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  Our tour ended just as the museum opened for general visitors. I wandered into the permanent exhibits, which were spread throughout a low-lit, brown-hued room with re-creations of campsites, Indian ceremonies, and early European settlers’ homesteads. This was a temple to noble landscapes and agricultural inheritance, an orderly linear progression from native farming to hardscrabble pioneer living.

  But off to one side, a temporary exhibition leapt a century into the future. Moveable Feasts: Entertaining at Glen Burnie was a small but luxurious view into the splendor at Julian Wood Glass Jr.’s home in 1960. “Be our guest and travel with us to those halcyon days,” beckoned a placard. “The family clock is chiming your arrival, just in time for brunch. So please, won’t you come in? It is a fine day to visit the entertaining Glen Burnie.”

  The room’s decadence made our gluttonous conference-room sugar feast seem almost monastic. Crystal champagne flutes were arranged next to pewter ice buckets, gilded plates, and serving platters. Julian’s own dinner jacket and bejeweled cuff links stood proud on a wooden display near his cigarette case. A “Cocktails at the Pink Pavilion” case described Julian’s effortless balance of eighteenth-century sophistication and Rat Pack cool. Through another doorway was a room of R. Lee Taylor’s dollhouses, which were large enough for young children to stand comfortably inside the frames. The miniatures were outfitted and designed with the same exacting care and detail that marked Glass and Taylor’s full-scale entertaining: upholstered chairs, chandeliers, sconces, little woven rugs. I’d never envied dolls before.

  Yet the saving grace of all this gauche lavishness was the fact that it was designed for humans, not toys. There was something relatable in Glass and Taylor’s eagerness to parade and entertain. However walled-off their life was, however inaccessible to the common person, it was endearing that they spent their fortune and good taste in service of their friends’ enjoyment. At the exact moment that I was ogling their china table settings, Jim and Bertha were up on Highland Ridge preparing for their own annual blowout. It would be store-brand meat and weathered picnic furniture, not fountain-side champagne and caviar, but the basic purpose would be the same: communal luxury, a set-apart world of food and leisure, and yes, a little showmanship for its own sake. It was no secret why, in Winchester, I kept finding myself inside carefully recreated historic homes. From the moment that Englishmen came up and settled it, this area has always been up for grabs. Statesmen have claimed it as forcefully as singers, First Family nobility as well as mountain families. Winchester’s residents have always been engaged in the process of defining this place and its character, and those definitions are often forged in living rooms more than state houses or courtrooms. That’s where people learn their values and hear their legends. Homes—the places to gather with your people—were the true currency of a region in perpetual search of itself.

  For the Boots, Beer, and BBQ event that evening, the museum had set up a huge tent outside, adjacent to the pleached allée and cocktail pavilion in the gardens. Hundreds of visitors were streaming in by 4 p.m. We entered and received our beer tickets and complementary plastic pint glass, which was emblazoned with the exhibit title and sponsors.

  The crowd under that warm late-summer evening was even more uniform than the fan club. It was exclusively white, middle-aged couples in their casual finery, maneuvering through the tent with beers in each hand. The more flamboyant men wore ostentatious cowboy hats and armor-grade belt buckles, though most were content with untucked short-sleeve plaid button-downs. They followed their wives, who walked slowly in hoop earrings and long sleeveless blouses. Once they settled, they went back up to the food line, a long pulled-pork buffet. There was a band onstage by the gardens, a modern country group from North Carolina, and the meat, too, had a distinct vinegary Tar Heel taste. I grabbed my sandwich, asked for extra coleslaw and corn fritters, and sat in an empty picnic chair by the edge of the festivities.

  The band had nothing to do with the kind of music that Patsy played. Like many country groups since the 1980s, they sounded more like a rock band than a honky-tonk one: everything was midtempo with the guitars up front and the drums loud and pounding, pedal steel floating above it all. The singer’s voice was in the Waylon vein, a deep twang that stepped up higher for the songs about beer and lower for the ones about women, God, and daddy. He looked massive on the stage, with long stringy hair and a goatee like a grizzly’s paw. The solos echoed through the tent as their audience discussed the weather and the traffic. Eventually a slick dude from Shenandoah Country Q102 took the mic and tried to whip up the burbling, diffuse crowd.

