I don’t read a lot of non-fiction but when I do it’s mostly biographies. My discovery of Patsy Cline is recent-ish. I’ve heard her music all my life but it never really connected emotionally until a couple of years ago when I heard her cover of “You Belong To Me”. Suddenly the real beauty of her voice in other songs just started standing out when I heard them and she’s my current girl-crush. Of course, being a trendsetting musician, you know her life story would be filled with wild stories, but I wasn’t quite prepared for just how sad her life was as well in the build up to her tragic end. The problem with biographies as opposed to autobiographies, is finding one that isn't too skewed in favor of any particular fantasy of what a life must have been like. This book seems like it's been thoroughly researched and the interviews aren’t just hearsay stories from second hand sources. The personal accounts are from relatives and those who had the most intimate conversations with her, so the documented facts along with the impressions drawn about her character all line up to form a realistic portrait of Patsy’s life and career, both of which are comparatively short. And with the forward being written by Loretta Lynn, I’m sure this is about as true of a telling of Patsy Cline’s life as one can get.
Her life and career were so short that it seems incredible that a person could find enough material to fill a book with 24 chapters. That brings me to my one and only criticism of the way this book was written. The author would take a deep dive into everyone that crossed Patsy’s path in life, filling space with their personal and professional histories. The closer they were to Patsy, the more justified it was, but sometimes it seemed like a lot of unnecessary rabbit chasing and a lot of inside baseball regarding the music industry that wasn’t always pertinent to this specific artist’s career. The fact is that Patsy Cline was a fast burning candle and it’s hard to slow it down even in documentary style. She was born Virginia Hensley and was called "Ginny" growing up. She took the name Patsy from her middle name, Patterson, and her self acknowledged naivety of the business end of the music industry. In the early chapters it’s essential to go back as far as her grandfather on her father’s side to uncover the patterns of choices she made in her life. Many bad. After her successful grandfather lost his fortunes her father, already an abusive alcoholic that had abandoned the children of his first wife, became an abusive father to Patsy and her mother. All the forms of abuse apply to one degree or another; physical, emotional, and sexual. She was pretty messed up by the time she was a teenager. But, you can see how it drove her to break away. She was always a good singer and she knew it, therefore choosing a career as a singer as her ticket out of her impoverished and unstable life. She remained close to her mother all her life, but the psychological trauma of her youth directed her actions and she allowed herself to become involved in a relationship with an early manager in return for his lackluster guidance. But, this was back in the days that women could still get a bad reputation in a hurry for being a kept woman, so she married Gerald Cline to give off the appearance of a properly married woman. It never convinced anyone in her hometown of Winchester where she was continually snubbed as a whore even though for years it was just these two men that she was involved with. I’m old school enough to believe in marriage too, but empathetic enough to realize that this woman was desensitized to normal relationships and operating in survival mode, so even though I understand she was getting the negative attention she deserved, I also feel really bad for her. I also feel bad for the two men. Her first manager had real feelings for her which she didn’t return and it ruined his marriage. Gerald, I suppose, cared for her. But I don’t think either one of them thought of their marriage as anything more than a convenience. She had an abortion at this time with no knowledge of which man was the father, though everyone was told that it was a miscarriage. Yes, her life had many dark turns that I didn’t know about until I read this book. I could have been happy never having known a lot of this, but it’s a gamble you take when you decide to read up on your idols, mentors, favorite celebrities, historical icons, etc. After she landed her first hit song she dropped both of these men. Then she fell in love for real with Charlie Dick, a man that was just like her father – an abusive drunkard. And so the pattern continued. But she could give as good as she got, always pushing back and even fighting back physically when they fought. She wanted to try to make a normal life with him that she'd never had before, taking time away from her career to have the first of their two children.
