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.
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...
Enjoy and please visit http://www.dwightyoakam.com/
Live version by the Blasters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb2xyj...
By Alan Howe
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