A couple of nights ago, I watched something called “Loretta Lynn’s Haunted Plantation” on the Travel Channel. The haunted plantation is a large, restored antebellum plantation in Tennessee; it is the center of a fifty-mile radius in which seemingly everything is named after the Coal Miner’s Daughter. If I lived in an area where everything was named after me, I think it might go to my head, but not Loretta Lynn . . . although something else may have gone to her head, if you know what I mean. She spent the whole program tottering around in a cheerful daze, saying whatever little thing came into her mind.

The people who work for Loretta Lynn have elevated her to the status of deity. They wear tee shirts with her face on them and speak about her in worshipful tones, their eyes shining with holy light. Even the ghost is a Loretta Lynn fan, as it supposedly attacks anyone who upsets the album covers she has hanging on the wall.

Loretta Lynn had a hard life until the 1960s, at which time she became some sort of country empress. This is fine, and I don’t begrudge her a penny of her fortune. She paid her dues. Throughout her childhood, she lived in a one-room cabin with her family of ten. If I had to live in a one-room cabin with my own family, I would have a heart attack long before I got even one album on the charts.

I suppose, now, her biggest problem is the ghosts who haunt her house. Or, judging from everyone’s behavior, the LSD lab in the basement.