Loretta Lynn was born in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, and was the second oldest of her eight siblings (via Biography). She lived in a cabin in a small Appalachian mining community, and her family lived in poverty, according to the Washington Post. She went to a one-room schoolhouse but dropped out in elementary school so she could care for her younger siblings while her parents worked.

Despite the financial struggles, Lynn speaks of her childhood on good terms. As her hit song "Coal Miner's Daughter" goes: "We were poor but we had love/That's the one thing that Daddy made sure of." Lynn told Country Living, "The winters were cold, so my mommy glued newspapers and pages from old Sears Roebuck catalogs to the wall to help keep the cold out. We didn't have money for wallpaper, but my mommy made that old house stay warm and beautiful."

Lynn sang in church as a child, per Biography, and continued to sing as she got older, foreshadowing her career to come. In 1948, at age 15, she married Oliver "Doolittle" Lynn, and the two had their first child when Loretta Lynn was 16. The couple moved to Washington state so that Lynn's husband could find better job opportunities, and it was there that her music career really began.