REMEMBERING PATSY

REMEMBERING PATSY. By Brian Mansfield. Rutledge Hill Press. 95 pp. $14.99

Forty years after her death, Patsy Cline (1932–63) is a bigger star than ever. She sells more albums than when she was alive. Her haunting rendition of "Crazy," a Willie Nelson composition, is the most played song on jukeboxes. And for fans who want to "see" Patsy as well as hear her, two biographical plays are currently touring. It’s a remarkable afterlife for any singer, especially one whose Nashville stardom lasted less than two years—from her first hit, "I Fall to Pieces," in July 1961, until her death in March 1963.

Her short career (along with three other Grand Ole Opry stars, she was killed in a plane crash near Camden, Tennessee) left us with too few photographs, and the same ones tend to get reproduced over and over again. I praise Mansfield, a journalist and music critic, for unearthing new pictures in the Nashville music establishment: the Grand Ole Opry Museum, the Country Music Hall of Fame, and particularly the files of Les Leverett, official Opry photographer in the 1960s. Mansfield’s short book intersperses these photographs with quotations. Singer k.d. lang, for instance, tells of receiving two Patsy Cline albums on her 21st birthday: "I started listening to them seriously and just being blown away by her interpretative quality and the timbre of her voice. . . . It was pretty powerful stuff, powerful to the point where it was transforming." In tribute, lang named her first band the "re-clines."

Remembering Patsy is no scholarly treatise (so we don’t know where the author got the lang quote), but a sort of love poem by someone who wishes to pay his respects to a voice we all recognize. Many of the book’s images display Patsy Cline’s appeal beyond the provinces of country music. Photograph after photograph has her in cocktail dresses, looking like Dinah Shore or Connie Francis. We also see her arguing with producers at Decca Records, making nice to disc jockeys who may play her songs, conferring with her manager, and schmoozing with country music star and Louisiana governor Jimmie Davis (best known for composing "You Are My Sunshine"). This is Patsy Cline at work, not singing but engaged in the real labor of keeping her singing career alive. The publicity photographs most familiar to us—Cline in a cowgirl outfit—reveal only a small part of the career, and of the talent.

No one-hit wonder, Patsy Cline amounts to a cultural icon of the later part of the 20th century. Mansfield offers fresh glimpses into her life, but he doesn’t try to unravel the secret of her endurance. Why do we remember Patsy long after we have forgotten Del Wood and other singers who were just as popular in the early 1960s? Whoever manages to answer that question will make a significant contribution to the history of mass culture.

—Douglas Gomery