Re -Train Your Brain To Happiness: Death

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January 01, 2017

Patsy Cline’s I Fall to Pieces: The Tragic Tale Of A Country Idol

Sadly not unique. A very talented singer who unfortunately was but one of the few who had to struggle like this.

The postwar country music scene was a frontier land of drunks, swindlers and scammers.

There were thousands of venues and as many bands and singers entertaining Americans before televisions flickered in every home. These were mostly poor people, and the entertainers and their audiences would travel hundreds of kilometres for a show.

The performers were a tight- knit community working in a brutal trade of gruelling tours and thieving promoters. It was a cash business and they were sometimes robbed. It was common for performers to carry a gun — like Buddy Holly, whose .22 pistol was found near his plane’s crash site. The Holly crash also claimed the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens.

Driving to gigs could be equally perilous: country singers Johnny Horton and Betty Jack Davis were both killed travelling between shows.

This was the world over which Patsy Cline briefly ruled with a short run of beautifully produced country crossover hits driven by her pure contralto. Pioneering a movement later dubbed “countrypolitan”, Cline led a revival of sorts as more traditional music was sidelined by the rock ’n’ roll phenomenon.

Virginia Patterson Hensley was named after the state in which she was born in 1932. Her parents were working poor and after her father left home she dropped out of school for a series of menial jobs before asking the local disc jockey if she could sing on his show. It went well and the soon-to-be-renamed Patsy started performing around the state and coming to the attention of rising country star Jimmy Dean. About the same time she married Gerald Cline.

Like many stars of the era, and lacking confidence, Patsy Cline signed a hopelessly restrictive contract and found she could record only material also published by her record company. After a series of honky-tonk duds, she chanced on a Kay Starr reject — Walkin’ After Midnight. It took off, reaching No 12 in January 1957 on what by the end of the year would be renamed Billboard’s Hot 100.

But it was a false dawn, and Cline remained shackled by her contract until 1960. Signing with Decca, she quickly relaunched her career with the glorious ballad I Fall to Pieces, one of the most distinctive hits of the era. It went to No 1 on the country charts and glanced Billboard’s top 10.

But as I Fall to Pieces made its way to the top, Cline did just that: on June 14, 1960 she was almost killed in a head-on car crash in Nashville. Cline was in hospital for a month and shaken by the near-death experience that left scarring on her forehead but, on crutches, she returned to touring almost immediately.

She soon scored another hit with one of Willie Nelson’s first compositions, Crazy, and became the first female country star to headline her own shows. She had a full book of them when, on January 25, 1963, disc jockey Cactus Jack Call, an old friend, was killed in a Missouri car crash, setting off an extraordinary series of events.

On March 2, Cline played a concert with Tex Ritter and Jerry Lee Lewis. She and others on the bill agreed to perform at a fundraiser in Kansas City the following day to help out Call’s widow. Cline gave three performances, finally appearing in a white chiffon gown and singing I Fall to Pieces.

With the airport fogged in, they stayed the night, but her manager and pilot, the recently licensed Randy Hughes, who had less than 50 hours’ flying experience, decided to take off into the poor weather the next day. “Don’t worry about me,” Cline told her friend Dottie West, who was driving back. “When it’s my time to go, it’s my time.”

Unable to read the instruments in the heavy weather, Hughes lost control and the plane went down outside Camden, Tennessee. Cline and Hughes were killed alongside Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins.

One of the first on the scene the next morning was singer Roger Miller, a friend of all on board. He found the Piper Cherokee crashed nose down and everyone dead. “Oh my god, there they were. It was ghastly,” he said years later.

After the bodies were removed, local looters stole personal effects from the scattered wreckage, including the chiffon dress and Cline’s concert payment.

Cline was 30 and left a son and daughter by her second marriage, to Charles Dick, who died last year aged 81.

Not long after setting out from his home in Tennessee to attend Cline’s funeral, her old friend and label mate from those days on the road, singer-guitarist Jack Anglin, rounded a bend at high speed, lost control of his car and was killed instantly.

