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‘I Felt Like She Was One of Us’
Decades After Her Death, Fans Are Still Emotionally Attached to Winchester’s Patsy Cline By: Don Worthington The Winchester Star The news spread quickly that rainy March day of 1963. Patsy Cline was dead, killed in a plane crash somewhere in Tennessee. Details were rapidly forthcoming. Cline, her manager, Randy Hughes, and two other Grand Old Opry stars, Cowboy Copas, and Hawkshaw Hawkins, were returning from a benefit concert in Kansas City in Randy Hughes’ Piper Comanche. They’d stopped at the airport in Dyersburg, Tenn., late on the afternoon of March 5 so that Randy Hughes could call home to Nashville. Only a couple hundred of miles away, the quartet expected to be home soon. Later that evening, residents of the farming community of Camden reported hearing something that sounded like “a Ford motor running wide open.” The next morning police found the scattered remains of Hughes’ Comanche, as well as a few personal items. It appeared the plane had descended almost vertically.
Fast forward to 1999 . . . It’s been a busy year for Cline. VH-1 names Cline one of the 100 most influential women of rock and roll. Her letters to her fan club president, Treva Miller Steinbicker, written between 1955 and 1959, are published in a book titled, “Love Always, Patsy. Patsy Cline’s Love Letters to a Friend.” Mario Munoz, a 26-year-old store planner for Wal-Mart, who wasn’t even born when Cline died, champions a star on Hollywood Boulevard for Cline. On the East Coast, Virginia Beach honors Cline with a star on its Legends Walk. Private I Records releases new Cline material, a duets album where a recorded Cline sings with the likes of Willie Nelson, Glen Campbell, Crystal Gayle, and Bob Carlisle. Producer Michael Blakey uses the latest in recording technology to strip all but Patsy’s vocals from her original recordings. The results are pure Patsy. “With recording technology the way it is, you couldn’t hear what they were capable of doing. You were only getting 50 percent of the story,” Blakey explains. Now, Cline fans get 100 percent. The pure Cline tapes are a little spooky to Cline’s second husband, Charlie Dick, who gave the project his blessing. “It was like she was in the living room, singing to me,” he says. In the living room, singing . . . As time edges closer to a new century, generation after generation is captured by Cline, by her passions, by her story. “Every generation discovers this woman and thinks they are the first,” David Gatchell, a producer of The Nashville Network, said in September of 1994 while watching Winchester’s annual Labor Day tribute to Cline. Some of the fans are so young that Dick wonders if they even comprehend her songs. Nonetheless, the youthful fans will call him at his Nashville home and in halting voices ask if he was Patsy Cline’s husband and then, what was she like? Even Dick’s grandchildren are captured by her music. Christopher and Andrew Fudge, the 12- and 10-year-old sons of Cline’s daughter, Julie, recently asked their mother if it would be OK to listen to “Grandma Cline” as they went to sleep. It was the first time, Fudge says, they’ve shown such an interest. “It was like Patsy was singing them to sleep,” Fudge says warmly. Fudge then admits she wasn’t a Cline fan until many years after her mother’s death. “Singing was just something she did.” Daughter, grandchildren, fans young and old alike, they’re captured by the magic — a magic Cline’s friend Loretta Lynn once described as “listening to one of God’s greatest singing angels.” On Sept. 8, 1932, Virginia Patterson Hensley was born in Winchester Memorial Hospital. It wasn’t much later that Ginny, as she was to known to friends then, started singing, beginning a life that soon swung between hardscrabble times and headlining. It was a life she once described as a railroad full of ups and downs. “It was a meteoric climb in 15 years,” The Winchester Evening Star reported on the day of her funeral. “From waiting in line to get on Phil Whitney’s Saturday morning country music show with the Melody Boys from Berkeley Springs, to $8 a night appearances at barn dances to chance recordings that hit, through the long gamut of one-night stands and guest appearances that sometimes cost her money — on to featured appearances at the Hollywood Bowl and