Patsy Cline: the Making of an Icon

INTRODUCTION

Patsy Cline remains a much beloved singer, even though she died in 1963. Unlike most singers from the past, she has not faded into obscurity; this book seeks to explain her rise to stardom and continued popularity.

By 1996, Patsy Cline had become such an icon that the New York Times magazine positioned her among a pantheon of women celebrities who transcended any single cultural genre. A series of essays on Heroine Worship included Patsy Cline with such feminine icons as Eleanor Roosevelt, Martha Graham, Indira Gandhi, Aretha Franklin, and Jackie Onassis.

The making of an icon is a cultural process that transcends traditional biographical analysis. One does not need to know the whole life story of the subject to understand how the subject became an icon. How was Patsy Cline able to rise above class and poverty to become the country music singer that non–country music fans embraced?

Thus far, everything written about Patsy Cline has been based on unverified interviews. This book uses data from archives, letters, and court records—and gives complete endnotes. Since it is about Patsy Cline’s long-term popularity, it does not end with her death in 1963. Indeed, the rise of her popularity—as Chapter 1 explains—commenced in 1980.

This book also includes a chapter that analyzes Patsy Cline recordings, such as Crazy, as complex popular music. I argue that these recordings represent great popular singing, able to appeal across genres and generations.

By the end of the 20th century, few could be considered true icons. This historical analysis of how Patsy Cline rose to iconic status divides into two halves: the first part on how Patsy Cline came to create only 102 songs she recorded in a studio, then an analysis of the complexity of her considerable musical abilities, and then a final section on her increase in popularity. Thus, this book begins not with the birth of Virginia Patterson Hensley (later Patsy Cline) but with the birth of her iconography and then explains how she crafted a body of recorded music, then examines why such music is so universal in its appeal, and then ends with an analysis of why Patsy Cline has archived iconic status.

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I thank Marilyn Moon and Judy Sue Huyett-Kempf for making this book possible.

Chapter 1

Patsy Cline Becomes an Icon

In 1980, Hollywood launched the worldwide rediscovery of Patsy Cline. That year an unexpectedly popular film, Coal Miner’s Daughter, began the elevation of Patsy Cline from the status of just another dead country singing star to that of an icon. New fans embraced her character on screen as the sympathetic friend helping Loretta Lynn. Although actress Beverly D’Angelo, who played Patsy Cline, did her own singing, fans by the millions went out to purchase the recordings of the real Patsy Cline. At the time, major country star Dolly Parton noted, I think people who may have not liked country music before [the movie] began to like that sound because she had this voice that was just heavenly! [Patsy Cline seemed to say:] ‘Hey, I’m a girl and I’m tough, don’t mess with me—just let me sing and do my thing.’ ¹

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Coal Miner’s Daughter is the film biography of Loretta Lynn, released by Hollywood’s Universal Studios in March 1980. Blockbusters are not usually released in the spring; so its success was unexpected. The movie told the rags-to-riches tale of a poor country girl struggling to become a singing star, helped by her best friend and mentor, Patsy Cline. Actually the Cline character was not part of the original script, which instead identified the Wilburn Brothers, country music stars of the 1960s, as Lynn’s mentors. But the Wilburn brothers and MCA-Universal executives could not come to terms, so the best friend angle was added. This change prompted Lew Wasserman, head of Universal, to sell Coal Miner’s Daughter as a feel-good movie for women, or in Hollywood terms, a chick flick.²

Wasserman was also pleased because his corporation owned the musical rights to half of Patsy Cline’s songs. Profit-conscious Wasserman made a great deal of money on the new sales of Patsy Cline recordings. Wasserman’s record company (MCA Records) released, publicized, and sold Patsy Cline as a pop singer, one who had taken country music into the mainstream of popular music.³

The film industry trade paper Variety praised Coal Miner’s Daughter as a thoughtful, endearing film. Variety noted that the film avoided the sudsy atmosphere common to many showbiz tales, and offered a realistic portrayal of a woman’s life as a professional singer, also noting, Beverly D’Angelo turns in a stellar performance as country singer Patsy Cline. Variety proved prophetic. Three weeks into its release, on March 27, 1980, the Hollywood Reporter front-page headlines read, ‘Coal Miner’ Film Strikes Heavy Vein; $16 million in 17 days.⁴

Coal Miner’s Daughter relied on features of Loretta Lynn’s best-selling autobiography. Patsy Cline came off as tough woman who became a professional singer because of her inner strength and work ethic. But nowhere in Coal Miner’s Daughter did the filmmakers visualize such traditional female tasks as fetching water, cooking on a wood stove, or scrubbing floors, chores Patsy did as she grew up in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

The central tenet of the film rests with Patsy Cline rising above the circumstances of birth and lack of formal musical training to become a star. The movie’s narrative ignored the forces of history—the Great Depression, World War II, the suburbanization of the United States, and the coming of television. The filmmakers also passed over any notion that poor, uneducated people suffered most during changing historical conditions, as they had no control over these changes, save to adapt as best they could.⁵

Another boost to Patsy Cline’s rediscovery came when Universal hired Owen Bradley to produce the soundtrack for Coal Miner’s Daughter. Bradley had originally produced the hits of Patsy Cline. Yet he did not merit a role in the movie; he was not part of the narrative myth. He was a critical piece of the story, however, as I will discuss later.