  “Have you seen it? Have you been inside?” he asked, to mild cheers. He was a board member of Celebrating Patsy Cline as well, and could not let the evening pass without recitation of the legend.

  “You’ve heard it. There were always some forces trying to keep her down. But folks, what you see here tonight, it could not have happened without people from Winchester making it happen. That’s the truth!” A smattering of applause amid ongoing chatter. “And I would love for you to come visit Patsy Cline’s historic house, 608 South Kent Street. That’s where she was when she came home after visiting Arthur Godfrey, that night when she won, that little room. And—JudySue says it best—but she looked at her mom, with her brother sleeping right nearby. She was next to a sheet. And she said, ‘Mama, it feels good to be back home. We did it.’ Not ‘I did it.’ Patsy Cline was the American dream. And it was her and her mom.

  “We gotta keep Patsy alive,” he finished, while restless beer-enabled hoots began to rise from the assembled masses. “And I just say thank God we finally have something like this.”

  What would Julian Wood Glass Jr., let alone James Wood, have thought of their backyard being used for this kind of put-on honky-tonkin’? Not just motorcycles and country music, but Carolina barbecue? The event looked like all of Winchester’s class history colliding under one tender sunset: Glen Burnie, its regal gardens, the new-money Georgian-revival museum, and a tent full of middle-class folks with no connections to the old gentry’s social life, gladly tossing money at the museum and signing up for memberships. Celebrating one of their own, the first east-side woman to push beyond the life that the Woods and their ilk had designed for her. She could never have stepped foot in Glen Burnie during its height, and she was now part of the story that the Valley told about itself. She was one of the single-name demigods that this region thrived on: Washington, Stonewall, Byrd, and now, Patsy. She had brought country music out of the farm and into the city, the parlor, the concert hall, and country people followed. They were now middle class and leisure-minded, they were PR professionals and media personalities and retirees with $100 to spend on a Saturday night fund-raiser.

  At the edge of the festivities I saw Julie Armel, plate in hand, and remembered from the morning where I’d heard her name.

  “I’ll be heading up to Jim McCoy’s place tonight,” I told her, and she nodded in eager recognition while still chewing.

  “Of course, Jim!”

  “And whenever he talks about the old days, his old band, he mentions a guy named Bud Armel. Is he—”

  “My husband’s uncle,” she jumped in. “I’ve never met Jim, but I have heard so much about those days and that place.”

  I could believe it. Bud Armel was one of those ever-present faces orbiting around Jim in black and white photos, a guitar strapped to his chest and a commanding hat upon his head. His was a name that made Jim ease back into his chair and sigh. I imagined sitting in the hearse with Bud Armel, rolling exhaustedly through the Maryland and West Virginia hill country in search of the next village roadhouse, and informing him that one day his niece-in-law would welcome a few hundred Winchesterites to Glen Burnie for a barbecue buffet in honor of Patsy Cline. Even better, I imagined telling him that Jim McCoy would still be hosting live music on the same night. The sun was setting. I had to make the long ride back up to the place where Patsy was more than just another historical e
xhibit.

  The sun was setting as I pulled into the Troubadour, the Christmas glow was just attaining its fullest warmth. Inside, the hubbub was considerable and the steaks were flying. The room smelled of grill grease and cigarettes. A flamboyantly coiffed blonde woman in a sparkly sequined top and black vest was slaying Tammy Wynette’s “Til I Can Make It on My Own” to a backing track. When she finished, holding the final note and masterfully pulling her mic away from her mouth to manage the fade-out, she clipped it back on the stand and walked through the crowd with a smile, to the most valued seats in the house, right by the entrance, right next to Jim McCoy.

  This was Sandy Uttley, from west-central Pennsylvania, and her most recent CD, Sings the Songs of Patsy Cline, recorded at Troubadour Studios and released by Troubadour Records in 2010, was visible on the for-sale shelves directly behind her seat. In 2011, that record won the Country Legacy CD of the Year Award from the National Traditional Country Music Association. It was the most recent feather in Jim’s cap; he’d produced it and accompanied Sandy to the awards ceremony in Iowa. Tonight he looked like a trip to the post office might be an ordeal. Sandy sat down, poured herself a beer from the half-full pitcher on the table, and leaned over to hug him. A tight smile curled up underneath his trucker’s hat brim. He gestured me closer to talk over the swirl of music and dinner chatter.