New York’s Carnegie Hall.” Key steps along the way included appearances on Jimmy Dean’s “Town and Country Jamboree” from Washington, DC, at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, and a breakthrough spot on Arthur Godfrey’s “Talent Scouts” television show of Jan. 21, 1957, where she performed what would become one of her signature songs, “Walkin’ After Midnight.” In the process, Cline went from the girl with the cowboy-fringe dresses to a woman in sleek evening gowns. What didn’t change, though, was the power of her voice. “Her songs are like a three-minute movie,” says Dick. “She was the star, she played the part. I remember seeing tears in the recording sessions. They were not phony. She put her whole self, her whole soul, into a song.” Country music singer Trisha Yearwood writes in the foreword to “Love Always, Patsy” “I love Patsy Cline . . . because of her powerful and passionate voice. Listening to her music today, with the growls, the cries in her voice, the soft whispers, laughs, and breaths between every phrase, it’s like Patsy’s standing in the room with me, and rest assured, the room is alive and on fire.” “You know she had grown up with pain in her life, you can’t sing that way and not have experienced pain,” says Susie Arden Syme, who once shared the Ozark Jubilee stage with Cline. Cline recorded “Walkin’ After Midnight” on Nov. 8. 1956. It shot to No. 2 on the Billboard country charts. Her other top 10 hits, all recorded between 1961 and 1963 were: “I Fall to Pieces,” No. 1 on the country charts. “Crazy,” No. 2 on the country charts and No. 9 on the pop charts. “She’s Got You,” No. 1 on the country charts. “Leavin’ On Your Mind,” No. 8 on the country charts. “Sweet Dreams,” No. 5 on the country charts. “Faded Love,” No. 7 on the country charts. And while the songs were recorded 30 years ago, “timeless” is the oft mentioned word when describing their lasting power. Why do the songs endure? Perhaps, suggests several country music legends, it’s because they represent a style so new in the 1960s that it took the country music industry 30 years to catch up. “There are three things responsible for Patsy Cline’s success,” says Harold Bradley, the guitar player on most of Cline’s sessions and brother of Cline’s producer, Owen Bradley. “Great Songs. A great singer. A great arranger . . . “Artist and recording men are still going back to those records, trying to figure out how they got so fresh.” Bradley, in a recent interview from Nashville, notes his brother developed a sound that continues to be used for such contemporary country singers as Mandy Barnett and k.d. lang. It didn’t happen overnight, though, and sometimes it took the musicians a lot of time “to learn, relearn, and then unlearn,” what Owen Bradley wanted, says his brother. As an example, Harold Bradley points to the Aug. 21, 1961, session, where Cline recorded “Crazy.” The session came only two months after a near-fatal, head-on car crash that had sent Cline through the car’s windshield. “She was having rib trouble and couldn’t hold the high notes,” Harold Bradley explains. The session lasted four hours and only one tune, “Crazy” was recorded. Despite all the handicaps, Owen Bradley and Cline crafted a masterpiece — one of a number of masterpieces that continue to be the standard aspiring singers in Nashville are judged by. “Every female singer that comes to this town, knows her tunes. The bands know her tunes. (To this day) they are judged against her standards,” says Harold Bradley. And it’s a standard that will likely last, at least as long as one can hear Cline, be it on record, radio, or CDs. “Patsy Cline’s Greatest Hits” album has been on the Billboard charts for 660 weeks,” Harold Bradley said. “Why wouldn't that continue?” On the day of Cline’s funeral, thousands lined U.S. 522 South. The funeral was as much an event as it was a somber occasion with the sounds of home movie cameras and the pop of flashbulbs breaking the silence. When it was over, some people rushed to the floral arrangements, tearing them apart to get their own Cline souvenir. An unidentified pallbearer quoted in The Winchester Evening Star observed of the throng: “it’s like a religion with them. They’re very emotional and that’s one reason so many are here.” Emotional, a religion. Decades after Cline’s death the words are still used to describe the