PATSY CLINE
THE GREATEST COUNTRY MUSIC SINGER EVER BROKE PLENTY OF BARRIERS DURING HER HARD ROAD TO FAME, FRIENDS & FAMILY RECALL
Her daughter talks to Closer about the singer’s tough road to stardom.
As fans flocked to the recent grand opening of Nashville’s Patsy Cline Museum, three generations of the country music legend’s family gathered around her wax figure to take a unique family photo. “The grandkids were born decades after she died, but they know a lot of her songs and sing her music,” Patsy’s daughter, Julie Fudge, 58, tells Closer. “I’d love to tell her about the family. She would’ve been a great grandmother.”
A March 5, 1963, plane crash, however, robbed Patsy of that opportunity. The “Sweet Dreams” crooner — whose voice is still the standard against which female singers are measured today — died at the age of 30, leaving husband Charlie Dick a widower when Julie was 4 and son Randy was barely 2. “She wanted to cut her work schedule down more to be with them,” legendary country artist Brenda Lee, 72, a close friend of Patsy’s, tells Closer. “But in those days you really didn’t have a choice. If you were lucky enough to have a hit record, you were out on the road working. She loved what she did, but she hated being away.”
BIG DREAMS, BIG VOICE
Patsy fought so hard to launch her music career that it was hard for her to pull back. “She had to knock down a lot of doors,” Brenda says. “It was a man’s world [in the mid-’50s], and Patsy was very sweet and gentle, but she gave as good as she got.”
With a will as powerful as her booming voice, Patsy became the first woman to wear pants on the Grand Ole Opry stage, something she was reprimanded for doing. “She had a lot of grit,” Brenda says. “And she hung in there.”
By 1961, her career was surging and Patsy’s tenacity would be put to the ultimate test: A car crash in Oklahoma almost took her life, but she refused to sit idle when she was released from the hospital a month later. She sang “I Fall to Pieces” at a Tulsa concert just six weeks after the crash, then proudly told the audience, “That song became No. 1 while I was in the hospital. It took six nurses to tie me in that bed! They said, ‘You’ve got everything canceled up to Tulsa,’ and I said, ‘Don’t cancel it because I’m gonna be there if I gotta crawl!’ ”
She was often winded during that show and had to rest on a stool at times, but “she was a strong-willed person,” Brenda insists. Patsy was still on crutches a month later when she recorded her career-defining song “Crazy,” and when she debuted it at the Grand Ole Opry. Her performance received three standing ovations.
As big a hit as Patsy was at the Opry, she was an even bigger hit at home. “We didn’t like for her to have to go away,” Julie shares. “And it was stressful the day we were all waiting for her to come home. We were always glad to see her return. She worked so hard at that point. I just
“I just sing like I hurt inside. If you can’t do it with feeling, don’t.”
— Patsy
missed the day-to-day normal stuff.”
Patsy herself had grown up poor in Virginia and had to drop out of school at the age of 16 to help support her family. “She worked a lot to give Julie and Randy what she didn’t have growing up as a kid,” Brenda says. “They were so important to her. She loved her children and was so proud of them. She was a great, great mom.”
Patsy’s struggles and dogged determination earned her a lot of respect. “I’m always amazed to know that all [of her success] came from so little,” Julie says. “When I look back now and see the letters and papers my dad still had that I’ve gone through — the tax records, the bank accounts, notes about the cars that were repossessed and things like that — they really didn’t have a lot.”
That makes the timing of Patsy’s death all the more tragic. “She had just gotten to a point,” Julie reveals, “where she was able to put a down payment on a house and furnish it. We were able to have a home and the stability that everybody wanted — and then she was gone.”
After the plane crash, Julie and Randy went to live with Patsy’s mother back in Virginia, while Charlie traveled back and forth from his job in Nashville. He died in 2015, but Julie is thankful that, unlike Patsy, he was able to witness her journey through parenthood. “You wouldn’t believe what a great grandfather he was and how his grandkids miss him so much,” she says, her thoughts turning again to her mother. “To think of him and my mom together like that, it really would have been great. I think more about the things my children missed than things that I missed.”
But Patsy’s spirit is kept alive today through her enduring music — for her millions of fans as well as for her family. “It’s on when the kids come home from school and it’s on TV shows they watch,” Julie says, “and it’s a familiar feeling; a comforting feeling.”
“Patsy was an awesome singer. A world-class voice. When you sing like that, it’s timeless.”
— Connie Smith, to
Closer