In Colorado: A Great Fondness for Country Tunes

By Gregory Jaynes

The road directions to the headquarters of the Loretta Lynn International Fan Club were the sort the skeptical traveler longs for: clear, fail-safe. East out of Denver to Limon. south out of Limon to Wild Horse, left on Road 9 and right on Road Y. Road Y, explained Loudilla Johnson, co-president of the club along with her sisters Loretta and Kay, "doesn't go anywhere but here."

An occasional wrinkle, an odd hitch in these tidy instructions pops up in the form of a fierce local sirocco that hurls itself at cyclonic force across the plains of eastern Colorado. It moves as a solid wall of dust, opaque and hard on the nerves of any ill-informed motorist it happens to catch. All a fool can do in these circumstances is listen to the finish of the car being grit-blasted away. Even with the windows closed, the dirt piles up on the dashboard and gathers in the folds of clothes and collects on the tongue. Coming as it does right out of the blue, a windstorm of such muscle is enough to give the intestate a remorseful heart.

"It can be just awful," Loudilla Johnson told a shaken guest a lifetime later. "It sucks the shingles right off one side of the house." Kay Johnson volunteered that the wind recently removed two railroad engines from a nearby track. Loretta Johnson said it once blew her from the yard outside the farmhouse to the crest of a distant hill before she could get some purchase. Their father, Mack Johnson, who had been hauling wheat, said it was nothing compared with some of the blows the family had been through. At that point, the visitor resolved that if anybody in the house answered to the name Dorothy or owned a dog called Toto, he would not stick around.

Fear of the elements soon passed, however, as talk in the cheerful kitchen turned on family reminiscences. The Johnsons moved from the Texas Panhandle to this not dissimilar ground in 1948. Until then, Mack had held a lot of jobs to cobble together his grubstake. He moved to Wild Horse to raise wheat and rear five children. He and his wife were headed toward divorce. One son would grow up to farm on his own: the other would throw in with his dad. The three daughters would chart a course that would keep them close by yet broaden them through association with singers of the country stripe. Thereby hung the tale.

In the early days the outside world reached them through a battery-powered radio, and when night or the weather drew them inside, they had Fibber McGee and Molly, Gunsmoke and music. When rock 'n' roll came along, the girls liked it, but they also developed a fondness for the country tunes their father favored so. In time they began driving the 120 miles to Colorado Springs, to attend country music concerts.

In 1960 a song, I'm a Honky Tonk Girl, hooked the Johnson sisters on its author and performer. The tune moved Loretta Johnson to write a mash note to Loretta Lynn, then living in Custer, Wash. At the time Lynn had four children, no money to speak of and not exactly what you would call your red-hot prospects for stardom. The celebrated earthiness made known to a wider audience in the book and movie Coal Miner's Daughter figured in Lynn's reaction to the letter (since acknowledged as her "first real fan letter"): she did not answer it. Loretta Johnson had written it on a Smith-Corona with a script typeface. She does a fair imitation of the conversation that followed between Lynn and her husband. Oliver Vanetta Lynn Jr.. also known as "Mooney," a.k.a. "Doolittle," a.k.a. "Doo": "Well I ain't answering it." "Well why not?" "Look how she writes! Every letter is perfect!" "It's a machine, Loretta. It was written on a machine." "I know machines. Machines print. That ain't print!"

Loretta's second letter to Loretta bore the natural imperfections of a work writ by human hand, and it drew a response. The exchange led to a correspondence, which led to a meeting in Colorado Springs, which led to a friendship, which led to the Johnson sisters' "begging every greasy spoon between here and Amarillo, Texas," to play Loretta's records, which resulted, in 1963, in the establishment of the Loretta Lynn International Fan Club's headquarters in a house in the middle of 9,000 acres of wheat sowed and reaped by Mack, who is called Daddy to this day by Loretta Lynn. The population of Wild Horse, Daddy was saying recently, "is 16 by my count."

"Oh, Daddy," Loudilla said, "you're counting dogs and everything." The point was, Loudilla went on, that when Lynn asked the sisters to run her fan club, "we didn't know what to do, living out here in the middle of nowhere."

As it turned out, the Johnson sisters' isolation was just the ticket. The newsletter they put out did and does sound like word from an aunt in Alaska, waiting for the thaw. It is plain and lyrical at once, not unlike the gifts of the woman it celebrates. "We have allheard before that Loretta would be letting up just a little bit on that grueling road schedule she has maintained for so many years," the latest dispatch told the 4,000 club members, saying further, "Maybe this really will be the year when we will see a little slack."

In her letters to the journal, Lynn calls the sisters "the girls." as in, "I know you all love the girls too. I liked them when I met em, and they have become just like sisters to me--and Daddy just has to put up with us." The singer has stopped over a number of times in the Wild Horse farmhouse, staying in the same bedroom the girls have shared for ages, staying up all hours talking about clothes, cosmetics and people. Through Lynn and their own resourcefulness, the Johnsons have met most of the starry citadels of country music. Their contacts provide information that now feeds a second newsletter, a sort of who-shot-John sheet that goes to disk-jockey subscribers. The phone rings a lot: Hillbilly Heaven is on the line. Remarkably--to extend the shot-John thought--they often know who pulled the trigger before Nashville does.

What gets the sisters' collective goat is people who think there is something odd about all this. Three sisters, never married, ages--easy here, delicately, boy--early to late 40s, provide a clearinghouse of Nashville skinny from a desolate plain in Colorado. Moreover, they do it from the house they grew up in, where Daddy still lives. To boot, sometimes they travel with Lynn. She took them to England in 1972, and they have returned six times. In Nashville, they assist with an annual fan club show that draws 12,000 people. Lately they wear the hats of fan club consultants. Odd? Eat them words, mister, or step outside (if the wind doesn't knock you down, the sisters will).

One must consider the place and circumstances. They all work hard on the farm with their father, always have. Good men are not all that plentiful anywhere, much less where the Johnsons live, where on a good day there might be one per county. Fan clubs caught fire with girls of the 1950s. For the Johnsons, it was merely a matter of taking within your circle a friend whose career lassoed world attention. Everything after that just happened, is all. They had found life beyond their beloved land, without having to leave it.

"Somebody asked me if it was true we had an altar and a shrine to Loretta," Loudilla said as ice formed on the sentence. "I can't imagine how silly."

Loretta: "Somebody said, I don't see how you can stand to be around your family all the time.' " Loretta harrumphed, really. "We give each other our space, but I'm not going to apologize for getting along with my sisters."

Kay is a quiet woman, a thoughtful listener. To recall if she had any say, one has to search the memory banks: "My word!" she said occasionally. Her sisters, by contrast, would talk to a pile of rocks. The combination makes them a dynamite team, they say, although Kay is a little soft. --By Gregory Jaynes