Loretta Through the Lens

The work of noted Nashville photographer David McClister has often graced the pages of Garden & Gun. He’s photographed Emmylou Harris, the Avett Brothers, Alabama Shakes, Alison Krauss, Jason Isbell, and Leon Bridges, among other musicians, for the magazine. McClister also worked many times with country music icon Loretta Lynn, who died earlier this month at the age of ninety. 

In the last decade, McClister collaborated with Lynn on more than ten photography projects and directed three of her music videos—Lay Me Down, Ain’t No Time to Go, and Coal Miner’s Daughter Recitation. In that time, he enjoyed a special window into the superstar’s life. “What I loved the most about Loretta was her smile and her joy for laughter,” he says. Below, he shares a sampling of his favorite photographs of Lynn along with the stories behind them.

Loretta Lynn’s Ranch in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, includes not just her home (a pre–Civil War manse) but a small town with museums, gift shops, and a replica of her childhood cabin in Butcher Holler, Kentucky. This black-and-white portrait of Lynn, strumming the guitar in the kitchen of the Butcher Holler replica, is one of McClister’s favorites. It was taken for the album Full Circle, released in 2016.

McClister recalls shooting Lynn on the re-created Butcher Holler porch in 2015: “The home is built on a rise, so to get the photo of Loretta standing on the front porch, I had to stand on top of my SUV. The town of Hurricane Mills was busy with tourists that day…They got a big surprise when they actually looked up and saw Loretta standing on the front porch, waving and saying hello to all the fans walking by, who quickly formed into a crowd to watch the photo session.”

This photo shows McClister and Lynn together in her office/writing/painting room at her home at Hurricane Mills—an area that can be glimpsed on public tours—in September 2019. “We always had fun together on our shoots,” McClister says. “She even let me goof with her at the end. I said, ‘Hey Loretta, let’s pretend we’re writing a song together.’ And I jumped in the frame and sat with her, pen and paper in hand, and she said, ‘What do you want to write about?’ And I’d come up with every bad idea you can imagine (not so hard for me), and she’d laugh.”

This outtake of Lynn in a white gown comes from the first music video McClister directed for Lynn, “Lay Me Down,” a duet with Willie Nelson (2016). “It was a snowy, cold day, and I was worried we would have to cancel, but Willie had his bus parked outside the venue,” McClister recalls. The shoot—which showcases an empty Nashville Municipal Auditorium—went on.

This image from the same shoot shows McClister with the two country stars. “With a music video, there is always down time, no matter how quickly you are moving,” he says. “I remember sitting with Loretta in a room just off the set, just her and me waiting for the lighting to get set, and I began ‘interviewing’ her, as I like to do on sessions whenever I have the time. It was the first time I realized that unlike many artists, there was no wall with her. I could ask her any question, and she would answer it honestly and directly…I asked her about her dad, and about her moving to Washington state as a young bride, and about his relationship with her husband, Mooney. She said, ‘You know, I don’t think he ever really got over that.’” 

Decca Records gifted Lynn this rug, which McClister snapped in 2014 on one of his first trips to Hurricane Mills. “Patsy, Loretta’s daughter, took us on a tour of the house and told us ghost stories about the spirits that walked there at night, which she and her twin sister, Peggy, had seen and heard through the years,” he says. “The rug was in a bedroom upstairs. I turned around and my photo assistants had all disappeared, rushing back downstairs as quickly as possible.”

McClister felt “pure joy” at the chance to meet Sissy Spacek in 2014. (Spacek earned an Oscar for her portrayal of Lynn in the 1980 film Coal Miner’s Daughter). “I had always been a big fan of Sissy and hoped for an opportunity to someday meet her and possibly photograph her,” he says. He was amused to learn that Spacek was a fellow “picker” who loved to thrift. “Can you imagine being at a thrift store and looking up and seeing Sissy Spacek browsing the used books or racks of sweaters?”

This 2015 photo was taken on one of Lynn’s old tour buses, which had been retired to the museum. “I instantly fell in love with it and asked if we could do some photos with Loretta back in that bus,” McClister says, “re-creating what she used to do before she went onstage for a show.”

At the end of a 2019 session of video interviews for Lynn’s book Me & Patsy [Cline], Loretta’s daughter Patsy asked McClister to photograph some artifacts they had pulled from storage. “Some of the items were signed records, photos, notes that Cline had given Loretta,” McClister says. “One was a two-piece negligee she had given Loretta. And then they showed me these.” According to Lynn, the three small items—a hairpin, a makeup compact, and lipstick—were retrieved from the plane crash that killed Cline in March 1963. “Loretta didn’t remember how she had gotten them or who had given them to her,” he says. “We all fell silent as I photographed them.”

Lynn’s daughters, Patsy and Peggy, learned to play piano on these Scotch-tape-accented keys, which McClister photographed at Lynn’s home at Hurricane Mills.