On July 29, 2013, eighty-one-year-old Loretta Lynn lost more than her firstborn child when sixty-four-year-old Betty Sue Lynn died from complications of emphysema at her home in Waverly, Tennessee. She lost the companion who had walked beside her since she was a teenager, the one person who remembered her life before the lights, the records, and the fame.
Betty Sue was born on November 26, 1948, in Bellingham, Washington, just ten months after fifteen-year-old Loretta Webb married Oliver ‘Doolittle’ Lynn in Kentucky. Seven months pregnant, Loretta boarded a train across the country to join her husband in Custer, Washington, a logging and farming community near the Canadian border far from her family in Butcher Hollow. With only sixteen years between them, mother and daughter grew up together.
In those early Pacific Northwest years, the young family lived on seasonal labor and timber work. Before Loretta turned twenty, Jack Benny, Ernest Ray, and Clara Marie had joined Betty Sue in their small house. Loretta tended the family garden, took in neighbors’ laundry, and picked strawberries in the local fields, while nine-year-old Betty Sue helped mind her younger siblings and keep the household running.
In that crowded Washington house in 1953, Doolittle bought Loretta a seventeen-dollar Harmony guitar from the Sears Roebuck catalog. While Betty Sue and her siblings slept or played on the floor, Loretta sat at the kitchen table with a songbook and the radio, teaching herself chords and writing her earliest verses on notebook paper.
By 1960, Loretta had recorded her debut single ‘I’m a Honky Tonk Girl’ and was driving across the country with Doolittle to promote it at radio stations, while Betty Sue stayed steady as an anchor for her younger brothers and sister. After Grand Ole Opry appearances and a Decca Records contract in 1961 brought the family to Tennessee, the birth of twin daughters Peggy Jean and Patsy Eileen in 1964 brought the Lynn children to six.
As Loretta’s career rose in Nashville, Betty Sue found her own voice as a songwriter, sharing her mother’s gift for turning everyday heartache and domestic grit into lyrics. Loretta often praised her eldest daughter as a talented songwriter in her own right, and for decades the two traded song ideas, sang together at home, and spoke on the telephone every single day when Loretta was off the tour bus. Their catalogs have sometimes been confused in institutional histories with that of Sure-Fire Music staff writer Betty Sue Perry, who wrote 1960s singles such as ‘Wine, Women and Song’ and ‘Before I’m Over You’.
Beyond music, Betty Sue became an essential partner in running the Hurricane Mills ranch in Humphreys County, which Loretta and Doolittle bought in the mid-1960s. While Loretta spent months on the road, Betty Sue helped manage the property’s business affairs, sorted and answered thousands of fan letters, and greeted visitors who traveled to the ranch.
She also owned and operated the Lynn Family Flea Market and a small shop in Hurricane Mills, where she was known for making sure neither a stray animal nor a passing stranger ever went hungry. Her afternoons were spent visiting with tourists and neighbors who stopped by her counter.
Because they had grown up side by side, Betty Sue held the complete memory of her mother’s life before fame and the private realities of Loretta’s forty-eight-year marriage to Doolittle before his death in 1996. When thirty-four-year-old Jack Benny drowned in July 1984 while trying to ford the Duck River on horseback at the ranch, Betty Sue stood beside her mother through the grief of burying a child.
Nearly twenty-nine years later, emphysema claimed Betty Sue just a short drive from the Hurricane Mills property. Following the Monday announcement, Loretta canceled her scheduled concert dates and stepped away from her touring schedule to stay at the ranch with her surviving children and with Betty Sue’s two daughters, Lynn Markworth and Audrey Dyer, along with five grandchildren.
Two days later, on July 31, 2013, friends, neighbors, and family gathered at the Luff-Bowen Funeral Home in Waverly for a public visitation before Betty Sue was laid to rest on the family ranch.
Nine years later, before her own death at age ninety in October 2022, Loretta wrote publicly of her oldest child, remembering those long days in Washington state sixty-five years earlier.
She still wished she could sit down with her best friend to talk, laugh, and sing together one more time.