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  Around sunrise the plane clipped the top tier of the woods near Camden, Tennessee, and plummeted. The crash was horrific: the plane looked shredded, the contents strewn all through the site. As one friend noted grimly, “Very little of her came back to Winchester.” But thousands of heartbroken fans and friends made the trip to Virginia for the funeral. Many called it the saddest day they ever experienced, but the Winchester Star—then as now the city’s only newspaper—described the solemn event as “a mob scene . . . They acted as if it was a ‘dollar day’ at the department store.”

  “David will be leading your tour,” JudySue said, then called over the man in white gloves. “You’re in luck.” She stepped away into the kitchen, where she’d converted one built-in shelf to a gift shop.

  “Where you folks from?” David asked. One man was from northern Virginia, another from central Pennsylvania. They were both over fifty, alone, just big-time Patsy fans looking to experience the house. Neither literally wore his fandom like the couple from Ohio whose Patsy T-shirts, with her mile-wide smile and full cheeks, peeked out from underneath their Steelers windbreakers.

  David gave us the facts of her early life, which had been most rigorously detailed in Patsy Cline: The Making of an Icon, written and published by Celebrating Patsy Cline historian Douglas Gomery a few years earlier. She was born Virginia Patterson Hensley in 1932, the first child of a sixteen-year-old mother and forty-three-year-old father. “Ginny” spent her first two years living with her mother, Hilda Hensley, in a wooded cabin without electricity or plumbing. Hilda grew vegetables in a garden behind the house and caught fish in the nearby Shenandoah River. Patsy’s father, Sam Hensley, worked construction and hauling jobs throughout Virginia before landing a salaried position as head boilerman for Washington and Lee University. The family moved with him to Lexington and was housed in a relatively luxurious home in the woods near the gymnasium. For five years, Ginny sat by her bedroom window and heard weekly dance concerts by the world-class jazz orchestras that came to campus for fraternity mixers. That was 1937 to 1942, the height of the big-band era. It was the first professional music that Ginny ever heard.

  David narrated this tale with such practiced earnestness that it was hard to tell if he actually liked Patsy or was simply an expert salesman. At the end of an anecdote about her childhood bout with rheumatic fever, an experience that nearly left her voiceless, he intoned, “Imagine, a world without Patsy’s voice,” and then let a moment of solemn silence go by. Our Ohio couple nodded in unison.

  He omitted, however, the worst of Patsy’s ordeals: Sam’s sexual abuse, the extent of which will likely never be known. Biographers (Gomery is the third so far) mention her occasional crying bouts to close friends as an adult. Late nights on tour, a thousand miles from her children, she’d occasionally just weep. Sloppy, tortured crying, full of self-hatred but never confessional. No one can corroborate it now. But for what it’s worth, Hilda and Sam divorced shortly after the family achieved some measure of stability upon moving into the South Kent Street house.

  Hilda and Patsy moved nineteen times in the sixteen years leading up to their arrival on South Kent, sometimes with Sam but often without. They were determined to provide a proper, stable home for Patsy’s much younger siblings, Sylvia and Sam Jr. They had no money. Patsy dropped out of high school and worked hourly jobs around the city, at the movie theater snack bar or a chicken slaughterhouse. Her longest job was at Gaunt’s Drug Store, about a ten-minute walk southwest. She was a beloved soda jerk who memorized everyone’s orders and even served black customers more than a decade before Virginia desegregated its schools. In the evenings and weekends she sang anywhere people would listen—every beery, nicotine-stained hellhole and every church social too.

  But rarely in Winchester. There was no country scene in her hometown beyond Jim McCoy’s radio show, no love for mountain culture or cowboy couture. So among the city’s patrician class Patsy was known simply as a loudmouth and unregenerate flirt. She called out to passersby from her porch swing and sang at disreputable venues with all-male bands. She had a deadbeat father and a divorced mother, and didn’t even have the decency to feel ashamed of herself.

  Worse still: She wore pants.

