Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
The Patsy Cline Historic House in Winchester, Va., where the future star lived with her mother and siblings.
The Patsy Cline Historic House is officially closed on this wintry day, but the door is open. A few garden club volunteers are decorating the squat Christmas tree, and someone has baked a black walnut cake to share when the lights are strung and the delicate ornaments are hung, just so.
Three months ago would have been Patsy Cline’s 80th birthday; three months from now is the 50th anniversary of her premature death, at 30. But still the people come, from as close as Culpeper and as far as Tokyo, to visit the hometown that was slow to embrace her and linger in the modest house where she spent several years, harboring dreams as big as her voice.
They say that Patsy speaks to them, giving them strength to carry on through hardship. “I’ve seen grown people fall to their knees when they come into the house,” says JudySue Huyett-Kempf, the house’s executive director.
“Spooky, and almost overboard,” adds Mel Dick, Patsy’s brother-in-law. “But sincere.”
Perhaps the Patsy faithful are responding to the been-there intimations of struggle and heartbreak in her voice, the note of aching resilience that she came by honestly. If that famous Beckettian thought — “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” — were set to music, Patsy Cline would be the one to sing it.
In this way, the modest tin-roof house at 608 South Kent Street stands as a monument to the complicated — and therefore authentic — American life. We trip forward through the year with laughter one day and tears the next, then bid it farewell with holiday music and cake, ready to try again.
Ms. Huyett-Kempf leads an intimate tour through the house — this lamp is original to the home, Patsy’s mother gave that coat to her hairdresser — before telling a life story she knows as well as her own.
“Could you turn Patsy down a little bit?” she calls out to someone near the sound system.
Patsy Cline was born Virginia Hensley in Winchester in 1932, the first child of a 43-year-old blacksmith with his 16-year-old bride. Her mother, Hilda, eventually took her three children and moved into this converted log cabin, keeping poverty at bay by sewing for the rich.
“This is not the nice part of Winchester,” Ms. Huyett-Kempf says.
Young Ginny left school to help pay the rent, working, for example, as a waitress at the Greyhound bus station and as a soda jerk at Gaunt’s Drug Store. She also sang wherever and whenever she could, first in the big-band style of her idol, Jo Stafford, and then in country style, often wearing Western outfits sewn by her mother.
As a dropout living with a single mother, she did not embody the Winchesterian elite’s ideal of young womanhood. She was considered to be nothing more than a Kent Street girl who did not know her proper place. That is, until she sang “Walkin’ After Midnight” to win a contest on Arthur Godfrey’s nationally televised talent show in 1957.
“Cute song,” Godfrey said afterward. “A wam-doodler.”
With her career in ascent, she helped her mother buy the home at 608 South Kent and another house down the street. She eventually moved to Nashville with her second husband to record “Sweet Dreams,” “Crazy” and other hits. She grappled with marital problems, barely survived a car accident and died in a plane crash in March 1963, just six years after performing her wam-doodler.
Thousands came to Winchester for the funeral, forming a line of cars that stretched for miles. Ms. Huyett-Kempf says the turnout stunned the city into realizing: “She was someone.”
But the city rarely deigned to recognize Cline, according to Douglas Gomery, a retired professor and the author of “Patsy Cline: The Making of an Icon.” Her appearance at Carnegie Hall warranted a two-sentence mention in the local newspaper, he says, and her tragic death received more empathetic coverage in out-of-town papers.
“There were two kinds of people that the elites in Winchester didn’t mix with,” Mr. Gomery says. “Poor white trash and African-Americans. And she was seen as poor white trash.”
It took Winchester more than two decades to honor its hometown star, and only after two movies in which she figured — “Coal Miner’s Daughter” in 1980, and “Sweet Dreams” in 1985 — had introduced her to a new generation of fans. A road was renamed, and a silent bell tower was erected near her grave site.
But her mother, who died in 1998, always sensed the city’s disdain for anything smacking of honky-tonk, no matter that Cline was a crossover star often seen in dresses and heels.
This Land: Years Later, Singer Patsy Cline Celebrated in Hometown http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/12/24/business/LAND-1/LAND-1-articleLarge-v2.jpg
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