The Fake Love Affair That Inspired This Loretta Lynn Deep Cut (And the Rock ‘n’ Roller Who Revived It)

Desperate times can call for desperate measures, and it’s safe to assume Loretta Lynn was at least close to desperation when she hatched a plan to make her cheating husband, Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn, jealous by starting a fake love affair with her guitarist, Cal Smith. Loretta’s logic was simple. Make Doo jealous, get him fired up over her again, and then maybe he’d lose interest in extramarital dalliances.

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What Loretta didn’t account for, however, was the fact that Doo had a temper, a proclivity for brown liquor, and access to a gun.

Loretta Lynn Turned a Harrowing Story Into “Portland, Oregon”

As many of her marital problems often did, this faux fling between Loretta Lynn and her guitarist, Cal Smith (and Loretta’s husband Doo Lynn’s reaction) inspired the song “Portland, Oregon”. Even though the story itself was fake, the narrative of what allegedly happened is clear: “In a booth in the corner with the lights down low / I was moving in fast, she was taking it slow / Well, I looked at him and caught him looking at me / I knew right then, we were playing free in Oregon.”

There were no sloe gin fizzes shared between Loretta and Smith—at least, not in that context—but that didn’t matter to the country star’s husband. Speaking to 60 Minutes in 2005, Loretta recalled the night she decided to implement her plan. “I got Cal, and I said, ‘Let’s go down to the bar and act like we’re getting drunk and act like we’re lovers.’ Boy, I’ve hated that ever since.”

Her aversion to the ruse is understandable, given what happened next. “After the show, I went in to go to the bathroom, and I seen that shower curtain move a little bit. Scared me to death!” She recalled. “So, I opened the shower curtain. There, Doo stood with a quart of whiskey in one hand and a gun pointed right at me. A loaded pistol! And if I’d had been in there with Cal Smith, he’d a-killed us both. I said, ‘That’s too close for comfort, Doo. Don’t you ever do this again.’”

The Rock ‘n’ Roller Who Cleared the Cobwebs off This Deep Cut Song

In the mid-2000s, Loretta Lynn began a working relationship with Detroit rock ‘n’ roller Jack White. One night, the musicians were having dinner at Lynn’s Tennessee home when she invited White to look through a pile of old lyrics. “Portland, Oregon”, which Lynn never recorded, was in the mountain of handwritten notes. The White Stripes founder pulled the song out of the pile, and they decided to include it on what would become Van Lear Rose, Lynn’s 42nd studio album.

“Portland, Oregon” turned into a duet between White and Lynn, which plays into the storyline of a man and woman sitting at the bar, slowly getting closer over a pitcher (or two or three) of sloe gin fizzes. “Doolittle” Lynn died in 1996, which meant he never got to see his wife singing a song about a staged affair back in the 1960s—this time with another man altogether.

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