  In the small parlor, where the family’s dinner table stood on a rug made from patches of World War II army uniforms, rested a bona fide breathtaker for Patsy fans: a replica of the blue-and-white tasseled cowgirl dress that she wore in her early career. In pictures with other women of the time, Patsy always looks bigger, less dainty, and yet this dress was positively petite. It hung starkly on a vintage dress-form mannequin next to Hilda’s sewing machine, the family’s main source of income during their years on South Kent. Hilda was a master seamstress and made all of Patsy’s early outfits by hand. She also sewed and repaired clothes for Winchester’s upper class and babysat their children. A kids’ toy made from wooden spools and red thread dangled from the Singer.

  We followed David up the narrow, creaking stairs by the front door and into the bedroom, which was even starker than the lower floor. Sam Jr.’s bed was hidden behind a sheet on a rope line. On the other side was Patsy’s bed, and another where Sylvia slept with Hilda.

  Singing was “the one thing she could do that wasn’t going to cost us,” Hilda later said. Patsy got her first real break at age twenty, playing with a regional country bandleader named Bill Peer, who was married and a father but still fell in love with her. It was Peer who suggested she call herself Patsy, from her middle name, Patterson. Their affair was well known and whispered about, and the indignity probably pushed her toward Gerald Cline, the twenty-eight-year-old heir to a construction fortune who wooed her whenever the Peer group stopped at the Moose Lodge in Brunswick, Maryland. They married in 1953, then fought bitterly for years because she refused to stay off the road and have children. By 1956 Patsy had split from Peer, then from Cline, but had fought her way onto a regular spot on Jimmy Dean’s television variety show, filmed in Washington, D.C. Camera-trained, she then auditioned for Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, one of the most popular television shows in the country. A win on Godfrey’s heavily sponsored program could make a career, and that’s what happened for Patsy when she sang her third single, “Walkin’ After Midnight,” in early 1957. The impressed host deemed it a “wam-doodler” on-air.

  The single sold well enough that Hilda could move the family to a bigger house down the street, number 720, and rent number 608 for extra cash. The Winchester Star wrote up the performance but misspelled Patsy’s name and called the song “I Walk Alone at Midnight.”

  But before any of that, before the television appearances and hit singles, there was this low-ceilinged bedroom, bisected by a thinning sheet on a rope. The lower floor was for entertaining, which Patsy and Hilda did whenever possible. But the bedroom, with its close quarters and drafty windows, embodied more of what those uncertain years must have felt like. Humiliation—suffering it and conquering it—was the grand tragic theme of Patsy Cline’s life, and this bedroom was the only half-private space she had throughout her leanest years. It was where she made her face up and prepared for late nights that she hoped might free her from such a hectic, needy existence. A blanket on the foot of Patsy’s bed was the actual handmade quilt she slept with. The glove box by Sam Jr.’s bed—Patsy was a glove collector, never without multiple pairs—was also genuine. The place felt heavy.

  “I hope you guys feel some of what we feel up here every day,” David said, making eye contact with each member of the group one by one. A drawl seeped into his voice, barely perceptible. “I know there’s something here. I work here a lot by myself, sometimes the entire day. And I hear things. And I think, ‘OK, did I not get enough sleep?’” He laughed and so did everyone else, secure that he wasn’t just some nut. Then he quickly regained his composure.

  “But I’ve heard the door close up here a few times.” No one laughed.

  Saturday night, my tie and jacket on, I walked over to the posh, boxy Ge
orge Washington Hotel, one of downtown Winchester’s dueling monoliths along with the regal Handley Library on the other end of Piccadilly Street. The main street’s name was one tip-off that Winchester, like many early-American cities, owed a lot of its physical and historical character to England: the skinny streets were lined with brick and stone, accented with black metal gates and vines crawling up every downspout. The library’s tall columns and green metal roof would have looked familiar to the pigeons of Trafalgar Square.

  Even the hotel’s name was a nod to British roots. Washington lived in town back when he commanded troops for the queen. In 1755, he was tasked with leading a Winchester-based regiment in the French and Indian War, and it nearly drove him to despair. In this “cold and barren frontier,” as he called it, Washington fought constantly with his soldiers over their alcoholism and laziness. He promised fifty lashes for men caught drinking in town, and hanged one attempted deserter. He threatened to resign less than two months after arriving. But years later, when Washington was living far away and campaigning for the Virginia House of Burgesses, he returned to Winchester on election day and handed out wine, brandy, beer, cider, and rum punch from a wagon in the center of town. He won in a landslide. It was his first political victory.

