Homeplace Read online

  No one was better suited to push country music into the mainstream. Always a powerful belter, Patsy had a busy touring and recording schedule that made her voice even stronger through the late 1950s. She became more expressive with her breaths and vibrato. Bradley brought in Elvis’s backing vocalists, the Jordanaires, whose pillowy harmonies grounded Patsy perfectly, like the hazy, distant backgrounds in Looney Tunes clips. Unlike earlier female country singers like Kitty Wells, Patsy had no twang in her voice. It was accentless and firm as copper, the perfect vehicle to advance the gentrification of the genre that started with honky-tonk. Take “Crazy,” her second enormous hit, from 1962. Even after decades of overuse in commercials and movies and compilations, it remains miraculous. For something so lonely sounding, it is wildly busy: the melody leaps and skips from high notes to low, under a chord progression that floats mercurially though major, minor, and seventh voicings. It’s a classic torch song; it would have fit perfectly on Sinatra & Strings, released the same year, and Patsy sings with an emotional depth and technical precision that equal anything her New Jersey contemporary ever accomplished. She makes the hopscotching melody sound restrained and muted. Her low notes are agonizing, her high ones are soaring. She sounds genuinely conflicted and heartbroken—when she gets to “Crazy for feeling so lonely,” she drops out for a split second in the middle of the final word, only to reemerge, more powerful and defiant than ever, in the last syllable. Patsy took Hank Williams’s despairing yodel and carried it to a new plane. She bridged the gap between “Lost Highway” and Maria Callas.

  Even after her fame arrived, Patsy would roll by WINC whenever she came back into town. With her hair in curlers, she’d park her beloved red Cadillac and come inside to cozy up with Jim McCoy on-air and play her new single. For Jim, her success was of course a thrill—his friend and Valley compatriot had made it to Valhalla. Moreover, she was his entry into Nashville, the reason he started going down there regularly and made the friends he made. But Patsy also ushered in the mindset that eventually shut people like Jim McCoy out of national stardom; her success with Bradley opened the floodgates to Nashville, and it became harder than ever for singers to make it elsewhere. Except for the harder-rocking Bakersfield stars like Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, mainstream country music became increasingly gussied-up throughout the 1960s: strings, masterful singing, and expert musicianship became the norm, even for those artists, like Ray Price and George Jones, who were as road-tested and rural-born as they came. The honky-tonk sound began to feel provincial, and Patsy’s voice was the one that made it so.

  Liz Ruffner cued up the backing track for “True Love” and dedicated it to her parents. A middle-aged woman swayed drunkenly by JudySue, calling out to her tall, bald husband who waved dismissively before turning back to a heated conversation with another man in the doorway. “It’s my daddy’s birthday,” Liz announced, a subtle Valley curl in her vowels. “He passed away many years ago.” No one acknowledged her.

  When Patsy performed at Carnegie Hall in 1961, as part of a veritable “Grand Ole Opry Goes Manhattan” package concert, the Winchester Star only mentioned it on page 7, a week after the show. Right as “I Fall to Pieces” peaked, Patsy returned home for a rare Winchester gig, leading her band atop the movie theater concession stand in between shows. Years later, Jim McCoy recalled to one of her biographers, “the women—it was never the men, that’s one thing I’d like to clarify—the women started blowing horns and booing her . . . She started crying so bad . . . she said, ‘Why do people in Winchester treat me like this?’”

  My new Sprite-guzzling female friends likely knew that feeling, as did many of the people in the Half Note Lounge that night. From the conversations I overheard, they either grew up with Patsy’s music playing on a loop throughout their childhoods, or they knew her personally. Their mama knew her mama. They had heard of her legendary friendliness while shopping at Gaunt’s. Or in the case of Anita, a middle-aged woman I bumped into while trying to avoid being tackled by the drunken dancer, they heard Patsy sing as a child.

