How Patsy Cline cemented her legendary status with the unthinkable ‘Crazy’
Patsy Cline knew she was going to die.
In the moments leading up to the fatal plane crash at just 30 years old, Cline started having visions about it. Maybe that’s because she’d also had two near-death experiences before this one, but this time it felt prophetic, so much so that she went to Dottie West, June Carter Cash and Loretta Lynn and told them she had a strange sense of foreboding she couldn’t shake.
Two years prior, Cline was in a car crash in Nashville that killed the driver and her son. Cline survived, but it knocked her back for a long while, despite her unwavering commitment to her music. At the time, she’d turned to Cash and Lynn and said, “Honey, I’ve had two bad wrecks. The third one will either be a charm or it’ll kill me.”
She’d also told her mother all about her new perspective on life, explaining how she now knew better than to measure her success by the price of her earrings, instead focusing on her gratitude for having life to begin with. At the time, she’d quipped, “You can’t appreciate life till you’ve almost left it”.
She was still in the hospital when she gained her first hit, ‘I Fall To Pieces’, which probably supported her claim that she still had work to do (she told her husband, Charlie Dick, that Jesus had visited her and told her her work wasn’t over).
Indeed, it wasn’t, as it was then her follow-up, ‘Crazy’, that cemented her legacy. Strangely, though, Cline’s sixth sense didn’t work so well when it came to the Willie Nelson track, as she initially “didn’t particularly like the song”, thinking it verged too far on the cusp of slow, boring, nothing to write home about – like a filler record no one would find interesting. She’d also told Dick she didn’t want to record it under any circumstances, but eventually conceded when the track began to grow on her.
But she did it her way, recording it differently to suit her voice and in a way she felt was better than Nelson’s original. She removed Nelson’s spoken parts and tried her best to reach higher notes – even though they caused her rib pain. When she came back to the studio about a week later, she did the whole thing in a single take, and it ushered her into a new level of success, causing a newfound gratitude that flourished alongside her appreciation for life.
In letters to West, Cash and Lynn, she’d talked about her death premonitions, but she’d also discussed how happy she was about her newfound achievements. Perhaps she acknowledged, even back then, that it would be ‘Crazy’ that continued her legacy, a gateway to a series of unthinkable things that made her truly one of a kind. Beyond her charting position, it also paved new ground for country music, intertwining its roots with other pop accessibility but underscored by nuance, a storytelling finesse that set her apart from her peers.
Cline was also impossible in other ways, namely as one of the first-ever female singers with roots in the country genre that owned her own space and performed headline sets, sometimes included in the same line-up as many of her male counterparts, proving that, despite the mindset of the time, women could exist in the same spaces too. But still, much like the spiritual instinct that defined her final moments, she remains something of a myth; the unimaginable star who smashed it all to pieces before reaching the age of 31.
