"Doo told me I could sing," Loretta Lynn once recalled. "Well, I knew better. I knew I couldn't sing, but he come in and catch me singin,' like when the baby's asleep, and the only thing I knew much of was 'White Christmas.' That's the song he catch me singin'.

"He come home one day and said, 'Loretta, you're a better singer than all these girls out there makin' money. I'm gonna put you on the road or get you a job here in a tavern, and you can sing for two years and we'll buy us a home. Then you can quit.'"

So how did it go? "Two years from that day," Lynn later recalled, "we didn't have enough money to buy a hamburger."

[Loretta Lynn, a Kentucky girl who was "borned a coal miner's daughter," wore flour-sack dresses as a child, ate possum and did not see a flushed toilet until she was thirteen years old.]