THE DAUGHTERS LORETTA LYNN SOMETIMES KNEW ONLY AS “TWIN”
A Name Used in a Hurry
The name was practical, which was precisely why the girls disliked it.
Loretta might be moving toward the bus, leaving a stage or trying to gather children into the next piece of a crowded schedule. Peggy and Patsy looked nearly identical. If Loretta had time to study their faces, she could distinguish them. If she did not, she called “Twin” and expected both daughters to answer.
The girls corrected her.
They were Peggy Jean and Patsy Eileen—two temperaments, two bodies and, eventually, two women who would deliberately put sixty miles between their homes because a lifetime of being treated as a pair had created a need for distance.
The childhood argument inside that one word was larger than a mistaken name. The twins wanted their mother to see each of them long enough to know who had turned around.
Loretta was often already leaving.
Two Babies After Patsy Cline
Peggy and Patsy were born on August 6, 1964.
Loretta had already given birth to four children before her music career began in earnest. The twins arrived after the family had entered another kind of life—one increasingly divided between home in Tennessee and the road.
Their names carried family and loss. Peggy was named for Loretta’s sister Peggy Sue. Patsy was named for Patsy Cline, Loretta’s close friend, who had died in a plane crash seventeen months earlier.
Naming a daughter Patsy placed memory inside the household. It did not make Loretta any less responsible for the practical demands surrounding two infants and four older children.
At the same time, her records were climbing. More radio stations wanted interviews. More promoters wanted dates. The family’s financial future depended increasingly upon Loretta continuing to go.
The House That Required the Road
The Lynns bought the large property at Hurricane Mills in the 1960s.
It offered land, a house, work and the possibility of keeping the family gathered in one place. It also required money far beyond anything Loretta had known in Butcher Hollow or during the lean years in Washington State.
Doo managed the property and sometimes added more acreage. Loretta later remembered returning from the road to discover that he had bought hundreds more. Someone had to cover the expense.
The answer was usually Loretta.
She worked weekends, clubs, fairs and long strings of concerts. At certain clubs, she performed two or three shows a night. Her brother Herman Webb recalled journeys of five, six or seven hundred miles between engagements.
Loretta’s success purchased stability for her children. Producing that stability repeatedly removed her from them.
The Parent Who Stayed Home
Peggy and Patsy were raised largely under Doo’s supervision.
Publicly, he was often reduced to the drinking, jealous husband portrayed in Loretta’s songs and later in Coal Miner’s Daughter. His daughters remembered another daily role. He made sure they attended public school. They went to church on Sundays and Wednesdays. They hoed the garden, hauled hay and lived much more like rural Tennessee children than the daughters of a major recording star.
Doo sometimes took the toddlers to Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge while Loretta performed nearby at the Ryman Auditorium. Peggy and Patsy climbed onto the bar, where they sang and danced before they were old enough to understand the reputation of the room.
Music surrounded them. Their mother did not.
The distinction stayed with them: Loretta’s voice was everywhere, while Loretta herself might be gone for weeks.
The Favorite Aunt Feeling
As adults, the twins described the arrangement without polishing it.
During the summers, they sometimes traveled the fair circuit with Loretta for a couple of weeks. Those stretches could feel like visiting a favorite aunt—someone exciting and affectionate who belonged partly to another life.
Loretta’s older daughters remembered the absence too. Betty Sue said she cried for her mother after Loretta began touring. Cissie described periods stretching for months and said the family once went close to a year without seeing her.
Loretta never pretended she had solved the conflict neatly. In a later interview, she called leaving the children the worst part of touring. She placed being with them above her musical accomplishments, even though the work had supported the household.
The regret did not erase what had been provided. The provision did not erase the regret.
A Mother Calling From the Stage
When the twins accompanied Loretta to fairs, they sometimes wandered toward the rides.
Peggy remembered getting too far away during one performance. Loretta stopped in the middle of a song and called from the stage, ordering “Peggy Jean” back to the bus.
That time she used the correct name.
The scene held both versions of Loretta’s motherhood. A paying audience was sitting in front of her, and a child needed correction somewhere beyond the edge of the crowd. Rather than choose privately between the roles, Loretta handled both through the microphone.
For Peggy, there could be no pretending that the star and the mother were separate women. The voice filling the fairground was the same one telling her to get back where she belonged.
The First Note on the Bus
By 1990, Peggy and Patsy had each considered solo careers. They had spent much of adolescence trying to establish separate identities, an understandable response to everyone treating them as a matched set.
Then Loretta hired them as backing singers.
One day on the tour bus, she instructed them to work up the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” They began singing, and the harmony appeared immediately. Peggy remembered the whole bus seeming to fill with it.
The twins looked at one another and understood something their mother had recognized before they did. They belonged together musically.
That realization did not mean surrendering their individual names. It allowed them to choose the terms under which they joined.
The Honk-a-Billies Without Loretta’s Name
When Peggy and Patsy began developing their own act, they concealed the most marketable fact about themselves.
They performed weeknights at Tootsie’s under the name the Honk-a-Billies. They did not advertise that their mother was Loretta Lynn or that their aunt was Crystal Gayle. The first show reportedly drew only a handful of people.
They kept returning.
The audiences grew, and Warner/Reprise representatives became interested before discovering the twins’ lineage. That order mattered deeply to Peggy and Patsy. They expected to be dismissed as “star babies” whose surname had opened a door their music could not.
Their eventual debut as the Lynns carried the family sound, but the work had been tested without the family name.
The girls who once demanded to be recognized separately had proven they could stand together without hiding behind their mother.
What Loretta and Her Twins Really Leave Behind
Loretta Lynn’s success is often measured through records, awards and the number of women who heard their own lives inside her songs.
Peggy and Patsy knew another unit of measurement: the number of weeks their mother was gone, the acres her performances paid for and the speed with which she sometimes had to identify her children.
The twins grew old enough to understand the arithmetic without pretending it had never hurt. Peggy, after becoming a mother herself, said she finally recognized the sacrifice required to keep the family’s life moving.
Then the road produced one more consequence.
Inside a bus built for Loretta’s career, Peggy and Patsy sang the first note of an old Everly Brothers song. The two daughters who had spent their childhood resisting a shared identity heard their separate voices form a third sound—one neither could make alone.
Loretta had once called for “Twin” because she was moving too quickly to choose a name.
Years later, she stopped long enough to listen while Peggy and Patsy chose each other.
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