annual arrival of Cline fans who flock to Winchester for Labor Day fan club festivities. The Cliners are fiercely protective of their Patsy and her legacy. They talk of the emotional attachment they’ve made, of how Patsy sings to their heart. “When she sings ‘Sweet Dreams’ I can hear her singing to Charlie,” says Jen Coburn, 16, of Hamilton, Ontario. “She put everything into her singing. She gave it her all.” Bernie Miller, 63, Belviderer, Ill., is another frequent visitor. A member of a 12-step recovery program, he says there’s something in Cline’s music that fills him — so much that he once arrived at the annual weekend with a T-shirt that read, “When I have made peace with God and family, I hope the last voice I hear will be ‘the Cline.’” Some of the annual visitors count Cline among their friends, remembering the day or days when their paths crossed with hers. Anne Armstrong of Guelph, Ontario, is one who proudly counts Cline as a friend. They met in 1961 after a concert. Armstrong and a group of her friends got up the courage to go backstage. “We were not rich or polished, not low, not high class. Just an average group of women. I felt like she was one of us.” One of us. Those are words frequently used to describe Cline the person. What you saw on stage was what you also got in Cline’s kitchen, they say. Roni Stoneman of “Hee-Haw” fame, remembers her first meeting with Cline. “She looked special. She was different. I wanted to find out why.” Cline responded by “always encouraging me to get out and play. To me, she'll always be there. She’ll always be in my heart,” says Stoneman. “She would talk like a downhome country girl, but she could sing with the best pop singers,” says Vernon Taylor, who once shared local Maryland stages with Cline. “She knew where she wanted to be and was determined to get there. She had the magic.” She wanted to be the best country music singer, and if that meant being hard on those around her, she was, says Dick. “She was more demanding on the road, more demanding of the band, of club owners; she was trying to get more respect,” Dick adds. The goal, however, wasn’t to be a trendsetter, maintains Dick and his and Patsy’s daughter, Julie Fudge. “She just loved to sing. . . . I don’t see her as a leader of a cause, she was just someone who wanted to sing,” Fudge says. Cline’s goal was to provide for her family, to put food on the table — food that sometimes came from her neighbors when Cline was struggling. “I remember one time they didn’t have any groceries,” recalls neighbor Joyce Blair. Blair and another neighbor banded together to help Cline and her family over that, as well as other, tough times. “I loved her dearly and she was more like a sister to me. . . . When she would go on trips she would call me every night. She was so homesick,” says Blair. She was a devoted mother, Blair remembers, as well as a Christian. “I’ve seen her fall to her knees and pray at Hillhurst Baptist Church,” Blair remembers. “She could pray as pretty a prayer as anyone could.” Regardless of the goal, the down-to-earth, salt-of-the-earth Cline became one of country music’s trendsetters and it’s these actions that stand as much as a legacy as her music. “Patsy Cline didn’t open the door for country singers, she knocked them down,” says country music singer George Hamilton IV, who frequently shared the stage with Cline. “At the time when it was a man’s world, she took center stage.” Taking center stage meant elevating the presence of women in country music for all women. “She raised the bar high,” says Harold Bradley. It wasn’t until Dolly Parton starred in the 1980 movie “9 to 5” that a female singer pushed the standards even higher, says Bradley. “She was a powerful women, she was a ’90s lady living in the ’60s,” says Irish country music singer Sandy Kelly, one of the many singers who openly speaks of her debt to Cline. “She was a man’s woman, she was woman’s woman, and most of all, she was her own woman. If she wanted to say a four-letter word, she said it. If she wanted to take a drink, she took it. She was a role model for women. Women fell in love, got married, got divorced, went through bereavements — all with Patsy Cline. She sang the background music for people’s lives.” |
Originally Published In The Winchester Star On January 1, 2000
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