frequently, but she said that “he never hit me one time that I didn’t hit him back twice”. Loretta has said that her marriage was “one of the hardest love stories”.[20][page needed] In one of her autobiographies, she recalled:

I married Doo when I wasn’t but a child, and he was my life from that day on. But as important as my youth and upbringing was, there’s something else that made me stick to Doo. He thought I was something special, more special than anyone else in the world, and never let me forget it. That belief would be hard to shove out the door. Doo was my security, my safety net. And just remember, I’m explainin’, not excusin’... Doo was a good man and a hard worker. But he was an alcoholic, and it affected our marriage all the way through.