Sweet dreams, Patsy

50 years after her death, Cline’s timeless music rings on a new CD and, soon, on Broadway

Illustration by John Deering
Illustration by John Deering

— Patsy Cline has been gone 50 years, but it’s hard to believe with her music still playing.

Her voice is timeless as midnight.

Heartbreaking high to the low of a dark table for one, confiding so much about love that can’t be: The longing never goes away.

But now, all this time after she died at age 30 in a plane crash on March 5, 1963, she is the object of new interest - a revival that seems bound to reach even the last few people who never heard of Patsy Cline.

“When I get through with you, you’ll love me, too,” she sang, and the latest proof is Ted Swindley’s musical biography Always … Patsy Cline. The show is headed for New York’s Broadway this summer with American Idol finalist Crystal Bowersox as Cline. Writer-producer Swindley credits much of the show’s success to the Arkansas Repertory Theatre in Little Rock. From 1993 to 2009, The Rep has staged it four times.

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Democrat-Gazette file photo

Patsy Cline sings at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville in one of her dressier outfits. She wore a gown to sing at New York’s Carnegie Hall, but said it was no Grand Ole Opry. Luckiest fans received one of her gloves.

“The Rep was one of the earliest to do the show, and the first to do a touring company of it,” Swindley says from home in Nashville, Tenn. Once the musical caught on, it went everywhere from Arkansas to Australia.

Loaded with Cline’s ballads, the two-act production is based on the true story of when a fan of Cline’s, Louise Seger, met the singer in a honky tonk in Houston. The two became friends, and Cline hand-wrote letters to Seger that she signed, “Always … Patsy Cline.” Swindley got the idea for the production as the artistic director of a theater company in Houston in 1988.

“I was not a country music fan at all,” Swindley says. “I barely knew who Patsy Cline was. But I had a singer who kept wanting to sing Patsy Cline songs, and I finally relented.”

Researching Cline’s life and career, Swindley learned about that fateful meeting in Houston.

He found the story of her friendship with Seger in Ellis Nassour’s biography, Patsy Cline (Leisure, 1981). He supposed these bits of background might do for a 45-minute reason to sing. Everything else that happened, and keeps happening, Swindley calls “a phenomenon.”

“I find that a lot of people come to see the show initially because of Patsy Cline,” Swindley says - no surprise considering “how wonderful her voice was.” But the singer’s following continues to surprise him. “I had no idea her fan base was so deep,” he says, “or so broad. Her music has really lasted.

“Another thing, people come and fall in love with the show itself.”

The two-woman stage play depicts Cline as she really was many times in her career: Out on the road by herself. After a bright start on the nationally televised variety show Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts in 1957, she settled into married life with second husband, home and children.

Cline worked her way to Nashville music stardom through years of appearing in such venues as the Empire Ballroom in Houston, where she met Seger. The show depicts her as quick to make a friend, but the real-life Cline “was no pushover,” Swindley says.

Wounded as she could sound in a song’s lyric, she had to be tough“in the male-dominated music business,” he says. Friends, she called “Hoss.” She referred to herself as “The Cline,” and “was very opinionated about what she sang.”

But there she is, so approachable that Seger (later of Bull Shoals in north-central Arkansas) finds the nerve to step right up to her. This, too, is part of the show’s charm, Swindley says, having had 25 years to figure out why it works. It evokes a simpler time before the music star’s arrival with an entourage, all behind a security barricade.

Robert Hupp, The Rep’s producing artistic director, staged Always … Patsy Cline in 2009 as a longtime fan of Cline’s music.

“I was a fan of Patsy Cline since I was in college,” Hupp says, “and the opportunity to direct the musical gave me a deeper understanding of the woman behind the songs. What a story and what a tragedy.”

SWEET DREAMS (OF YOU)

Cline’s music “transcends generations,” Hupp says. New fans “join and sustain a strong existing fan base, and that accounts for the show’s continued popularity.

“A life full of promise cut short also fuels the popularity of both the singer and the musical,” he says. And while he could name musicals that did not send him away humming, “I still listen to Patsy Cline. I never get tired of her music.

“No one has that voice.”

New in time for the 50thyear anniversary is Patsy on the Air: Her Greatest TV Performances (Universal). The CD collects 14 tunes from the Pet Milk Grand Ole Opry, The Glenn Reeves Show and Country Style U.S.A., capturing some of the last times she sang.

Cline delivered a foot-stompin’ “San Antonio Rose” on the Reeves show of Feb. 28, 1963, five days before the plane crash that killed her.

