The country music world is in mourning this week after K.T. Oslin, who was the first female songwriter to win the CMA Award for Song of the Year for the 1987 hit “80’s Ladies,” passed away on Monday. She was 78 years-old.

Journalist Robert K. Oermann confirmed Oslin’s death to Rolling Stone, saying that she had been battling Parkinson’s disease and had tested positive for COVID-19 last week.

“K.T. Oslin had one of the most soulful voices in country music and was a strong influence for women with her hit ’80’s Ladies,'” Country Music Association CEO Sarah Trahern told Entertainment Tonight. “I was fortunate to work with K.T. on a number of television shows in the late ’90s. She was always gracious to the crews and up-and-coming talent performing alongside her. She truly had one of the best voices in the history of our format. Our thoughts go out to her loved ones at this difficult time.”

Born in Arkansas in 1942, Oslin was already 45 years-old when she came out of nowhere to release the chart-topping hit “80’s Ladies,” a nostalgic ballad about a trio of girls who “burned our bras…dinners…and our candles at both ends.”

“There ain’t been much these ladies ain’t tried,” Oslin sang in the song.

“I wrote it a little piece at a time,” Oslin said in a 2011 interview with CMT. “It was an idea I had. I thought it would be a song that would be great to do live in concert. I thought it was one of those show pieces. I never dreamed or thought it would be a single.”

Oslin stopped touring regularly in the 1990s and began a career as a television actress. In 1993, she released a greatest hits album whose title summed up the self-assured way she viewed growing old: “Songs From an Aging Sex Bomb.”

“We should have music for all of us,” Oslin told the Nashville Scene in 2013. “Music isn’t just for a 20-year-old.”

Oslin released her final album, “Simply,” in 2013. Three years later, she was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Oslin influenced many of the great country music songwriters of today, including Brandy Clark, who remembered her in a Twitter thread as “Larger than life, smart, funny, elegant, beautiful….the list could go on and on.”

I’ll never forget the night that I opened for Mike Reid at the Franklin Theater in 2013. My friend Robert Filhart asked if he could bring someone backstage. I didn’t know that that someone was KT Oslin until she blew through the door with him like something out of a movie. pic.twitter.com/JmPLJcR7bx

— Brandy Clark (@TheBrandyClark) December 21, 2020