Tracking the legacy of Patsy Cline after her tragic death: “Ahead of her time”
Patsy Cline established an unusual crossover appeal beginning with her first hit song, 1957’s ‘Walkin’ After Midnight’, which saw her be just as popular in juke points and rock ‘n’ roll dance halls as in cowboy bars and honky tonks.
In the early 1960s, her star was all the more on the rise, as singles like ‘Crazy’, ‘I Fall to Pieces’, and ‘She’s Got You’ raced up the US pop and country charts with equal velocity, such that it seemed like there was no stopping her from becoming one of the biggest artists in the world, but then, in a tale eerily similar to that of Buddy Holly just four years earlier, she boarded an ill-fated flight on a foggy night, bound for her home in Nashville but the plane never got there.
Its wreckage was ultimately found in the town of Camden, Tennessee, just 90 miles short of its destination, with Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Cowboy Copas, and pilot Randy Hughes all dead on impact. Popular culture did not immortalise it in song as ‘The Day the Music Died’, but the 1963 plane crash had a devastating effect on American music and especially on people personally associated with Cline and the other performers.
“I was tore up for some time,” her husband and promoter Charlie Dick told the Associated Press in 1977, looking back at the tragedy, “I was good friends with the others killed, too. Their relatives and I sort of put it all back together. Dottie West was a good friend of Patsy’s. She and Loretta [Lynn] asked me to go on the road with them to get me away from things.”
Without really planning it, Cline’s friends and admirers across various genres of popular music took up the job of keeping her legacy alive, making it known to the next generation of artists that it wasn’t just her voice that was unique, but her energy and spirit. She exuded a strength and toughness that was unique for female singers of her time, but that could also be pulled away to reveal great pain and vulnerability that one might just call an overall authenticity.
“She was ahead of her time, definitely,” Charlie Dick said of his late wife, “She’d still be on top today—still selling records with no problem at all. You still hear her songs on the radio, but you’d hear a lot more except that she didn’t have much in the can when she died.
“Her records aren’t dated,” he added, “there’s not that much difference from what you hear today. A lot of people are trying to sing like her”.
In the late 1970s, the first of many Patsy Cline revivals was underway, as many of the most popular singers of the moment, including Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, were covering her songs and expressing their admiration for her, and the release of the film Coal Miner’s Daughter in 1980, about Loretta Lynn and Cline’s friendship in their early days, sparked an even bigger interest in the singer, which led to another generation taking up the mantle. In fact, by the ‘90s, LeAnn Rimes made a habit of covering Patsy’s songs and became one of the top-selling country acts in the world while doing so.
“[Patsy Cline’s] music and influence continues to be passed down through generations,” Rimes wrote in a social media post in 2019, “Every song, the backdrop for our deepest heartbroken and tear-stained moments. When she sang, you caught a glimpse of the soul at work. I am forever grateful she existed. Man, I wish she was still around. The music she would have created. Always an honour to honour her.”