  “Tonight we got Sandy warming up for the big show,” he said in his deep, slow growl. I had to lean in close to hear him over the electronic jukebox, currently playing Garth Brooks’s “The Thunder Rolls.” “Carol Glass-Cooper. She’s got a Patsy tribute. Brought it up from South Carolina.” I could see Glass-Cooper’s husband on the stage, assembling a prop WINC-branded desk, preparing for showtime.

  I told Jim that I met them down at the museum, and asked if he had plans to see the exhibit.

  “Oh, I’ll get down there. Heard they have my microphone.” I concurred. It dawned on me that I’d never asked Jim if he’d ever been to the Cline House.

  “Just once, when they got it open.” He paused. “It didn’t look like it did. They never kept the piano there. Felt like a different place. You know Charlie’ll be here tomorrow?” I’d heard. He never missed Labor Day weekend on Highland Ridge.

  “We’ll do ‘Waltz Across Texas,’ fifty years now.” “Waltz” was Ernest Tubb’s signature song, and every year at the Patsy birthday bash, Jim and Charlie croaked their way through it together onstage. They had now known each other for nearly sixty years, since before Charlie and Patsy became a couple. As a young man, Charlie hauled papers for the Star, part of a succession of odd jobs all over Winchester-Frederick County, and he loved to drink and listen to country music. It was inevitable that he and Joltin’ Jim would cross paths. When Patsy and Charlie married, Jim and his first wife, Marjie, were their regular social partners, and Jim’s stories from that time all revolve around getting tanked—he and Charlie so drunk they let dinner burn on the grill, or Patsy’s eyes rolling as they stayed up late, acting like loud young assholes. It wasn’t until Patsy died that their friendship became one of the defining aspects of both their lives.

  “After the funeral, he went back down to Nashville,” Jim told me as Sandy finished her beer. “And then he would start calling me. Midnight, two in the morning sometimes. He was just looking for a friend. He’d play me records over the phone.” Jim and Charlie shared the agony of Patsy’s loss, but Jim had his own heartbreak happening simultaneously. After nearly fifteen years, Marjie had grown weary of his joltin’. They divorced right before Patsy’s death. Jim didn’t blame her; he’d had women on the road, too many to count, and always had an eye on the door, looking for the next musical opportunity rather than building a good home. He retained partial custody and his parents and sister helped watch the kids when he found gigs and sessions. And with increasing regularity, he took calls from grieving Charlie and heard the widower’s favorite records.

  The song that Jim most strongly associated with Charlie was recorded a few years later, in the early 1970s: Gene Davis & the Star-Routers’ “I Need Help,” a wailing country-gospel tune. Jim heard it for the first time over the phone, and recalled its opening lines to me now: “Here I am, on my knees for the first time, and praying is something I’ve never done / But Lord, I need a friend I can talk to, and I need help from someone.”

  This was not a well-known song, then or now, but in the growing dinnertime noise of the Troubadour with Sandy Uttley’s loving hand on his shoulder, Jim recalled every word of it from memory. The way he spoke it—with all the anticipation he had in his voice for the arrival of his dearest male friend the next day—upturned the religious message, subordinating it to the interpersonal one. It sounded like a song about earthly partnership, human deliverance: “Lord, send me a friend” rather than “Lord, be my friend.”

  With a sudden blast, Mark Cooper cued up a backing track on stage and stood to announce “Daily Walkin’ with Patsy Cline.” He was dressed in a Clemson-orange embroidered stage suit and white cowboy hat. Then the side door kicked open and Carol Glass-Cooper strode in singing “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” high-strutting in Patsy’s famous red cowgirl getup. White Stetson, white fringed gloves.

  The first act of “Daily Walkin’” was Patsy’s apocryphal debut on WINC. At the wooden desk and antique microphone, Mark portrayed Joltin’ Jim in this burlesque re-creation of the moment. Carol caromed through the tune, strong but unsubtle; Patsy’s version is nearly conversational and tossed off, but most mortals have to exert quite a bit to hang with the melody’s leaps and dashes.

