Patsy in Appleland

By Joan V. Schroeder

[Originally published in the September/October 1992 issue of Blue Ridge Country, pages 14-17 & 41]

Winchester, Virginia. It's a pretty place, especially in the spring, when the Shenandoah Valley greens up and Frederick Country's famed apple blossoms soften the hillsides.

And it's a prosperous city. The privately endowed city high school boasts a full Jeffersonian portico and a vast landscaped lawn. The city park sports both an indoor and outdoor pool, tennis courts, ball fields, an antique-car raceway, meticulously maintained and memorialized picnic shelters. Elegant brick homes line the shady streets on the west side of town, where doctors and lawyers and executives enjoy the best of life with their families.

There's history in Winchester, too. George Washington surveyed the area. Stonewall Jackson headquartered here. James and Dolly Madison honeymooned at nearby Belle Grove Plantation. It's home to Virginia's First Family, the Byrds. Sen. Harry F. Byrd still walks Winchester's streets. A small bronze stature of his brother, Antarctic explorer Admiral Richard Byrd, graces the elegant, Beaux-Arts Handley Library and Archives building.

And there's a bright red apple monument, a six-foot-high plaster remnant of the first Apple Blossom parade. You can't miss it, sitting in front of Sheridan's Headquarters across the street from the library. Winchester is, after all, the Apple Capital of the World.

Winchester was also home to country music legend Patsy Cline. But you won't see a statue of her anywhere in town, no matter how hard you look. As one angry fan wrote to the editor of the Winchester Evening Star: "I've visited cities which pay greater tribute to early American gangsters and outlaws than Winchester does to Patsy Cline."

The diehard members of the Patsy Cline Memorial Committee are working hard to change all that. In Winchester, people are beginning to face the music. Patsy Cline was one hell of a singer.

Who was she, this woman who Tammy Wynette calls "the standard bearer of all female country singers?" Whose recording of Willie Nelson's "Crazy" was ranked second only to Elvis' "Hound Dog"/"Don't Be Cruel" on the Top 10 Jukebox records of all time? Whose greatest hits album went triple platinum 28 years after her death?

Born Virginia Patterson Hensley on September 8, 1932 in Gore, VA, Patsy Cline was an entertainer from the start. To be Shirley Temple in black patent Mary Janes was every little girl's dream then; for Patsy, it was an obsession. Growing up down the Valley in Elkton, Patsy taught herself to sing and dance, picked up the piano by ear. She would sing anywhere, remembers Elkton merchant Hobby Robinson: on the street; in church with her child-bride mother, Hilda; at local talent shows.

Jack Fretwell was the emcee of one of those talent shows. "I first heard Patsy when she was 12 or 13, after the family had moved here to Winchester," he says. "Saturday mornings, the kids would come and compete for two tickets to a movie. She was good, very good."

Did she win?

"I don't remember, actually," Fretwell admits. "But I sure remember what she sang for four years later at the Elks Minstrel Show." His eyes shift into the past, far away from the corner of the Winchester Library where we sit. "It was 'Blue in the Night,' and what a mature voice she had for a 16-year-old. It was something. She had the kind of voice you recognize right away. Like Sinatra and Tony Bennett - it was that distinctive."

Fretwell, who still performs as a singer-comedian in the Winchester area and runs an alcohol rehabilitation center, took Patsy on as a singer for his eight-piece dance band.

"I'd go by her house on a Saturday afternoon and rehearse with her. We did Cole Porter, Jerome Kern . . . She didn't read music at all, but she picked up the songs like that." He snaps his fingers. "She had great timing on top of that big voice of hers."

About that time, Patsy quit elegant Handley High School to help support her family after father Sam Hensley deserted them. Hunter and Elsie Mae Gaunt hired her to work their drugstore soda fountain.

Pharmacist Harold "Doc" Madagan now owns Gaunt's Drug on the corner of Cameron and Boscawen Streets. It's the kind of store where you can still buy Tame Cream Rinse in white, urn-shaped bottles, where the mailman stops to buy a greeting card on his route. Though the soda fountain has long since shut down, you can still sit in one of the high-backed wooden booths while Madagan fills your prescription. Across the center aisle stacks of Patsy T-shirts lay neatly folded on a table.

Beneath the pharmacy counter and above long shelves of medicine, rows of hastily framed Patsy photographs shine beneath glass. Madagan is proud of them: keeps copies of one to hand out to visiting fans. Like his idol, Patsy, Madagan is plainspoken and says exactly what he thinks.

"Yeah, she worked here from late 1949 through most of 1951. And after she left Winchester, made it big in Nashville, she'd still come in here and give us all the news. She always had her hair up in curlers because she was always singing someplace that night."

He leans across the table. "She had it tough, really tough. That kid had to fight her way across the tracks in this town. She wasn't on the Washington Street cocktail-party lists, let's just say that. Winchester is a very cliquish town, to say the least."