The album is sound only, but a few snippets of Cline’s TV appearances endure on the Internet video site You-Tube. Music video was nobody’s idea 50 years ago: Cline simply faced the camera, dressed for these shows as if hoping to make a good impression in somebody’s else’s living room. Her dark hair was short and curled, suitable for a secretary; eyebrows darkened; lipstick a dress-up addition in the powder-and-paint style of the day, jewelry from the costume counter.

In this different time, she did not object to such male introductions as “pretty little Patsy Cline,” but just came out and sang. She might have looked a few pounds heavy by today’s celebrity weight-watching standards, but this was the rounder and softer era of Marilyn Monroe and pin-up queen Bettie Page. Confidential magazine clucked over Liberace’s get ups, not Patsy Cline’s. She wore cowgirl outfits with fringed skirts. The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville enshrines her wildest outfit, a pair of gold lame pants.

Her life held plenty of drama: a tough childhood, father run out, quitting school to be small-town drugstore soda jerk, two marriages, a car wreck that nearly killed her. But the audience didn’t hear much about her own troubles. The sob in her voice cried for everybody else’s broken heart.

The way she sang it, “A Church, A Courtroom, Then Goodbye” tells pretty much all there is about love gone wrong: “We walked from that courtroom together/We shook hands, and once again we cried.”

But this was television when the medium was still so new, whole families sat up straight to watch. Cline threw the living-room crowd a peppier number when she could. The weep is gone from “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” and she puts a best foot forward in this collection’s especially hopeful “Walkin’ After Midnight.”

The song is awful advice: To “go out walkin’ in the moonlight … for miles along the highway,” looking for love. But Cline at her saddest makes it sound like she has been hurt so much already, nothing worse could happen to her. And the snappier step in this sung-for-TV version makes the idea sound like it just might work.

IMAGINE THAT

Cline released three albums - 36 songs - before she died, or, as the songwriters put it better, took life’s railway to heaven. She had just six years to sing “She’s Got You,” “Anytime,” “Crazy,” “Faded Love” and “He Called Me Baby,” all the great Patsy Cline hits.

Dozens of later releases and different compilations make her recording career seem to have lasted longer - in fact, never ended. Some of her biggest accomplishments have come in the last 50 years.

The Country Music Hall of Fame made her the first woman inducted as a solo performer in 1973. Electronic splicing allowed her to sing “Have You Ever Been Lonely (Have You Ever Been Blue)” and “I Fall to Pieces” with Jim Reeves, as she never did in life. The duets brought her back to Billboard’s country hit charts in 1981 and ’82.

And in Cline’s home town of Winchester, Va., they say it’s like she never left.

The two-story frame house where she lived from ages 16 to 25 as Virginia Patterson Hensley, 1948 to 1957, is newly open to visitors at 608 S. Kent St. (She picked up the name “Patsy” on stage, “Cline” being the name of her first husband.) This year’s tour season starts April 2.

“You walk in the door, it’s an eerie feeling,” says Judy Sue Huyett-Kempf, executive director of Celebrating Patsy Cline, the nonprofit group that restored the more than century-old dwelling. “You expect to see her come down the stairs.”

About 6, 500 visitors have toured the house since 2011, when it opened after a $100,000 fix-up to bring it back the way that Cline left it. Nobody has claimed to see a ghost, the director says, but Cline is a “presence” - a spirit in the place where she started singing. Some of her first times onstage were for music shows in Winchester, and those times gave the blacksmith’s misfit daughter big dreams.

The house has been full of surprises, Celebrating Patsy Cline board President Ron Hottle says. The siding turned out to conceal a log cabin, built in the 1800s.

“You can see the horsehair in the chinks between the logs,” he says. Being uncommon as a two-story log cabin, it might have been part of a plantation. By the time Cline’s mother, Hilda Hensley, wallpapered the property as a single parent, “it probably would be called a low-income home in the low-rent section of Winchester.”

A series of renters came and went over the years, leaving the house in “pretty bad shape,” Hottle says.And the town, he says, was slow to get behind restoring the place. People liked Elvis; Patsy Cline was a name on a marker in the cemetery outside of town.

“I grew up in the area,” Hottle says. “I remember as a sophomore in high school, reading the article in the paper about her funeral - how the line was five miles long and people stood three and four deep all the way to the cemetery.”

But now, the line is to see inside Patsy’s house, and people leave roses and pennies at the grave, he says - pennies in memory of her fondness for penny loafer shoes.

Fifty years after she died, Patsy Cline is at least as big an attraction as the town’s other most famous residents of the past, George Washington and Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.

And so far as history knows about her competition, they didn’t sing.

Style, Pages 51 on 03/03/2013

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