  Anita grew up in Frederick County but later moved downtown and had lived there for thirty-four years with her husband, Nathan, who sat next to her, smiling silently. She shared her story as Liz sang the loping gospel standard “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” a live version of which was the final recording Patsy ever made.

  “We never were the moneyed people,” Anita said of her early life. Her father worked in the city at the employment commission, and her mother held multiple jobs, for a tractor company and then for medical offices.

  “My mom was very aware of Patsy Cline, but we never discussed her back then.” Anita’s aunt and uncle, however, took her to see Patsy perform when she was a little girl. “I remember seeing her, realizing she was so different. She looked a little different; she was more made up than a woman in my family.

  “I’ll never forget, in 2000, going into a remote little pub in England and Patsy Cline was playing. Then we later had some English friends come over and their high-school-age kids wanted to see Patsy Cline’s grave.” At the time there was nothing in town to commemorate the singer besides her resting place. But nowadays, Anita said, “We’ve decided to honor her the way she deserved. It’s almost as if we developed a conscience.”

  By going to college, serving on the Winchester board of education, and participating in state and local political campaigns, Anita found a very different life for herself than her rural upbringing had promised. She still referred to herself proudly as a “county girl,” meaning Frederick County, though one of her daughters lived in the Baltimore suburbs and she and Nathan had traveled the country and abroad. In this way, she echoed the postwar experience of the entire Winchester-area middle class, which had generally grown wealthier and achieved agency that their ancestors wouldn’t have even dreamed about. But this wasn’t because Anita’s ilk were invited into the proprietary class; it was a result of the whole class structure shattering altogether. The old local tycoons were less powerful, but corporations like Rubbermaid, Pactiv, and Valley Health, which owns the infinitely expanding Winchester Medical Center on the city’s west side, had replaced them. The old restrictions gave way, presenting many rural people with new options in the world, but every year for decades, a town that lived and breathed history had fewer and fewer people for whom that history was actually personal.

  The town may have modernized but Patsy Cline’s music did not, and so the music became a mainline to the old days. Patsy was on her way up when she died, and she is now preserved as a picture of ascendancy, frozen forever at the moment when a lifetime of spit-upon white-trash struggle finally gave way to upper-class respectability. Her voice is the sound of talent triumphing over despair. Her songs of lost love now signify a lost era, and so they find a new audience every year—ironically, an audience in search of “real” country, or a dose of postwar American optimism and innocence. Patsy is gone from the world, but the world still demands that she perform.

  That’s why the Half Note bar buzzed with triumph on Saturday night. The descendants of Patsy’s people were now in positions of power and influence, free to toast with cocktails in the lobby of the George Washington. And Patsy embodied everything they claimed to value in a person: hard work, generosity, humor, irreverence, and God-given talent. As Liz sang the mournful opening bars of “Crazy,” Anita called over her mother, Louise, who worked alongside Patsy at a newsstand in the 1950s. Louise is now a docent at 608 South Kent. I asked her, what caused all this change in Winchester in the last few decades?

  Louise looked me straight in the eye and said, almost by angry reflex, “Northerners came in.”

  A few minutes later, in need of some steadying moonlight, I pushed through the crowd and out the lobby to the George Washington’s rear parking lot. I took a seat on the curb without noticing three teenagers hidden in the shadows barely 40 feet away. A girl with a pierced nose and jagged hair was sitting on the curb too, talking tearfully on the phone to someone who
had hurt her. Her tears were thick. Her nose dripped snot. “I don’t care!” she moaned into her phone, then ripped it away from her cheek and looked longingly at the moon, like she wanted it to seize her.

  Her confidants were nearby, a boy and girl canoodling in the parking garage light. I figured they’d driven their tortured friend or maybe met her there, in a safe and central place where they wouldn’t be noticed. They were pressed so tightly together they were basically wearing each other. When friends rescue you from a morass and then feel each other up in public while you weep at its edge—that’s country music. That is life at the border between youthful whimsy and adult despair. This kind of dreadful night is how a person becomes herself, how she decides that a cruel hometown or bad boyfriend don’t deserve her. Erase the phone, dirty up the party inside, and this was a scene that Patsy Cline lived more than once.

