Me & Patsy Kickin' Up Dust

I walked into Patsy Cline’s house on Nella Drive like I always did, without knocking.

My husband, Doo, carried in the food we’d brought and laid it out in the kitchen. Already there was enough to feed an army: fried chicken, baked ham, deviled eggs, biscuits, pies, cakes. And, of course, drinks: Cokes and beer and liquor. You’d have thought it was another one of her and Charlie’s famous parties.

Things looked the same, but there was something off in that house. I told myself it was because Patsy wasn’t there to greet me like usual, hollerin’, “It’s about time you got here, Little Gal!” But there was something else: There wasn’t no music playin’. When Patsy had folks over, there’d always be a radio on, a record spinning, or tapes on the reel-to-reel. Patsy listened to all kinds of music. She’d opened my eyes to blues and R&B and swing. I remember she played me Etta James singing “At Last.” I was amazed. I loved it!

Now it was too quiet. People was talking, but they was hushed. Patsy liked to talk loud, and whenever she was holdin’ court, the room would be filled with laughter, too. That day the sounds were all wrong in there, seemed like.

I started helping right away, carving up a ham, trying to be useful. Guests were arriving already—the house would be packed before long. But my brain was foggy, and I was in shock. All I could think was, This can’t be right. Patsy’s too young to die. Hell, we were both just thirty, born a few months apart, her in Virginia and me in the hills of Kentucky. There was so much living left to do for both of us. Julie and Randy, her two little kids, needed raising. And Patsy’s dreams had just started to come true! She was winning all kinds of awards, and folks from all over were hearing her music on the radio, getting to know how special Patsy Cline was. How could she be gone from this world?

When there wasn’t no more food left to prepare, I went on into the living room, where her gold casket was on display in front of the big picture window. The drapes were closed. It was chilly for March. Maybe poor Charlie forgot to turn on the heat, I thought. He had a lot going on. I stood by the casket, wishing I could see Patsy one more time, but the lid was closed. The plane crash had been too awful to leave it open. Charlie’d put Patsy’s best publicity picture on top. She smiled in that picture like she didn’t have a care in the world.

This wasn’t nothing like the sittin’-up ceremonies we had in the hills. Back home, when somebody died the body’d be laid out, not boxed up. We used to sit up with a body for days, singing and crying. How else could you get used to the idea of a soul going to heaven? Hilda, Patsy’s momma, planned to have the funeral back in Virginia and bury her there. That would have ticked Patsy off. She used to say, “The next time I set foot in Winchester, everybody in town’ll know Patsy Cline has been there!” Well, at least that’d be true now.

I sat down on the pretty white sofa Patsy’d had made special. In my mind, I couldn’t stop fussing over her. Had they done her makeup good? Patsy hated when her scars showed. They better have had the sense to put her in a good dress. Patsy wore the prettiest clothes, real sophisticated. She’d grown out of the cowgirl look she wore all those years ago when she was just getting started. She gave away a bunch of those costumes and ordered fancy dresses and long gowns special. Nobody could call Patsy Cline a “hillbilly” anymore. She was too elegant. She didn’t care what folks expected of her. To hell with what anybody else thinks, she said. She wanted to feel good.

Most everybody else was in the kitchen, drinking and eating. I was sad and mad at the same time that nobody but me was sitting with Patsy in that living room that she’d fixed up so nice and pretty. So I decided to stay with her a bit, just me and her, like we’d done so many times before. I thought, What am I gonna do now? I don’t have nobody to take care of me or fight for me anymore.

Right then I felt a cold chill—goose bumps running up my arms. I shivered and said out loud, “Dadgum, it’s cold in here!” Like I said, there wasn’t nobody to hear me so I don’t know why I said it out loud. But then I heard Patsy’s voice, like she was right next to me. She said, “Well, turn on the damn heat!” I swear I heard her plain as day. So I got up and did just that.

Funny thing was, I was glad. Patsy was still tellin’ me what to do. Since the day we met, she’d been saying I could do something to change things, encouraging me to stand up for myself and for my music. Whatever it was, she always told me the God’s honest truth and she always had my back. She’d said I could do it and she was right. Patsy hadn’t left me. I would keep hearing her voice, in the days and the weeks after her death. Even now, years later, I still hear her. She came into my life and changed everything. And I know I meant a lot to her, too. She’ll always be a part of me. That’s what real friendships do. We made each other better.

The first time I ever laid eyes on Patsy Cline, it was 1957. I was in the front room at the little farmhouse where me and my husband, Oliver “Mooney” Lynn, lived in Custer, Washington. I’d been working all day at Bob and Clyde Green’s dairy farm. I cleaned, washed, ironed, and cooked for the thirty-six ranch hands that worked there. My husband worked there, too. He’d milk the cows in the mornings, work in the fields all day, then milk again in the evening. I always called him Doo—short for Doolittle—but he was a hard worker. We both were—always have been. That’s why the Greens let us live in a little house out there on their farm. I was maybe twenty-four at the time and already had four kids. I guess Ernie would have been about three, Cissie was five, Jack was maybe eight, and Betty Sue was nine.

Me and Doo didn’t have much, but we’d scraped together some money and got us a black-and-white television set from Sears and Roebuck. That was a big deal. We put a payment down, then paid something every month—took about forever to finally own that thing. It was a black-and-white television set with two big wire antennas on the top. You’d wiggle those around just right until you got a signal comin’ in good. This was way before cable or even color televisions. We had about two stations that’d come in good enough to watch. We’d just turn that thing on and watch whatever we could get. We thought we were ridin’ high.

