Miranda Lambert’s Family Took in Abused Women When She Was Young, Which Influenced Her Early Songwriting

Country singer-songwriter Miranda Lambert grew up in Texas with her parents and younger brother. While growing up, Lambert’s family often took in abused women at their house. These experiences helped give Lambert songwriting inspiration when it came to making her first country songs.

Miranda Lambert’s family helped abused women

A 2011 interview with Texas Monthly explored Lambert’s start in life and the beginning of her career in country music.

While Lambert was growing up, a local preacher asked Lambert and her family to look after women who had been abused.

“I told the women that we would clothe them and feed them as long as they told their husbands not to step foot on our property, because if they did I would ask no questions,” Lambert’s father Rick told Texas Monthly. “I would get out my gun and drop them in the front yard.”

Lambert’s father also revealed that Lambert witnessing this at a young age with her family paved the way for some of her songwriting.

“We talked about who was cheating on who or who was shacking up at some motel, and she’d quietly take it all in,” her father said in the interview. “She heard about some gal who had been left dead-broke by her husband, who had walked out on her and the kids.”

He continued, “She heard about some other gal who was so down on her luck she started drinking and getting in trouble. And she’d say, ‘Daddy, it isn’t right what those men are doing.’ When I look back on those years, I realize she was getting a clinic in how to write a country song.”

The singer made music with her father while growing up

Lambert showed a talent for making music at a young age. With the help of her father, she was able to improve this skill.

“One day, she walked into my room while I was strumming some chords on my guitar, and she suddenly sang to the melody I was playing, ‘Rain on the window makes me lonely.’ We both came up with some more lines, and in an hour and a half, we had a song about a woman sitting on a bus, devastated by the end of an affair with a married man,” Lambert’s father told Texas Monthly.

He added, “We played it for Bev, and when Miranda sang, ‘I’m gonna find someplace I can ease my mind and try to heal my wounded pride,’ we both shook our heads. Miranda had this eerie ability to take on someone else’s story and make it her own.”

Miranda Lambert’s father was in a country band

Before Lambert was born, her father worked as a police officer and played country music in a band. According to Texas Monthly, her father worked in the Dallas Police Department in the “patrol division, then to undercover narcotics, and then homicide,” and his band was called Contraband.

“It was a good way to meet drug dealers and make undercover buys and get them off the streets,” Lambert’s father Rick told Texas Monthly in 2011. “And by the way, it was also a good way to meet Dallas stewardesses.”