CMT Blog: Patsy Cline

There is no statue for Patsy Cline in her hometown of Winchester, Va. Although she’s one of the most celebrated country singers in history, you’d be challenged to find much that honors her there. It’s enough to make her fans fall to pieces. The house where she lived with her mother is noted with a historical marker. There’s a memorial highway on the outskirts of town, and a boulevard in town named for her. However, I would have never found her flat gravestone in Shenandoah Memorial Park without a local tourism representative literally leading me to it.

See photos from Patsy Cline’s hometown of Winchester, Va.

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OK Here goes :

I am always amazed at the cool and unusual things I get to do with CMT, and this past weekend just about topped it all. As many of you know, John Rich has written a song for Senator John McCain’s presidential election campaign. The song is called “Raisin’ McCain,” and in true John Rich fashion it’s rocking! John Rich played a McCain rally in Panama City, Florida, and we were invited to go down and interview them both. Any time you can interview someone who might be the next president of the United States, it’s a big deal! I am keeping my fingers crossed for an Obama interview, too.

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Write this down: The first Sunday of every month, Robert’s Western World on Lower Broadway in Nashville, 2 to 6 p.m. Be there — absences will not be tolerated… If you can’t get there you’ll miss a true living legend of country music. Don Helms, who was Hank Williams‘ steel guitar player, performs with Nashville musicians David Tanner, Jesse Lee Jones and Chris Scruggs. This is your chance to hear the man who played the intros to “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “Cold, Cold Heart.” I went to see him earlier this month and it honestly sent a chill down my spine to hear him play those classic lines.

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Here’s a very rare opportunity to own a piece of country music history: a handwritten three-page letter from Patsy Cline to her fan club president back in 1956. It’ll be worth every penny it goes for.

Like Waylon Jennings and Steve Earle before him, Dierks Bentley will be the one and only country act to grace the stages of Chicago’s alt-rock festival Lollapalooza.

John Michael Montgomery’s “Mad Cowboy Disease,” the drunken-cowboy-meets-barroom-beauty tale, is now streaming on his MySpace page.

Taylor Swift is positively bubbly about making music with Colbie Caillat. She says Colbie’s cool and the song is cool, so everything’s very cool.

While Def Leppard’s guitarist thinks that most collaborations are crap, he does think their recent effort with Tim McGraw turned out quite well.

Ashton Shepherd’s album, Sounds So Good, is here at last. So now everyone can enjoy the rich country sound she’s bringing back to country radio (with the support of the smoking hot fiddle work by Nashville vet Joe Spivey). But for me, so much of what makes this music so blessedly relatable is the lyrics. So I’m going to list a dozen of the lines I love the most, and when you’re done listening to the album I highly recommend buying, you can come back here and list your own favorites.

They are, in no particular order:

1. So what if I like the bar and dancin’? What do you care if you don’t mind me askin’?

2. Tonight I’ve had too much to drink and he stays on my mind.

3. There ain’t nothin’ like the sound of a cooler slushin’ on the bed of your truck.

4. You don’t ever even talk to me, I just get to do your laundry.

5. There’s always somethin’ to be done, but I still like havin’ fun.

6. I’m a grown woman, I should’ve already set myself free.

7. I felt at home though I’d never been in there before.

8. She ain’t gonna stay, she don’t work that way.

9. I’ve got a baby at home, a to-do list a mile long.

10. And hopin’ to God you feel like I do, completely lost in you.

11. I can’t believe you even spoke to me, what nerve you must have.

12. I like a pint of Crown and a country sound.

I know that words on paper don’t do justice to the way they sound coming out of her mouth, but you have to admit they certainly pique your interest. Now just try to imagine them delivered with a Loretta Lynn twangy drawl, Patsy Cline expressiveness, Gretchen Wilson sass, Martina McBride power and Carrie Underwood’s vocal control. Or, just go download the album to hear these lyrics come to life. Even without the pint of Crown, these 11 songs will put you in your happy country place.

For the last year and a half, I have been obsessed with The Doyle and Debbie Show - a country music send-up that is still going strong in Nashville. See, Doyle Mayfield is a washed-up country star who never really had too many hits to start with, but when he discovers his “new Debbie” in a rural VFW hall, he realizes that she’s his ticket back to the big time. It’s a script, so you get the same show every night (and I’ve seen it 11 times now), but it’s just so clever that I can’t keep from cracking up time and time again.

My favorite line in the whole thing may come from “Stock Car Love,” as Debbie confides, “I miss the pole position. I used to get it all the time. But now I barely qualify at all.” The whole song is completely ridiculous, yet it’s more inventive than just about any novelty song I’ve ever heard. You can hear most of the music (but unfortunately none of the dialogue) on their Web site. Still, the real reason to see it in person is for Doyle’s anything-for-entertainment gestures, and Debbie’s hilariously subtle expressions that prove she’s giving it all she’s got with this wacko.

To me, Doyle is pretty much a cross between Bill Anderson and Glen Campbell, and he seems ready to come unhinged at any moment. Meanwhile, Debbie is a pretty little gal who actually has a brain and a strong set of pipes. She just wants to be a star so bad that she makes some bad decisions. (Really… really bad.) She can sing like Loretta Lynn or Patsy Cline, but “For the Children” is like a melodramatic Martina McBride ballad gone very, very wrong. But that’s OK. As Doyle & Debbie are proud to admit, they’re just doing all they could with what the good Lord gave ‘em.