You might laugh—even to me it sounds a little funny now, with people watching shows on their phones on airplanes or standing in line waiting for their coffees at the Starbucks. Back then television was something new, something different. People’d come from miles to watch a TV. Wasn’t no shame in it. We were all poor. We sat on the floor watching. No carpet or nothing. We just barely had a wood floor. Listen, we were poor people.

That night the Arthur Godfrey show came on—Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, it was called. That’s the first time I ever seen Patsy. When she come on, boy, it caught my eye. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She sung like she was singing just for one person watchin’. She sang “Walkin’ After Midnight.” Her voice was so powerful. So rich and pretty with a real lonesome sound. I didn’t know their names yet, but there was Grady Martin and Hank “Sugarfoot” Garland on guitar and Owen Bradley on piano next to her, just a-smilin’. She wasn’t nothing like any of the other girl singers I’d ever heard. Her singing like to break my heart. I thought, That girl’s gonna be somebody.

I had a real good feelin’ about Patsy Cline. I felt real proud of her somehow, like we were connected, even though we’d never met. See, not long before I saw Patsy sing on Arthur Godfrey’s show, I’d started singing myself.

We’d been married about ten years when Doo figured out I could sing. He’d heard me singing for the kids and said I sounded pretty good. In 1957, he surprised me with a seventeen-dollar Harmony guitar that I taught myself to play. Wasn’t much else to do besides cook and clean and chase after the kids. Besides, making music was something I’d always done. I wasn’t too good at chores and, with eight kids, Mommy’d made sure we all pulled our own weight. So I’d make myself useful rockin’ and singin’ to the young ’uns. I remember one night rocking my baby brother on the porch, just a singin’. Daddy hollered, “Pipe down, Loretta! Everybody on the mountain can hear you!” I hollered back, “Don’t matter. They’re all our cousins!”

Wasn’t nothing special about me being able to sing. My whole family did. Mommy had a beautiful voice—much prettier’n mine. When I was little I’d sneak out of my bed to hear my parents sing and play the banjo. Daddy could play anything. Mommy could, too. Mommy taught me songs like “The Great Titanic.” Most of our songs told a story. That’s how folks shared the news, with songs. We didn’t have newspapers or televisions. And we sang hymns. Our family went to church when we could. We sang “How Great Thou Art” and “Where No One Stands Alone.” I was a tenderhearted child, and I liked songs that made me cry. I still get choked up at “The Old Rugged Cross.”

When I started learning to play that guitar, I got a copy of Country Song Roundup to learn the words to all the country hits on the radio. I looked at the songs in there and thought, Anybody can do this. I wrote my own songs to play. I wrote about things that happened, things that I felt—about raisin’ babies, about love and family, and about my feelings. I wrote about marriage and betrayal and hurt. Being able to write about things I felt deep inside was good. And when Doo heard the songs I wrote, he said they were good. Doo hadn’t ever encouraged me like that. I liked it.

Doo worked pretty regular, but we were barely living on what he made. Somehow he decided my singin’ was our ticket. He started acting like maybe I was worth more than just a woman he lived with, having his babies and cookin’ his supper. I won’t lie. I liked it when he saw me that way. It made me think maybe there was more to me, too. After that, me and Doo were a team. No matter what, me and Doo were gonna make something out of ourselves, for our family. He’d say, “There’s a bar down the road and you’re going to learn a song and talk to the man and make him let you get up there and sing.” And I’d do it, or we’d do it together.

Doo believed in me and he pushed me. He’d say, “I think you’re that good.” And I’d listen, because I trusted him. Most of the time he was right, and you don’t disrespect that kind of dedication.

Without Doo, I’d never have even thought to get paid for singing. Where I grew up, folks made their money workin’ in the mines. Or they ran moonshine, maybe. Making music was just something to pass the time and please yourself. Besides, like I told Doo, I just wanted to sing for my kids. I didn’t need nobody else to hear. But Doo said, “Trust me.” He’d been around the world. He knew better than me. Besides, I didn’t go to bars to hear live music. But Doo? He’d been to his fair share of honky-tonks. More than his fair share, really.

At first I didn’t want to do it. But when Doo got an idea in his head, he was bullheaded. I begged and cried and tried to get out of performing in front of people, but he wouldn’t let me. He forced me to go onstage and sing. It was a struggle. I did it ’cause he made me. At first playing for a crowd made me want to turn and run, but Doo wouldn’t let me. So I kept at it. And after a while I got to where I loved performing. And when folks liked the songs I’d wrote, it made it even better. It sparked something in me. Something good.

Doo wasn’t a bit bashful about promotin’ me. He’d walk right in and say, “You ever heard of Kitty Wells?” ’Course they’d say yes, ’cause Kitty was the first female country music star. She had the first number one hit by a woman, in 1952. Doo would say, “Well, I got the best girl singer you ever heard next to Kitty Wells.” That’d get their attention. But they’d usually say, “Bring her over and we’ll let her audition.” Doo wouldn’t let up. He’d say, “Naw, Loretta’s the best. You’re gonna want her onstage tonight!” Doo pushed me. I’d have never made it if he hadn’t. I was too bashful. That might be hard to believe, but it’s true.

So that’s what was going on in the back of my mind when I saw Patsy sing on TV. She was as good as Hank Williams, maybe better—and she was a woman! That was a new thing, newer than television, maybe even. The audience loved her. On Arthur Godfrey’s show it was the applause that told who won the contest. A little meter showed whether folks were clapping hard or not. When Patsy sang, that arrow went right to the top of the dial! I’d of voted for her, too, if I wasn’t three thousand miles away. When she won, I remember Mr. Godfrey asked if she was happy. Patsy said, “Happy as if I had good sense.” I remember chuckling at that. She was funny, and that made me like her even more.