  In 2013, there was still a persistent divide between folks who could be wooed by free booze and those who could afford to offer it. The stately stone hotel charged the highest rates for the nicest room in town, yet from its sidewalk I could see around the corner to the Royal Lunch, the platonic ideal of a dive bar that surely would have been a favorite of Washington’s ungovernable platoon had they lived to see the Bud Light era. In one sense, the Royal Lunch was just the townie bar, and the hotel the yuppie tourist haven. But their proximity spoke to Winchester’s almost elemental schizophrenia. On the walk over from 608 South Kent, I passed by two cemeteries, one Confederate and the other Union, that stare at each other from opposite sides of the street. It is said that Winchester switched sides more than seventy times during the Civil War, and a major highway nearby is still named for Jubal Early, the Confederate general who lost the Third Battle of Winchester in 1864. Standing in the road was like staring at the brain lobes of an entire town. The Union cemetery was compact and geometric—all straight lines, untouched by heathenish creativity. The identical, undecorated stones were packed like ice cubes in their tray. Across the street, the Confederate site’s Gothic fence was adorned with wrought-iron wisteria. The burial sites were roomier, the stones varied from soaring columns to squat shelves. This site had stood as a graveyard since the 1840s, but the Civil War–specific portion, named Stonewall Cemetery, was founded by bereaved Winchester women to accommodate the shallowly buried bodies that farmers kept unintentionally disinterring with their tools in the war’s aftermath. Eventually, some 2,500 men were reburied in Stonewall. Into the twentieth century, Winchester held an annual Confederate Memorial Day gathering of somber reflection and song on the grounds.

  The George Washington was built in 1924 but closed in the 1970s and was used as an old-age home for a time. Like the Cline House, it had recently been restored, though in the hotel’s case the rejuvenators were the not-even-remotely-nonprofit Wyndham Hotel Group, which had installed a loud, low-lit lobby bar with high ceilings and jazz-club décor: the Half Note Lounge. On Saturday night, this was the site of the official memorial-weekend party. The place was buzzing with Patsy fans and Winchesterites who knew her when. JudySue, in a different but even more resplendent outfit, this one accentuated with a turquoise wrap, was drifting through the crowd thanking everyone. Around 8:30, Patsy’s daughter, Julie, got up to thank the assembled and say how much it meant to return home. Julie was only four years old when her mother died, and was only beginning to engage publicly as a family representative. She had just earlier that year been sworn in as president of the global Patsy Cline fan club.

  “It means so much to have her here,” JudySue told me as Julie set down the microphone and everyone quietly applauded. “To have her blessing and her involvement is just . . . so important.”

  Julie’s presence carried so much weight because Winchester remains one of those noble American towns where history can still be felt as a living force. It is spoken of and fretted about like the clouds hovering over the Troubadour. For generations, Winchester chose to see itself as a New World Camelot or Rome—a grand tragic opera of future presidents, wartime heroics, and European fortunes. Against this backdrop, no amount of number-1 records or global adoration could erase the notion that Patsy Cline was just another piece of poor white trash from South Kent Street. A certain class just never considered her worth acknowledging, and Winchester’s ways are so deeply set that that attitude has survived, in an admittedly limited scope, into the twenty-first century. The few nominal public acknowledgments of her connection to the town—a street name, a sign along Interstate 81, a historic marker outside the house—all popped up in the 1980s and later, usually thanks to private backing, and with considerable opposition from the city government in each case. Patsy Cline Boulevard, for example, is an entrance road to the Apple Blossom Mall, not an official street. The government doesn’t even have to hold its nose and plow it when it snows.

  As it happens, the George Washington Hotel was once an important hub for the nose-holding set. In the 1950s, its lobby restaurant was the main daytime social site for doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and their wives. By night their employees and customers, most of whom lived on Kent Street, descended upon Loudoun Street, a few blocks west. They saw movies or talent shows at the Palace Theatre, got drunk at the bars, or just sat in their parked cars and called out to each other.