She didn’t have much choice in the career aspect of this decision. She was beholden to a record contract that was 5 years overextended and choked off nearly all the money she could have been making from her first song, Walking After Midnight. It was a one-hit career destined to go nowhere. Maybe if her marriage had been everything she’d romanticized it to be, she wouldn’t have felt the need to get back into the entertainment industry and when she did almost four years later, she basically had to start over. She was getting better advice the second time around though and she balanced being booked on endless gigs with fighting with Charlie and doting on her mother, children and friends that she made on her way up. It wasn’t all tragedy during these years, and she forged bonds with other female singers that were breaking into the industry at a time when “girl singers” weren’t taken seriously as marketable in Country Music. To say she was a feminist fighting for equality wouldn’t be accurate though. She was just fighting for the credit she knew was due to her for her natural talent. She didn’t ask for special consideration, but played the game the way it was played back then and ended up kicking down the doors for other lady artists on the way. A lot of people would credit the affairs she had on the road after she started tracking successfully as an artist to a victory of female empowerment as well, but they were just the product of an unhappy marriage that she desperately wanted to work. And I still see it as sad in the context of the rest of her life rather than scandalous.
She got her comeback hit that launched her into real fame and a potential long term career in 1961 and in 1963 she died. It’s breathtaking how fast it all happened. Perhaps not for her though. She appeared to have an innate intuition that her life wouldn’t be a long one. She made out a last will and testament early in her successful years. The book shows a handwritten copy of the will that obviously wasn't made with legal advice, but thorough nonetheless. Convinced she wouldn’t live to see 30-years-old, one of her premonitions almost came true when she was in a near fatal car wreck at age 29. She survived with a scar across her forehead from where her scalp was pealed up. Once you know about it you can see the heavy makeup she used even in the black-and-white photos from 1962-3. She didn't want to stop recording and preforming for long enough to have something done about it though since her career was finally taking off, so she soldiered on even when Charlie hit her hard enough to open the scar up again. Eventually, she decided to take the time to get plastic surgery to fix the scar as well as divorce Charlie but she didn't live long enough. It turns out that she lived to see 30 but not 31. Her life ended because of her current manager fancying himself to be a pilot since a lot of musicians were buying and sometimes learning to fly their own planes to gigs to get around commercial traffic. He could fly but he wasn’t a great pilot especially for longer travel. He wasn’t rated for his instruments and in bad weather and was in a position of thinking that he was climbing in altitude when he was really nose-diving to the surface. Horrifying. I don’t describe it as well as the book.
She wasn't even at the pique of her career, really. She wasn't a songwriter, so her songs were picked by producers. And except for a few that had been written in real time by the likes of young song writers like Willie Nelson, many of the songs she released during her two hot years were covers of older songs that could easily cross over into the pop market, by design. The next project in speculation for her was an album of Broadway hits. And I'm sure she'd have crushed them. My husband and I often wonder whether or not the big voices of this era that died young would have found their way into the Outlaw Country music. It was compromised of musicians that marched to their own drums and didn't like being controlled by the corporate heads. Patsy hated the controlling aspect of the business and had already done regular touring with the Johnny Cash show being billed only second to Cash himself. I do think she would have collaborated with Cash and Jennings but also with Loretta Lynn who walked the line of controversy at times on her own. Even though she was rough and ran with the men, I think there would have been a fine pack of outlaw women with Patsy in the lead. Although she drank, and that mostly after her marriage to Charlie, I don't think she would have been carried too far away with the substance abuse after the preferred method speed, amphetamines, transitioned into cocaine. But I think she had an amazing career ahead of her with the potential to change the landscape of Country music like the other trailblazers that moved on from the Nashville Sound.
I enjoyed the book. If you like celebrity biographies, and emotionally intense biographies at that, this is a must have. The photos inside are nice finds and along with the drama, there are also a lot of heart warming stories of Patsy and her mother, step siblings, and close friends. It's amazing that she could still be such a loving person after a life that could make anyone bitter and angry. Even though she had a tragic life she wasn't a tragic figure by any means and that part, at least, is inspiring. Like other Country artists that lived hard, she was raised in church and would have undoubtedly found her way back in her late years and it's a shame she wasn't here long enough to see her life come full circle the way we got to see Johnny Cash and others straighten back out and find peace. This would be a good gift for any Patsy Cline fan.
