From Nothing to Legendary: Country's Three Greatest Rags to Riches Stories

Country music has always been the genre of the working class, the forgotten, and the left behind. But even within a genre full of hard luck stories, three women stand apart. Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, and Shania Twain did not just overcome poverty. They turned it into art, into empire, and into inspiration for millions of people who recognized their own lives in every song.

Loretta Lynn: The Coal Miner's Daughter Who Became a Legend

Loretta Lynn was born Loretta Webb in a one-room log cabin and was the second of eight children. Her father was a coal miner in the rural coal town of Butcher Holler, Kentucky. This was not romantic poverty. This was the real thing, in one of the most economically isolated corners of America, where the mines took everything and gave back very little. Her father worked all night in the Van Lear coal mines and farmed during the day just to help make ends meet. He later died of black lung disease at just 52.

Lynn famously married Oliver "Doolittle" Lynn at fifteen years old. "Doo" was a 21-year-old war veteran with a reputation as a hell raiser. He also turned out to be the person who changed her life. The trajectory of her life shifted when her husband bought her a guitar and encouraged her to sing. She taught herself, wrote her own songs at a time when female artists rarely did, and drove herself to Nashville. 

She went straight to the top. Three Grammys. 21 number one hits. A bestselling autobiography, an Oscar-winning film, and a Medal of Freedom awarded by President Barack Obama. The Country Music Hall of Fame called her story "more like fiction than fact." She called it just her life.

Dolly Parton: From a Two-Room Cabin to a $675 Million Empire

Dolly Rebecca Parton was born in 1946, the fourth of 12 children, in a one-room cabin without heat or running water in Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains. Her father, Robert Lee Parton, was an illiterate sharecropper. Her mother, Avie Lee, was a homemaker. The family was so poor that when Dolly was born, her father paid the doctor who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal.

Growing up wearing dresses made from feed sacks didn't make her sorrowful but rather grateful. Her mother made her a coat from scraps of rags one winter because she could not afford to buy one. Dolly wore it to school and got mocked by classmates. Her mother told her it was a special coat of many colors, just like Joseph's in the Bible. That story became "Coat of Many Colors," one of the most beloved country songs ever written, and Parton has said it is the song most special to her out of everything she has ever recorded.

The day after she earned her high school diploma, Parton headed straight for Nashville. What she built from there is staggering. More than 100 million records sold worldwide. 47 career top-ten country albums, a record for any artist. Dollywood. Hollywood. A real estate empire. The Imagination Library, a charity she dedicated to her illiterate father that has now delivered over 100 million free books to children under five years old. Her net worth sits at an estimated $675 million. Not bad for a girl from a two-room cabin with no electricity and no running water.

Shania Twain: The Greatest Comeback Story Country Music Has Ever Seen

Shania Twain was raised dirt poor in Timmins, Ontario, in a household where food was very often scarce and domestic violence was a reality she lived with as a child. She was so afraid of what people would think that she refused to tell anyone outside the family how poor they were, terrified that child services would separate the siblings. By the time she was eight years old, she was performing in bars to help her family put food on the table, staying up past midnight on school nights to sing for tips.

Then, when she was twenty-two years old, the bottom fell out entirely. Her mother and stepfather were killed when their car collided with a logging truck, leaving Shania responsible for her three teenage siblings. She moved back home and spent the next several years keeping the family together, singing at a resort in northern Ontario to pay the bills. When the last of her siblings was old enough to be on their own, she assembled a demo tape and headed for Nashville.

Her first album flopped. It sold modestly in the United States, but it reached one very important listener: rock producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange, who had produced albums for AC/DC, the Cars, and Def Leppard. He introduced himself over the phone, the two began a songwriting collaboration, met in person at the Fan Fair convention in Nashville, and were married by the end of 1993. Together they wrote The Woman in Me, then Come on Over, which became the best-selling country album in history. 

Five Grammys followed. A $400 million fortune. And one of the most remarkable survival stories the music industry has ever produced.

Three women. Three impossible starts. Three legacies that will outlast all of us.