  JudySue insisted on taking me around town on Sunday morning, a few hours before the graveside memorial service. Typically she delivers her “Patsy’s Winchester” spiel from the front of a coach bus filled with visiting Patsyphiles. For many years she did it in a full cowgirl outfit. That day she just drove her Camry. It was the first morning of daylight saving time, and downtown was still quiet. But not JudySue.

  “This town is all about Washington and the Civil War,” she said, as if in judgment of the empty streets. “That’s all they care about.”

  Unlike many of the people who come to Winchester for Patsy tourism, JudySue isn’t a lifelong fan. Back when, Patsy was just a singer in the same bars that JudySue went to on Saturday nights with her teenage boyfriend.

  “I had no idea,” she told me. “I was in my own world then, doing my own thing. I was into Elvis, rock and roll. That’s one thing Patsy and I shared—we loved Elvis.”

  JudySue grew up an only child in Berryville, one exit east on the Harry F. Byrd Highway. Her father traveled all over the country training racehorses and then switched careers to work for Canter, an oil business now owned by Southern Energy Company. JudySue would have loved to have been a singer, but had to settle for being Miss Apple Blossom 1961. (She bragged about the accomplishment, but I had to figure out the year for myself later.)

  She entered the banking industry early, working her way up over twenty-eight years to branch manager for Winchester Farmers and Merchants. Then, in the early 1990s, her bank was robbed three times in six months. She was a hostage twice, and had her hair pulled at gunpoint. “I had just purchased a gorgeous white suit, and they got it all dirty,” she remembered. “That’s what really got me upset.”

  She left banking and began volunteering for the Winchester Tourism Board in 1994. After fielding dozens of calls asking about then-nonexistent Patsy attractions, JudySue petitioned the chamber of commerce to start Celebrating Patsy Cline, which became independent of the chamber four years later. By that time she’d immersed herself in Patsyana and grown amazed that the city was willfully ignoring such a goldmine.

  As a rural girl and a female professional in an old-money town, JudySue also grew to appreciate just how daring Patsy was. “She supported her family, she worked, she sang. She was quite a busy lady. They threw things at her, but she got right back up again and kept singing. She was way, way ahead of her time. A woman in a man’s world. And she adapted herself to that.”

  We passed the building where Patsy recorded her earliest sides, then continued on to the Triangle Diner, where she is rumored to have worked. We stopped at Gaunt’s Drug Store, which now lacked the sundae bar where Patsy benevolently held court as a teenager, giving out extra toppings even when folks couldn’t afford them. In place of ice cream, Gaunt’s now housed a storefront and memorabilia counter devoted to her. A life-size painting of Patsy in her trademark red cowgirl dress smiled out from the main window. It bore no resemblance whatsoever.

  Gaunt’s longtime owner, Harold “Doc” Madagan, began working there shortly after Patsy left. JudySue explained that Doc was threatening retirement, and there were no set plans for the building. She wanted Celebrating Patsy Cline to have it for displaying the original dresses and other clothes that wouldn’t be safe from deterioration in drafty 608 South Kent. She sounded anxious but resolved. A McDonald’s loomed tauntingly across the parking lot, though even it had bowed to Patsy’s legacy: there was a huge wooden 45 record in the window and a couple black and white photos of her hanging near the bathrooms.

  JudySue continued on to the improbably regal Handley High School, which has soaring columns and a central football arena befitting a prep school for robber barons’ sons. This was the school that Patsy dropped out of; it’s possible she didn’t attend classes at all. Either way, their new performing arts center, opened in 2011, is named for her.

  “Let me show you the rich area,” JudySue said, conspiratorially. She took a left turn onto Washington Street, a wide boulevard flanked on both sides by palatial plantation-style homes. Here were wide, wraparound porches and gilded domes, field-length yards behind walls of manicured hedges.

