Patsy Cline admirers analytical about the aboriginal canicule of her abrupt but awful acclaimed country music career will assuredly be able to do added than aloof drive by her old abode in Winchester and breeze a picture.
The Patsy Cline Historic Abode will accessible Tuesday as a canonizing to the accompanist who recorded such abstract as “Crazy” and “I Fall to Pieces” afore dying in a even blast in 1963. Visitors will be able to footfall through the aperture of 608 S. Kent St. and aback in time some six decades for a glimpse of how Virginia “Ginny” Patterson Hensley lived from her midteens to mid-20s, as she emerged from alone obscurity to become one of music’s best constant and affecting superstars.
“The actuality that her music seems around-the-clock brings a able fresh accumulation in every bearing that keeps her alive,” said Cline’s daughter, Julie Fudge of Nashville. “Her career was a baby bulk of years, and she had lots of accolades, but I don’t anticipate she absurd the things that would appear afterwards she died.”
Cline’s husband, Charlie Dick of Nashville, said Patsy’s afterlife at age 30 and the catechism of how abundant added she ability accept able is “part of the mystique” that continues to ammunition absorption in her activity and career. But Cline’s sophisticated, genre-defying articulation additionally explains her iconic status, he said.
“Her articulation was the aboriginal of that blazon in country music,” Dick said, acquainted its address to a broader admirers than determined country fans.
In fact, Cline biographer Douglas Gomery said abounding of Cline’s hit annal fabricated both the country and pop charts.
“It’s absolutely circuitous music,” said Gomery, a retired University of Maryland media studies professor, citizen academic at the Library of American Broadcasting and columnist of “Patsy Cline: The Making of an Icon.”
For decades, Cline’s fans have had to satisfy their curiosity about her early years in Winchester by cruising past her once-dilapidated former home on Kent Street, dropping by the drugstore where she worked as a teenage soda jerk, and paying homage at her gravesite just outside the Shenandoah Valley city of 26,000. The public’s ongoing fascination with the first female solo artist inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame prompted a group of Winchester residents to establish a nonprofit corporation, Celebrating Patsy Cline Inc., which purchased and renovated the home. Cline moved to the house with her mother and two siblings in 1948, the year after her parents split up. She lived there until June 1957, except for a few years during her first marriage to Gerald Cline. Her mother, Hilda Hensley, rented at first but later bought the home.
Cline was living in the tiny two-story house when she signed her first record deal, made her Grand Ole Opry debut and won Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts television competition by singing “Walkin’ After Midnight,” which became her first hit record.
“There’s no museum for her, so this is the actual place that she lived the longest in her short life,” said Gomery. “She really made the transition from amateur singer to professional singer when she lived there.”
Said Fudge: “I think when you go into the house, you will kind of feel like this is a snapshot of what it would have been like to visit when Mom lived there.”
What visitors will see is a home that was typical for families of modest means during that era: small rooms, low ceilings, scaled-down furniture and very little storage space. Celebrating Patsy Cline spent about $100,000 renovating the house and equipping it with appliances and furniture intended to replicate the way the home looked when the singer lived there.
The first stop is the living room — a compact space with refinished pine floors that Ron Hottle, president of Celebrating Patsy Cline, said predate the Civil War. The house originally was an early-1800s log cabin, and some of the original logs are exposed under Plexiglas next to the front door.
Decor was kept to a minimum to allow room for visitors: a floral-print sofa with lace doilies, an end table holding a turquoise lamp and black rotary-dial telephone and ashtray, a small chair flanked by a rack of vintage magazines, a 1951 television, family photos and an 8-by-10 of Cline in one of her cowgirl outfits on the fireplace mantel.
In the dining room, visitors will see an old Singer sewing machine like the one her mother used to make a living as a seamstress, and to make costumes similar to one displayed on a mannequin a few feet away. Hottle said some of Cline’s original costumes, still faintly smelling of the cigarette smoke that hung in the 1950s honky-tonk air, are in climate-controlled storage for display in a museum that Celebrating Patsy Cline hopes to eventually open elsewhere in Winchester.
Adjacent to the dining room is a galley-style kitchen that was added when Cline lived there. Originally a porch, the room is equipped with ’50s appliances and basic white cabinets packed with souvenirs that will be available for purchase—coffee mugs, assorted trinkets, videos and Gomery’s book.
Upstairs is the lone bedroom that was shared by all four family members. Pat Brannon, Cline’s cousin, remembers the sleeping arrangements: Patsy in the twin bed closest to the door, her mother and younger sister in a double bed on the other side of an apple-crate night-stand, and her little brother in another single bed tucked into the corner. Two tiny closets and a four-drawer dresser provided all the storage space the family needed. “People just didn’t have a lot of clothes back then like they do now,” Brannon said.
Brannon said the restoration accurately portrays 608 S. Kent St. as she remembers it. She also said it brings back personal memories of helping out around the house, bringing in firewood and watching her Aunt Hilda on the Singer, working the treadle as the bobbin spun out thread for one of Patsy’s fringed cowgirl outfits.
Hottle said many of the 20 docents who will conduct tours of the house have personal memories of Cline to share.
If you go:
Patsy Cline Historic House: 608 S. Kent St., Winchester, Va.; www.celebratingpatsycline.org; (540) 662-5555. Tour hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a. m.-4 p. m.; Sundays, noon-4 p. m. Adults, $6, seniors over 60 and children under 18, $5; children under 10 and military with ID, free.
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