Waitress by day, singer by night, Patsy would sing anything: she sang live on WINC, the Winchester radio station, at the Berryville Armory; at fairs and supper clubs and little honkytonks. Decked out in elaborate cowgirl dresses handmade by her mother, Patsy sang with Bill Peer and the Melody Playboys under contract at the Moose Club in Brunswick, Md.

Joan Hafer, a Winchester hairdresser and musician, played bass with the Playboys from 1956-58 and remembers Patsy Cline as one strong, determined woman.

"You know, it wasn't an easy thing to be a woman in country music back then. I was resented as a woman bass player, believe me. But I knew I could do the job, so I just went on and did it."

"Patsy was the same way, much more so. She had the guts to get what she wanted. She said exactly what she thought. She got along great with men. You'd see her having a beer, telling jokes. She'd be right in the center of things. Today, nobody'd think a thing of it. But back in the '50s, women just didn't do that. In a lot of ways, Patsy was way ahead of her time."

In March 1953, 20-year-old Patsy married Gerald Cline, eight years her senior. Patsy got more than her now-famous name from Gerald: by all accounts he was looking for a stay-at-home wife, and Patsy just didn't fit the bill. He became increasingly resentful of her nights out with the band, nights which, it was rumored, included a love affair with bandleader Bill Peer.

"Patsy had a tough time in that marriage," Joan Hafer says carefully. "Gerald had been married before, and his ex-mother-in-law and her daughter would come to the Moose Club and sit right below Patsy in the front row. They'd just stare at her and Patsy wouldn't pay them any mind; she'd just go right on singing like they weren't even there."

Hafer doesn't have much to say about stories of Patsy's healthy libido; that she "knew how to entertain the gentlemen" and had affairs trailing from Winchester to Nashville and back again.

"Well, she did break up Bill Peer's marriage. Beyond that. . ." Beyond that, what she may have done after the show doesn't have a whole lot to do with Patsy's talent and accomplishments.

What did affect her career in the mid-to-late-fifties was a bad contract, which Patsy had signed in the late 1954 with Bill McCall, President of Four Star Records. In it, Patsy agreed to record only songs owned by Four Star and for a royalty rate less than half that of established starts. It tied her hands artistically and kept her poor far longer than she should have been.

There was that contract, and meeting Charlie Dick, who thought Patsy was the best there was.

Lewis Ruffner owns the Rainbow Road Club in Rippon, W.Va. It's where the unforgettable dance scene from Sweet Dreams was filmed; the one when Patsy and Charlie fall in love in the parking lot, dancing in front of the flashing neon rainbow. Ruffner remembers Patsy and Charlie around town in their 1956 Oldsmobile, "about the nicest car we'd ever seen around here."

"She sang a lot at the Berryville Armory down the road," he says from behind his cash register. "She sang some with the Kountry Krackers. And yeah, she was good, real good."

Just for the record: Patsy never sang here. But it would have been her kind of place: smoky and dark, jam-packed with men looking for women and women looking for me, with a strong-beat band and free-flowing beer.

Most everybody in Winchester remembers (or claims to) the night of January 21, 1957, when Patsy Cline froze the applause meter on Arthur Godfrey's CBS "Talent Scouts" television show. Reluctantly replacing her cowgirl outfit with a wardrobe evening gown. Patsy sang "Walkin' After Midnight" and received a standing ovation. Her life would never be the same.

In the next few years, things moved fast for Patsy; she divorced Gerald Cline in March 1957, and married Charlie Dick in September. She gave birth to a daughter, Julie, in August 1958 and the family moved to Nashville in late summer, 1959. Six months later, her dream came true. Patsy traded small-time television (Connie B. Gay's Washington, D.C. "Town and Country Jamboree") to sing at the Grand Ole Opry.

Still, money was tight. Four Star Records deducted every possible expense from the earnings of "Walkin' After Midnight"; the record sold 750,000 copies, yet Patsy received a grand total of $900 in royalties from it. She continued to record with Four Star, unhappy with many of the songs they chose for her. It must have been with great relief that Patsy signed with Paul Cohen at Decca Records in 1960, when her contract with Four Star expired, leaving behind Bill McCall for producer Owen Bradley.

The rest is country-music history. Nine days after son Randy was born in January 1961, her second hit, "I Fall to Pieces," was released. It was this Hank Cochran/Harlan Howard song that finally gave Patsy the financial security which had evaded her so long.

And what did Winchester think of Patsy's second #1 hit on Billboard's country charts? Mel Dick, Charlie's brother, tells it like this:

"I remember going into the big record store downtown. "I Fall to Pieces" was way up on the national pop charts as well on the Billboard list. There was nothing in the window, and nobody said a thing to me about it. I went back next week - same thing. Finally, when it reached #1, they did a window display. It was probably the high mark of Patsy's popularity here in Winchester. Now, in Martinsburg, Hagerstown - she was everywhere. But not here," he says.

