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It's hard to believe Patsy Cline's legendary career spanned just three albums and five-and-a-half years, but the woman behind the classic voice only lived until the age of 30.
"She kind of has this mythical quality," Sally McKellip, author of the play, You Belong to Me: A Patsy Cline Story, told The Times-Picayune. "She died way too early, and it's like people don't want to let her go."
Since her untimely death, Patsy has been posthumously honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award, a spot in the Country Music Hall of Fame (she was the first female solo artist inducted), and a museum in Nashville dedicated to her legacy.
Patsy's work ethic was forged early on, something that certainly expedited her career. As a teenager in Winchester, Virginia, she dropped out of school after her father abandoned the family, instead opting to work a series of odd jobs, such as cleaning Greyhound buses and performing in honky tonks on the weekends.
"This is a woman who barely had an eighth-grade education, came from a single-parent home, worked to make ends meet to help feed the family, and still figured out how to work the music business," Barabara Hall, the filmmaker behind a documentary on Patsy's life told PBS NewsHour.
At 24, Patsy was discovered singing "Walkin' After Midnight" on the Arthur Godfrey Show, a talent competition akin to American Idol. The song reached No. 2 on the Billboard country chart and No. 12 on the pop chart in 1957. It would be Patsy's only hit single for four years, though it made her one of the first country singers to achieve crossover success and sold more than a million copies.
A year later, her first marriage eroded allegedly because of her then-husband's vision for her: that is, as a housewife, not a country star. She married Charlie Dick shortly after, at the age of 25. The couple moved to Nashville following the birth of their daughter, Julie, in 1958. Son Randy came along three years later.
Also in 1961, with the help of a new manager, Randy Hughes, she released "I Fall to Pieces." Incredibly, her second hit also achieved crossover status, not only topping country charts but reaching No. 12 on the pop and No. 6 on the adult contemporary charts, too. The accomplishment solidified Patsy's place among her successful male peers and made her a household name.
More hits followed—including "Crazy" (written by Willie Nelson), "Sweet Dreams," and "She's Got You"—but decades-spanning stardom was not to be.
Friends June Carter Cash and Loretta Lynn have said Patsy had an eerie sense of her own impending death. According to the 1993 documentary Remembering Patsy, Patsy wrote to a friend of her success, "It's wonderful—but what do I do for '63? It's getting so even Cline can't follow Cline!" A week before the plane crash that killed her, she told singer Ray Walker, "Honey, I've had two bad ones [car accidents]. The third one will either be a charm or it'll kill me."
On March 5, 1963, Patsy was on her way back from a show in Kansas City when an intense rainstorm interfered with the light aircraft she was on, piloted by Randy Hughes. The plane crashed in the woods near Camden, Tennessee, approximately 90 miles outside Nashville, and killed everyone on board instantly.
Strangely, Patsy had written her will some months before and designated loved ones to care for her children in the event of her death. She was laid to rest at Shenandoah Memorial Park in Winchester, Virginia, per her wishes.
She left the world with, as her Country Music Hall of Fame plaque states, a "heritage of timeless recordings...[a] testimony to her artistic capacity"—an impressive legacy for only three decades on earth.