  Patsy’s wedding to Gerald Cline was the closest she got to the proprietary life, and it’s easy to imagine her struggling to adapt to its strictures before ultimately embracing the truth: she had to sing. And the best kind of guy to accommodate that dream was a crass, boisterous good ol’ boy named Charlie Dick. Like Patsy, he was the oldest of three and never saw his father after the age of fifteen. Also like Patsy, Charlie liked to drink and cuss and fall in love, and they did all three from the moment they met each other on Friday, April 13, 1956. Julie, their first child, was born in 1958.

  All around us at the Half Note Lounge, people were growing louder and drinking the night’s special, a martini-glass bourbon cocktail called The Cline. Every bartender was visibly frustrated by the recipe, which involved a just-so orange twist. Over at the microphone, a nervy-eyed brunette named Liz Ruffner, Celebrating Patsy Cline’s resident tribute singer, cued up her backing tracks on an iPad and performed alarmingly note-perfect renditions of all the hits, including “Walkin’ After Midnight,” “Strange,” and “She’s Got You.” Her voice was a little huskier than Patsy’s but she understood the void in those songs and luxuriated in it. She sang without any outreach to the crowd.

  Idling at the bar, I watched two of the younger women in attendance yell warmly at each other over the noise. They were watering down their Clines with Sprite and looked like they’d spent most of their years breathing through cigarettes. The bottle blonde had an ornate tattoo visible across her upper chest, and the brunette, with no tattoos I could see, soon caught me eavesdropping and invited me to the spring Apple Blossom Festival.

  “It’s amazing. Whole town’s just drinking outside for like a week. Like Mardi Gras with apples. I’m gonna have my beads on—she knows!” The blonde laughed and shook her head.

  “I love this hotel now,” said the brunette. “So classy. Couple years ago this was, like, a mental hospital? Awful. Now you got music and it’s beautiful looking. It’ll fill up around Apple Blossom.

  “This girl right here,” she shouted at me, wrapping an unmuscular arm around her drinking partner, “we’ve known each other forty . . . forty-one?”

  “Forty-one,” said the blonde.

  “Forty-one years. Since we were little kids.”

  Her friend nodded. “Don’t listen to her,” she said. “She goes on and on.”


  That was true. In a raspy, happy voice, the brunette told me that she spent time at a youth home as a teenager. She’d lived in Winchester all her life, and her father used to drink with Patsy. He even claimed that he kissed her once, and so this woman grew up hearing that if Patsy had only been a bit younger, he would have married her instead of the brunette’s mother. She watched Julie move around the crowd, signing programs and giving hugs.

  “We could be twins!” she shouted, then went back and ordered another drink from the bar that wouldn’t have served her grandmother.

  The official Celebrating Patsy Cline line on Charlie and Patsy is that they were nothing like the 1985 Patsy biopic Sweet Dreams, starring Jessica Lange and Ed Harris. In Winchester, everybody calls that film simply “the movie,” and nobody speaks of it fondly. Part of the CPC mission, particularly since Charlie has been generous with his support, is to scrub up the Patsy story for public view. Enough with the hearsay and domestic abuse accusations. As David put it: They fought, sure, but it only got physical one time.

  No matter how you frame it, their marriage might be charitably called tempestuous. Their home life was tense when Patsy’s career flatlined in the late 1950s, following the success of “Walkin’ After Midnight.” She continued to record with her regular producer, the visionary “Nashville Sound” pioneer Owen Bradley, but nothing stuck to the charts. They tried everything: mambo and gutbucket country, gospel and weepy pop ballads. Then lightning struck, in the form of “I Fall to Pieces,” written by a young Hank Cochran. It was a heartbreak ballad like dozens of others Patsy had already recorded (she called them “hurtin’ songs”), and she curled around the melody, tugging at the lyrics with her signature rise-and-fall crying effect. It was released in early 1961, around the time Patsy gave birth to Randy, her second child with Charlie, and the song crawled up the charts all through the summer. Patsy’s near-fatal car crash came on June 14, when she was running errands. “I Fall to Pieces” hit number 1 on the pop charts while she convalesced. Tribute performances, many by younger female singers who already considered Patsy an influence, began at the Opry. By the time she got back on the road she was a superstar.