What's the story behind Patsy Cline's stage name?
When and where did her breakout performance happen?
She's one of the biggest names in country music history, and this is her tragic true
story.
Patsy Cline was born Virginia Patterson Hensley on September 8, 1932.
Her mother Hilda Patterson Hensley was just 16 years old when "Ginny" was born, while
her father Sam Hensley was already in his forties.
Times were tough for the Hensleys in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia during the Great Depression,
but music was a constant.
Sam could barely provide his family with running water or an indoor toilet, yet a radio was
always there, as was sometimes a piano.
The Hensleys moved often so that Sam could make a living as a blacksmith, about 19 times
before Ginny turned 15.
The young girl took to music naturally, learning to play piano by ear and finding her voice
at an early age.
As family friend Randolph Robinson recalled in the biography Honky Tonk Angel: The Intimate
Story of Patsy Cline,
"I can still see her now as a five- and six-year-old, skipping down the street, singing at the top
of her voice.
Already she possessed a sassiness and the knowledge that she was someone special."
Her father was an amateur singer himself, but unfortunately, he was also reportedly
abusive.
Patsy Cline once admitted,
"I can't read a note of music and I never took a singing lesson in my life."
Nevertheless, she had dreams of making it all the way to the Grand Ole Opry and into
the homes of millions.
But folks around town often reminded her not only that achieving fame was hard, but also
that it was nearly impossible for someone growing up "on the other side of the tracks."
But that didn't stop her.
Instead, young Ginny Hensley drew on those hardships and even turned her first brush
with death into a musical advantage.
At 13, she suffered a serious throat infection and was diagnosed with rheumatic fever.
The disease can have long-term effects on the heart, joints, and brain if left untreated.
It's rare nowadays, but back then it was much more common and often fatal.
Ultimately, this episode proved motivational.
As Cline was quoted in the book Honky Tonk Angel,
"The doctor put me in an oxygen tent.
You might say it was my return to the living after several days that launched me as a singer."
At the age of 14, a confident Patsy Cline, still known then as Virginia Hensley, walked
into a local radio station in her hometown of Winchester, Virginia.
She got an audition on the spot and landed her first singing gig.
But that local fame didn't lead to instant renown.
Her father and mother split up when Patsy was 16.
Some say it was because of infidelity and drinking, but more likely it was due to Sam's
transient work and Hilda's desire to put down roots.
Young Ginny moved with her mother and two siblings into a house without running water
or electricity, in a blue-collar neighborhood of Winchester.
To make ends meet, Hilda worked as a seamstress, while Ginny found messy work in a poultry
plant plucking chickens, scrubbing the Greyhound bus station, and jerking sodas at a local
drug store.
She enrolled in the local high school, but never attended.
As Barbara Hall, director of the documentary Patsy Cline: American Masters, told PBS NewsHour,
"This is a woman who barely had an eighth-grade education, came from a single-parent home,
worked to make ends meet to help feed the family, and still figured out how to work
the music business."
"We're all her because of her music."
By 1952, Virginia Patterson Hensley was touring local clubs regularly in the Virginia-Maryland-Washington,
DC, area with bandleader Bill Peer and his group, the Melody Boys and Girls.
Peer had encouraged her to take on a stage name.
So "Patsy," an homage to her middle name, was starting to emerge.
It wasn't until she met and married Gerald Cline a year later, though, that Patsy Cline
fully came into being.
At the time, she wasn't just Bill Peers' musical partner but also his lover, and they carried
on their affair throughout her marriage to Gerald.
By 1955, Patsy Cline was a regional star, now appearing on a local variety show that
attracted DC politicians as much as country folks.
All the while, she kept her sights on Nashville, while Gerald kept his eyes on making a home.
He worked, she played gigs, and they passed like ships in the night.
Eventually, the marriage hardly existed anymore.
As he recalled in Honky Tonk Angel,
"It was her way or not at all.
And that wasn't fair to me.
For a long time, I tried but got nothing in return."
For Patsy's part, she said,
"In the beginning, Gerald and I had a good marriage, as marriages go.
My problem was that I don't think I knew what love was."
By 1957, the marriage was over, but Patsy’s new surname stuck.
Patsy Cline needed a strong voice and an equally strong attitude to break through the male-dominated
country music scene.
One time, when she asked for a raise from the variety show Town and Country Time, she
was told that she was, quote, "being paid more than enough for a woman in the business."
In 1954, Cline signed with Four Star Records, an independent label owned by William McCall,
a talent scout who didn't exactly have the best reputation.
This would turn out to be one of the biggest mistakes of her career.
The contract limited her to recording only songs that McCall owned the publishing rights
to, so that he could make money off the rights and the record.
She recorded four records with Four Star, all while struggling to pay her bills.
Cline's personal letters and documents show that when her contract ended, she owed the
label nearly $5,000 and had hardly earned any royalties, only about 2 percent, despite
recording the hit song "Walkin' After Midnight" during that time.
In 1956, with steady, though meager, earnings from Town and Country Time, Patsy Cline needed
money just to keep food on the table.
