Patsy: The Life and Times of Patsy Cline

by Margaret Jones

Thirty years after the plane crash that claimed her life and has kept her frozen in time, Patsy Cline remains one of the greatest voices of this century. Since the 1980 film of Loretta Lynn's life, Coal Miner's Daughter (in which Cline was featured as Lynn's mentor and influence), and the 1985 film about Cline's life, Sweet Dreams, Patsy Cline has become a cultural icon with a following all over the world. Once heard, her uniquely haunting voice, with its characteristic sob, is never forgotten. Her recordings continue to go platinum and her signature song, the Willie Nelson composition "Crazy," is the number-one jukebox hit of all time. Patsy Cline is an archetypal American heroine who sprang from her own conception of what it truly means to be a star - a woman whose willfulness and independence made her ahead of her time. The story of her rise to fame at a time when female singers were considered window dressing is an incredible tale of tenacity set in a series of parables and uncanny "coincidences." Margaret Jones has interviewed family, friends, and many of the Nashville stars who peopled the country music scene of the 1950s and 1960s to present the first fully drawn portrait of this remarkable artist, as well as a vivid picture of the country music setting from which she emerged, as it was transformed almost overnight from regional anomaly to a multimillion-dollar industry. Patsy chronicles the life of Patsy Cline (nee Virginia Hensley) from her impoverished origins in the Depression-era South through her long, arduous apprenticeships in one-night stands in countless bars and clubs, battling questionable promoters and recording companies and surviving a near-fatal car crash to her hard-won success as the first female crossover artist to emerge from the country field. Her name was to become synonymous with heartbreak ballads, and many of her greatest hits, which explore the murky terrain of fear, loneliness, abandonment, and betrayal, could have been torn fr

368 pages, Paperback

First published April 28, 1995