Now that the Writers Guild of America has granted a waiver to the Grammy Awards, the show will go on in Los Angeles on Feb. 10 and I’m glad it will. Although it must be said that the idea of the WGA granting waivers, as it has been doing, somewhat diffuses the impact of a writers strike. Even so, I think not having a show this year, which marks Grammy’s 50th anniversary, would be severely detrimental to a music industry that’s in enough trouble of its own. I enjoy going to the Grammy Awards for its attempts to honor good music across all genres. Year in and year out, the Grammy voters consistently try to honor the best music, and generally do a pretty good job of doing so. Even so, there have been some curious lapses in Grammy judgment. For example, how many Grammys do you think the following rock artists have won — Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, the Who, Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bob Marley, Janis Joplin, and the Doors? Answer: none of them ever won a Grammy.

What about the following country artists – George Strait, Patsy Cline, Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, and Ernest Tubb? Answer: zero. Not a single Grammy among them. Strait is nominated again this year, for country album and country male vocal performance. He’s had nine Grammy nominations. Maybe this will be his year.

One big reason that Nashville rocks is because it’s the home of my favorite record store, Grimey’s. The store’s founder Mike Grimes recently hosted the store’s bi-annual sidewalk sale, selling LPs for a $1 and CDs for $2. Being a vinyl enthusiast, I battled through hundreds of bins outside with other avid collectors for hours. As I thumbed through each record, I noticed the real fanatics were delicately pulling out each vinyl and studying it like it was an ancient artifact before tucking it away with other collected musical findings in their huge satchels. I probably looked like a crazed maniac to them as I frantically flipped through the music carelessly shoving my records under my sweating arm.

Between the live music by the Dynamites featuring Charles Walker and my heavy arms overloaded with my cheaply purchased vinyl prizes, I almost overdosed on music. By the end of the day, I bought Patsy Cline, Waylon Jennings, James Brown, the Beatles, Gogol Bordello, the Knack, Willie Nelson, Earth, Wind & Fire, Tammy Wynette, Jimi Hendrix and plenty of others. It’s going to take me forever to listen to it all and I can’t wait until next year’s sale.

Also, the local entertainment paper, the Nashville Scene, recently published a Best of Nashville issue and the readers’ results poll calls it the best place to buy vinyl and the best non-chain CD store in the city. Congratulations, Grimey’s!

I was foraging through Arthur Schlesinger’s Journals, 1952-2000 the other day when I came upon an entry in which the late historian and presidential adviser declared that he “detest[ed] country music and rock-and-roll.” Well, that’s a bit too pat, don’t you think? Over the years, a lot of people have told me they hated country music. But what they really meant, I discovered when I pressed them for specifics, was that they disliked the very few samples of country music they had heard and assumed that those samples represented the whole format. In other words, they stereotyped.It’s easy to imagine that the urbane, gregarious, fashionable and politically liberal Schlesinger might have disdained the twangy, faux down-home gibberish and conservative viewpoints that mark some country music. But that’s like biting into one or two sour apples and concluding you hate all fruit. Eddy Arnold’s “You Don’t Know Me,” which he co-wrote with Cindy Walker, is surely as elegant as any love song that ever graced the Broadway stage. Alan Jackson’s “Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning)” provides as much food for thought about humanity under pressure as any of Schlesinger’s celebrated op-ed essays.

As a prose stylist himself, Schlesinger would almost certainly have been impressed by the narrative power and cinematic imagery of Tom T. Hall’s “Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine” and the carefully crafted dark interiors of Bob McDill’s “Good Ole Boys Like Me” (via Don Williams‘ impeccable interpretation).

While Schlesinger might have recoiled instinctively from the traditional country sounds of “It’s Not Love (But It’s Not Bad)” — the Merle Haggard hit from Hank Cochran and Glenn Martin — he was enough of a ladies’ man to savor and smile knowingly at its message. And I have no doubt that he would have been moved by Patsy Cline’s smoky rendering of Don Gibson’s “Sweet Dreams.” How could any male heart resist it?

Country music is such a richly varied art form that you can bring almost any of its critics to heel by insisting that they cite the particular roots of their distaste and then pointing out how narrow their view is. There’s no greater sport than shoving ill-informed criticism down people’s throats.

“You know, I hope I have that much energy when I get to be 83.” – Patsy Cline

That’s the quote that opens this video, but who was to know she would never make it to 83, let alone 33? Patsy Cline would be turning 75 this month. She was only 30 years old when she died in a plane crash in March 1963. Her strong character and indisputable angelic voice helped pave the way for female country artists of past and present, inspiring greats like Loretta Lynn and Wynonna, to name a few.

The adage, “Only the good die young,” holds some grain of truth in music history. Look at Hank Williams. He’d be 84 this month. Williams, like too many other talented and moving artists, was stricken with premature death in the prime of his life. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant died in a plane crash at 29. The Doors’ Jim Morrison suffered a heart attack, rocker Janis Joplin overdosed from drugs and The Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones drowned, all at the tender age of 27. What wonderful music history could still be made today if these gifted individuals still walked the earth. It’s unfortunate their lives were taken so tragically and so soon. If Patsy were alive, I wonder what she would think of today’s country music. What would she say about Faith Hill and Kenny Chesney?

In this video, actual footage is shown of Cline singing the forever-popular, Willie Nelson classic, “Crazy,” intertwined with pictures of her youth and life. Sadly, she never experienced life much into adulthood. However, her music and legendary impact will remain forever as she continues to reign as one of country music’s most popular female recording artists. I can’t help but be reminded of a little saying my mother once had framed in the downstairs of our home. It says, “Do not regret growing older. It’s a privilege denied to many.”

Happy birthday, Patsy. You’re forever missed.