Having received no royalties from Four Star, she signed for another year with the label
on the promise of a quick $200, a decision that did nothing more than prolong a bad deal.
She went from gig to gig on a rickety old bus, sometimes traveling 12 hours at a time,
as she worked well into the early morning hours on a pittance.
Then in the spring of that year, she met Charlie Dick.
Charlie had a reputation for drinking and fighting, as well as being a ladies man.
It didn't get much better when he got together with Cline.
According to the book Sweet Dreams: The World of Patsy Cline, their fights were "legendary."
They married in 1957, and later that year, Dick was drafted into the Army.
Cline gave birth to their first child, a daughter, in 1958, and she was for all intents and purposes
a working single mother struggling to pay the bills.
Patsy Cline's breakout performance happened in 1957, when she earned her way onto the
CBS show Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts.
It was basically the American Idol of its day, with a sizable national audience.
And she made it on thanks to a little lie.
Godfrey required that only professional scouts, and not family members, bring talent to him
to perform on the show.
So Hilda Hensley posed as her daughter's talent scout and introduced Cline to the Godfrey
audience, without ever mentioning the family connection.
"So they kinda fibbed, and my grandmother introduced her friend that she had brought
along."
Cline crooned "Walkin' After Midnight" to overwhelming applause from the live audience,
while also reaching millions more who were watching at home on TV.
At the end, Godfrey asked her if this was her first record or if she'd had any hits
yet.
When she admitted that she hadn't had any hits, he replied,
"I've got a hunch this one is."
His hunch was right.
The song shot up the country charts and made the crossover to the pop charts as well, a
first for a female country artist at the time.
By all accounts, Cline's appearance on Talent Scouts was the pivotal moment in her career.
Patsy Cline's appearance on Talent Scouts put her name out into the world and broadcast
her sound into millions of homes.
True to Arthur Godfrey's hunch, "Walkin' After Midnight" was a hit, but the boost Cline sought
from the show never came.
Instead, she settled into life with her daughter and husband, who returned from the Army in
1959.
Then in 1960, desperate for money, Cline signed to a new label, Decca Records, where she laid
down "I Fall to Pieces."
This new Nashville Sound revived Cline's career, though she initially fought the cross-genre
style.
As her producer at the time, Owen Bradley, said in the book Patsy Cline: The Making of
an Icon,
"What she really had was a pop voice in a country music head.
Until Patsy, no country female singer dared being smooth; they were all rough."
Cline finally earned a membership in the Grand Ole Opry, a lifelong dream of hers.
But then in 1961, she had her second brush with death just months after giving birth
to her son, as she and her brother were involved in a near-fatal head-on car crash.
She had to go through reconstructive surgery on her face and endure tremendous pain, but
she managed to return to performing later that year.
"Most people would've said, 'Okay, I've kinda- I've had enough.'"
Patsy Cline's star power could not be denied, and her rising fan base could not be contained.
As she told her fans during a post-car crash performance,
"Right at the very time I needed you the most, you came through with the flying-est colors."
A residency at the Mint in Las Vegas soon followed, which was a first for a female country
music singer.
She also made appearances at the Hollywood Bowl and Carnegie Hall, a performance for
which Cline did not get paid.
But with the exposure and radio play of "Leavin' on Your Mind" and "Crazy," she was on her
way to stardom.
In a letter to a friend, she wrote,
"It's wonderful — but what do I do for '63?
It's getting so even Cline can't follow Cline."
On March 3, 1963, Cline flew to Kansas City with two other country artists, with her manager
piloting the plane, to perform at a fundraiser.
Poor weather conditions rolled in and grounded flights.
Singer Dottie West, worried about her good friend flying, offered Cline a car ride back
to Nashville.
But she refused, telling her friend,
"Don't worry about me, Hoss.
When it's my time to go, it's my time to go."
Cline's time came March 5, 1963, as the plane crashed just outside of Camden, Tennessee,
with pilot inexperience and weather conditions the cause.
Nobody survived.
Cline was only 30 years old.
Patsy Cline's career spanned just five years with a scant few hits.
Yet her staying power nearly six decades later is a testament to the significant impact she's
had on music, history, and gender equality.
Just consider the words used to describe her by Sally McKellip, who wrote the play You
Belong to Me: A Patsy Cline Story:
"She kind of has this mythical quality.
She died way too early, and it's like people don't want to let her go."
Since her death, Cline's voice and story have remained alive through countless retrospectives,
heartfelt accolades, and awards recognition.
Her life story became the basis for the 1985 Oscar-nominated biopic Sweet Dreams, which
starred Jessica Lange as Cline.
And there have also been a number of documentaries and biographies about the iconic singer.
She posthumously received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award and was the first female
solo artist to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
And her single "Crazy" is one of the most played jukebox songs of all time.
Amid all these accomplishments, it's the person Patsy Cline — friend, lover, mother, and
daughter taken too soon — who's most often remembered.
As poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou once said of her,
"It's wonderful that whenever her name is mentioned, people's voices fall and they become
right sentimental.
And, rightly so."
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