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Clara Webb Butcher, mother of country music stars Loretta...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Clara Webb Butcher, mother of country music stars Loretta Lynn and Crystal Gayle, died Tuesday night of heart failure. She was 69.

Mrs. Butcher was admitted to Nashville's Parkview Hospital last week for problems related to lung cancer. She previously underwent an operation for removal of all of one lung and part of the other.

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After her mother's condition worsened Sunday, Ms. Lynn cancelled the last three days of a two-week engagement at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas to be with her mother.

Mrs. Butcher was born in 1913 in Butcher Holler, Ky., a tiny town in eastern Kentucky made famous in the movie 'Coal Miner's Daughter.'

Mrs. Butcher was one of 12 children of an Irish mother and Cherokee Indian father. When she was 5 years old, her entire family contracted 'the fever,' as Loretta Lynn described it in her autobiography, and young Clara took care of them.

'When Mommy was 6,' Ms. Lynn wrote, 'her mother died from the fever, and after that, she was on her own a lot. She'd go from one family to another. If somebody was having a baby, she would take care of the other kids.'

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She had eight children by her first marriage to Ted Webb. After his death, she moved to Wabash, Ind., and later married Webb's first cousin, Tommy Butcher. She worked there in a home for retarded children.

She had been living recently with her daughter, Brenda (Crystal Gayle), in Nashville.

Funeral arrangements are incomplete, but a spokesman for Ms. Lynn said she will probably be buried next to Ted Webb in Butcher Holler.

When Webb died, Ms. Lynn's husband cleared a road to the burial site with a bulldozer, and he will have to do the same for Mrs. Butcher, the spokesman said.

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