  “Well hello there, Mr. McCoy, my name’s Virginia Patterson Hensley and I’d sure love to sing on your country show—”

  The narration was ham-handed biographical roughage to move things along from one song to another. It was pure southern showbiz: part schmaltz and part white-knuckle conviction, held together by sheer gumption and the local hardware store. There has been a steady supply of Patsy tribute singers since the 1980s and 1990s, when her legend really came together thanks to Coal Miner’s Daughter, the first biographies, and her postage stamp. Most tribute singers go the full distance with her hairstyles and outfits, and they usually perform with a narrative act just like this one, hitting most of these same details: Jim McCoy, Bill Peer, Arthur Godfrey, Owen Bradley. Jim had seen more than a few of these, and has been guest of honor at many of them as well. He claimed that he goes along with it all for Charlie—these shows pay royalties, as does any use of Patsy’s songs or likeness. Nevertheless, he seemed unflattered by them.

  “She’s no Patsy. But they never are,” he said to me. The audience around the Troubadour’s tight dining room was attentive but not at all rowdy. Jim seemed detached, distant. He was watching a younger man’s impersonation of himself yet again, watching the pivotal episode of his youth play out on an amateur stage—reenacted like the goddamn Civil War. Maybe if an actual Gettysburg veteran lived to see amateur enthusiasts re-create the day for fun, he would have worn the same vaguely dissatisfied look that Jim wore that night. A memory draws power from its privacy—years of recall and revision slowly wear it down to a smaller, denser version of itself, like a dwarf star that only one person knows is there. To see it refracted back out in a mere three dimensions, rehearsed and read by two strangers, can only feel like a betrayal of its true hugeness. After a minute watching stoically, Jim gestured me close again. “Patsy had perfect pitch. She was a real musician. You shoulda heard her play the piano.”

  He took a long drag on his cigarette; these days, there were no short drags. His hat brim glowed orange from the fire as he inhaled. When he pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and dangled it over his chair back, it wobbled in his unsure hand, releasing a silky wisp of gray smoke that disappeared into the blur of lights along the ceiling. People from all over the world, South Carolina to South Africa, know Winchester only because of this one Saturday morning that Jim lived as a teenager. Not every man gets to watch the stage show of his own life, or see a crowd rapt an
d invested in it. But Jim had reason to feel depleted by it all. Back on that fateful Saturday, he was working toward his own dreams, toward something bigger than just a first-act cameo in a tribute show.

  By the early 1960s, Jim had an open invitation in Nashville, where he could stay with Charlie and run around trying to sell songs and play on sessions. With hopes for a hit record, Jim left his kids with his parents or his sister and took regular trips to Music City. He would visit Ernest Tubb’s Record Shop near the Ryman Theater, which doubled as a famous gathering place and performance venue for country royalty. Jim remained close with Tubb, who had ventured into retail and syndicated radio shows in the tradition of well-diversified country businessmen. With Tubb and others, Jim was brought to recording studios and backrooms, right in the beating heart of the industry’s most transformative phase. Jim watched Willie Nelson show new songs to Ray Price. He grew close with Marty Robbins. He was enlisted in pharmacy runs to buy illegal pills for Johnny Cash, which required the knowledge of certain secret handshakes. He was even brought in to observe a vocal session with Elvis himself.

  These weren’t just friendships and one-off brushes with stardom. Jim was known as a performer and a bandleader. In late 1962, when Patsy was preparing for a short residency in Las Vegas, the first ever by a female country singer, Jim was in Nashville to record an album with producer Tommy Hill. Hill was a veteran performer on Louisiana Hayride, a famed live radio country show. As a producer and record executive, he helmed pretty much every session for Starday Records, George Jones’s original label, during the 1960s, and wrote songs for Tubb, Webb Pierce, and many other top-flight stars. Jim and Hill had already collaborated on a couple songs, and the buzz for Jim’s upcoming record was sufficient to garner notice in Billboard Music Week in November. The recording went splendidly, the tapes were sent to the record pressing plant, and then—it hurts to even type it—they simply vanished. The plant lost them, then the plant went bankrupt. Jim’s potential break vaporized. Then his marriage followed. Then Patsy died.