Below: Dwight Yoakam
Long White Cadillac

Allegedly about Hank Williams.

The Blasters song by Mister Yoakam, a tribute the father of Country Music, Hank Williams
Enjoy and please visit http://www.dwightyoakam.com/
Live version by the Blasters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb2xyj...

By Alan Howe

With many thanks to The Australian

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January 11, 2016

Remembering David Bowie

David Robert Jones, known professionally as David Bowie, was an English singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, arranger, painter and actor.

8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016.

Spouse: Iman (m. 1992), Angela Bowie (m. 1970–1980)

Movies: Labyrinth, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Prestige, more

Picture credits: The Australian

David Bowie confronted his deep fear of death to complete the play and album that would be his final work, a close collaborator who had been sworn to secrecy about his cancer said last night.

The stage show Lazarus opened in New York a month ago, with a frail Bowie attending the opening night, while his album Blackstar was released on his 69th birthday on Friday, two days before his death.

Tony Visconti, who produced the album, described it as Bowie’s parting gift. Ivo van Hove, who is directing Lazarus, said the show was the artist’s last testament.

One of Britain’s greatest rock stars, with an artistic career spanning more than half a century, Bowie is thought to have been ill with liver cancer for 18 months.

Van Hove told The Times that he had been sworn to secrecy about Bowie’s failing health and did not even tell his own partner about it. “David told me, ‘We have to work together very intensely for the next year and I want you to know, if I cannot be there, why that is.’ It was a very intense time because he sometimes was very ill and in treatment but he came as much as possible to rehearsals. He was, at the end, very fragile — physically, not mentally.”

Van Hove said that he and Bowie went on stage after the opening night at the New York Theatre Workshop on December 7 to receive the audience’s applause. The Belgian director added: “I was very aware that this perhaps would be the last time I would see him. He was really weak and when we came off stage he had to take a seat. Then he said, ‘Let’s make a second one now’, so he still had mental energy to go on.

“I could see the tears behind his eyes, because he was not a man to show off his emotions. He was really in deep fear.

“I felt he was not in a death struggle but a struggle for life — he wanted to live on. He has a daughter of 15 and he really wanted to go on, but it was physically not possible.”

Bowie died yesterday in New York surrounded, a statement said, by his family — his wife, the model Iman, their daughter Alexandria ‘Lexi’ Zahra Jones, 15, and his son Duncan Jones, the film-maker. As the news of his father’s death spread on social media, Mr Jones tweeted confirmation: “Very sorry and sad to say it’s true”.

The songs on Bowie’s last album can now be seen as a foretelling of his death. Lazarus opens with the line “Look up here, I’m in Heaven”, and the video shows a blindfolded Bowie on his deathbed. The video for Blackstar depicts an astronaut lying dead on a moonscape in a possible reference to the demise of Major Tom, one of his best-known creations.

Visconti said: “He always did what he wanted to do. And he wanted to do it his way and he wanted to do it the best way.”

Bowie had also sent cryptic messages to some of his oldest friends and musical partners. Brian Eno said he had received an email a week ago saying: “Thank you for our good times, Brian. They will never rot”. Eno added: “It was signed ‘Dawn’. I realise now he was saying goodbye.”

Bowie, who was born David Jones in Brixton, south London, in 1947, had an extraordinarily innovative career, constantly experimenting with new styles and characters and influencing film, fashion and visual art. The power of his music was reflected in a tribute from the German Foreign Office acknowledging the role the song Heroes had in highlighting the scar created by the Berlin Wall. In a tweet, German diplomats said: “Good-bye, David Bowie. You are now among Heroes. Thank you for helping to bring down the Wall.”

Mick Jagger, the lead singer of the Rolling Stones and a longtime friend, tweeted: “David was always an inspiration to me and a true original. We had so many good times together. He was my friend, I will never forget him.”

Van Hove said the last song on the new album, I Can’t Give Everything Away, was about the privacy he craved. “He was saying, let me have some secrets, and being very sick was one of his last secrets.”

By Sean O’Neill
With many thanks to The Australian