Six months later, Patsy was in a Nashville hospital after a near-fatal car accident; she bore the facial scars the rest of her life. Front-page news in Winchester? Hardly. A brief article buried among AP wire stories reported the accident, referring to Patsy as a "former resident of Winchester. . . whose real name is Mrs. Virginia Dick." The article mentions that Patsy had been in Winchester earlier that month for her sister's high-school graduation, that Patsy had sung her hit "I Fall to Pieces" at the Winchester Drive-in Theater on Route 11 north of town. What they don't mention in that article is that there was as much booing as applause when she finished.

But Carnegie Hall beckoned in late 1961, and Patsy went, along with Grand Ole Opry co-stars Minnie Pearl, Bill Monroe, Faron Young and Jim Reeves, to Las Vegas.

"Crazy," "She's Got You," "Strange," "Sweet Dreams (of You)," "Faded Love," "Crazy Arms." Patsy recorded 48 songs during 15 marathon studio sessions between August 1961 and March 1963. Her voice got stronger; her delivery perfectly timed; the emotion exquisitely conveyed. She played a five-week stint in Vegas, performing every single night, and appeared with Johnny Cash at the Hollywood Bowl. She sang heart songs with tears running down her cheeks. She was a lyricist's dream come true, according to Willie Nelson. She felt the lyrics because she lived them.

And then, Patsy finally got her front-page headline in the Winchester Star.

On March 5, the single-engine Piper Comanche plane crashed near Camden, Tenn. Patsy, he pilot/manager Randy Hughes, and country/western singers Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins all were killed. She was 30 years old.

Patsy Cline is buried in the Shenandoah Memorial Park on U.S. 522 south of Winchester. It's the kind of cemetery they liked in the '50s and '60s; neat and uniform, with flat grave markers for easy mowing and lots of ever-bright plastic flowers.

You'll miss Patsy's grave unless you know where to look for it. Her bronze plaque reads like this: "Virginia H. (Patsy Cline) Dick, 1932-1963. Death can not kill what never dies: Love."

Two other monuments to Patsy stand in the cemetery, neither erected by the City of Winchester. One is a bronze gateway plaque, placed by Charlie Dick and children Julie and Randy. It's decorated with running musical notes, dedicated to "one of America's best-beloved singers."

Over near the lake, on the southern edge of the cemetery, stands the Patsy Cline Memorial Bell Tower, a 55-foot bronzed steel tower from which three clapperless bells hang. It's not a pretty thing, but it took a lot of fundraising by the Patsy Cline Memorial Committee to pay cemetery owner Larry Omps what it cost him to put it up five years ago.

Fern Adams is a tall, striking woman, vice-president of the real estate and development firm. She's a recent Winchester transplant, a Canadian native and 38-year-veteran of Northern Virginia life. And she's the current chairperson of the Patsy Cline Memorial Committee.

"I saw the movie Sweet Dreams and fell in love with the spirit I saw on the screen," she says. "It was that spirit, and her wonderful talent, that carried her."

It was a similar spirit in Adams that finally put Patsy Cline's name to a Winchester street. Adams and her husband owned a strip of land that was needed to connect the snappy new Apple Blossom mall with a main Winchester thoroughfare, Pleasant Valley Road.

"We donated the road," says Adams. "We could call it anything we wanted. So now Winchester has Patsy Cline Boulevard." She grins big.

Adams is quick to share the credit with long-time Winchester residents who have worked for many years to give Patsy her due. There's Jack Fretwell and Theresa Jenkins Bowers, who worked for over two years to win the right to name a short stretch of U.S. 522 south from U.S. 50 to the Clarke County line named the Patsy Cline Memorial Highway. All they were asking for was a sign. They finally got it - 24 years after Patsy's death.

And there's Jim Kniceley, a Patsy fan from way back, when he lived behind Gaunt's Drugstore. He's got a Patsy Cline videotape collection, Patsy Cline T-shirts for sale, Lions' Club Patsy Cline pins, hours of Patsy Cline stories, and very set opinions about Winchester's treatment of the big-voiced girl from the wrong side of the tracks.

"If she'd been a doctor's daughter, you better believe this city would have stood behind her from the start," he says. "And about the rest - her morals, let's call it - well, it was all right for any man in this town to do what they say she did. You know what I mean?"

It's changing a little in Winchester. Today, you can go to the Visitor's Center and watch a short tape of Patsy's life and times. The Memorial Committee has produced a map and brochure. "Celebrating Patsy: Landmarks and Historical Sites." Within a year, the Kurtz Memorial Center will feature a Patsy Cline showcase, displaying some of her personal items, her triple-platinum Greatest Hits album, Jessica Lange's cowgirl dress from Sweet Dreams, and lots of photographs. Shenandoah University has given several Patsy Cline music scholarships.

What does Patsy's mother think of all this? Nobody really knows for sure. Hilda Hensley long ago stopped talking to strangers about it. But if the Patsy Cline Memorial Committee has its way, the future is going to matter a lot more than the past.

"The old folks who resented her are dying off," Kniceley says. "And the young people - they're the ones who're listening to Patsy's music now."

And that's as it should be. Because finally, it was the music that mattered most to Patsy Cline.

Joan Schroeder is a long-time fan and a member of the Patsy Cline fan club. She lives in Roanoke, VA.