  “This was all lawyers,” she explained. “Most are still owned by the original families.”

  JudySue described Winchester as a place where “you never pay any attention to your neighbor.” You keep to yourself and don’t question things too much. Unlike Anita and Nathan the night before, JudySue was a longtime member of the city’s business class. When you look at the town from an economic perspective, she said, “I wouldn’t say things have changed. It’s still a tight ship with the city council. Most of them are still there from when I started.” I asked for names and she paused for a while, then declined. “I gotta live here.”

  All nine members of the Celebrating Patsy Cline board were businesspeople: a retired banker, a woman from Valley Health, the downtown development director—people with wealth and connections, but not necessarily members of those original families from Washington Street. The Cline House’s thirteen docents were people like David and Louise, fans and contemporaries who just want to spend time in that rarefied air, sharing their love of the singer. The criterion for membership was the same for both positions; everyone had to be “True Patsy,” as JudySue described it—warriors, believers, missionaries.

  “A lot of the people who come to the house are either from that generation or they have a connection to it,” she explained. “They say, ‘Oh my mom had a couch like that. My grandma had that plate.’ That generation only had each other.”

  She turned right on Piccadilly Street, headed for the east side of town where South Kent converges with Route 522, the main southbound road. Catty-corner from the George Washington Hotel, a thin café looked squished into position between its neighbors. Its front windows were decorated with a spray-painted name: JUST LIKE GRANDMA’S.

  “I don’t like that,” JudySue said, not quite under her breath. I asked what she meant. “They just opened. It looks a little cheap, doesn’t it? They’re trying to do something with this block.”

  I didn’t ask her to clarify. The intersection by the hotel was its own kind of microcosm: directly across the street from the hotel, a tall midcentury apartment building with a striking art deco facade loomed, empty and out of business. Large blue sans-serif letters spelled out WINCHESTER TOWERS on its cracked stucco. Across the street, a newly opened tobacconist’s shop looked warm and welcoming with stately gold lettering on pristine glass, like every other newly opened tobacconist’s shop on earth. What’s cheaper looking—a disused historic property, a faceless lifestyle boutique, or a homey diner?

  We drove out into the county toward Shenandoah Memorial Park, where the afternoon’s service would be held. On that day fifty years earlier, Route 522 was a parking lot for Patsy’s funeral. People left their cars sitting there to walk up. But at the moment it just looked like another quiet country highway waiting for its share of sprawl. The farmland rolled by and the houses grew farther apart. We pulled into the parking lot of Omps Funeral Home, right by the park.

  JudySue was nervous. She looked over the empty spaces, wond
ering how many would be filled in a couple hours. Fifty attendees would put her at ease, give her the sense that all the weekend’s preparations were worth it. Coverage by the Star and by Channel 3, the local TV news, would help the mission as well. But at the moment she had a ghost story on her mind.

  It cost $100,000 to refurbish 608 South Kent, and that sum wasn’t easy to raise. The day that Celebrating Patsy Cline got its final $20,000, the house was still only bones: no heat, plumbing, or power. JudySue received the celebratory call just past 6 p.m. She hung up, elated, and then immediately the phone rang again. It was a South Kent Street neighbor calling to tell her that all the lights were on in the house.

  “So I drive by, and it’s lit up like a Christmas tree. I circle the block, and come back and everything’s off again. Now, I don’t believe that stuff, but I called the city the next day and they told me, the electricity was off the whole time.” She let a silent moment hang in the parked car. Then she sung the descending opening syllables of “Crazy” and laughed to herself.

  Well before 3 p.m., more than sixty people had shuffled quietly into the funeral home’s main hall and taken the programs David had prepared, featuring dozens of pixelated Patsy photos. A young woman from Channel 3 was sitting near the back with a video camera. The other guests, dressed for church, fiddled with forget-me-not seed packets illustrated with Patsy’s portrait that the docents had given out with the programs.