Noted film critic Roger Ebert gave Coal Miner’s Daughter two thumbs up, and correctly predicted that it would turn into an evergreen. In fact, the film appeared constantly on cable TV, then on home video, and in 2005, as a rerelease in a twenty-fifth-anniversary DVD edition. Thus, the movie-going public has continually discovered Coal Miner’s Daughter since its March 1980 premiered, when first it introduced Patsy Cline to a new generation.⁶

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On September 2, 1984, the producer of Coal Miner’s Daughter, Bernard Schwartz, announced that he had signed Jessica Lange to play Patsy Cline in a movie, Sweet Dreams. Production started in November 1984, at a cost of thirteen million. Schwartz proclaimed that the star power of Academy Award–winning actress Jessica Lange would trump the tragic tale that would end with the death of the star. He did not mention that Universal’s head, Lew Wasserman, had passed on Sweet Dreams; Wasserman, then Hollywood’s most powerful movie mogul, knew that there was no Hollywood happy ending here.

Schwartz partnered with the HBO cable TV network, then owned by Columbia Pictures. Jessica Lange was as big a star as there was in Hollywood, and Patsy Cline was a known legend from Coal Miner’s Daughter.⁷

Sweet Dreams Premiere Ticket

Schwartz hired former Decca vice president Owen Bradley to make the music for Sweet Dreams, again remastering Cline’s recordings, but this time with Lange lip-synching. Schwartz hired Ed Harris to star as her second husband, Charles Dick (his formal named, which I use throughout this book), and Ann Wedgeworth to play Hilda Hensley, Patsy Cline’s mother. Rather than deal with her upbringing, the script started with Dick’s initial meeting with Patsy Cline, in 1955, and ended eight years later, with her death. Absent was any examination of the first twenty-three years of Cline’s life—her poverty, her learning to sing, her struggles as a woman, or her embracing of pop music.

Sweet Dreams completed principal photography on February 15, 1985, filming in Martinsburg, West Virginia, which stood in for Winchester, Virginia. Other locations included Fort Campbell, Kentucky (standing in for Fort Bragg, where Charles Dick had been stationed while in the U.S. Army), and Nashville. Lange spent three weeks in Nashville, learning to imitate Cline’s vocal mannerisms from Owen Bradley. The director, Karel Reisz, was selected by Lange for his reputation based on directing the award-winning French Lieutenant’s Woman and other serious films about women.⁸

For the movie soundtrack, MCA created an LP and an audio cassette, as something new. As the film’s soundtrack adviser, Owen Bradley, by then 70, got a second chance to redo Cline, creating new instrumentation around her voice on San Antonio Rose, Your Cheatin’ Heart, and Half as Much. Saying that he wanted to make it easy for 1980s audiences to listen to, he stripped off the original instrumentation, and replaced it with a new background that included a fiddler, two trombone players, six saxophone players, two trumpet players, and new background vocals—not the Jordanaires backup group, who performed on the original recordings.⁹

Ironically, Charles Dick’s ex–second wife, Jamey Ryan, provided the vocals for two new songs in the movie: Rollin’ in My Sweet Baby’s Arms and Blue Christmas. Ryan’s sound was so close to Cline’s that many fans searched Cline’s discography trying to find these two songs, but soon discovered that these tracks were recorded solely for the film, on October 12, 1984.

According to Schwartz, the story of Patsy Cline and Charles Dick was to be an affirmation of love and life. The emotion I heard in Patsy’s music made me think she must have been very emotional in life. And everything I read about her, everything people said about her, confirmed that, said Schwartz’s Academy-Award-nominated screenplay writer, Robert Getchell (who had been nominated for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Bound for Glory). Schwartz chose not to go with a traditional biopic, but instead to fashion a film based on Cline’s rumored negative relationship with Charles Dick. This was a concession to Jessica Lange, who wanted to act in a serious drama, not another chick flick.¹⁰

We first see Patsy, at the age of twenty-three, singing at the Rainbow Inn, where she belts out songs by Bob Wills and Bill Monroe. Her first husband, Gerald Cline, is portrayed as a quiet, conservative, nondrinking, gentle homebody. Fictional Gerald is made to be boring, and the movie makes boredom Patsy’s motivation for responding to the advances of Charles Dick.

Patsy tells Charles that her deepest personal goal as a country singer is to become a happy mother: I want it all and I want to make it right… . Since I’ve been about eleven or twelve years old I’ve had my life mapped out… . I’m gonna be a singer. I’m gonna make some money, have some kids, then I’m gonna stop singin’ and raise them kids right. Her actual struggles between being a proper full-time mother and having a full-time career are made invisible. Where did Schwartz get these words? He made them up.

When Patsy agrees to marry Charles, their union is portrayed not as all good times all the time but as a drama of martial struggle—with the predictable unhappy ending. The script is filled with errors: When she appears on the Arthur Godfrey TV show in New York City, she wears the cowgirl outfit made by her mother, not a cocktail dress the producers of the Godfrey show purchased for her. When Cline tells manager Randy Hughes that she wants to be Hank Williams, he tells her how to go about it: You’ve got a voice that was made to sing love songs. And if you work with me we’re gonna take advantage of that fact.

The film drama portrays Patsy Cline as victim of random violence. In a 1961 car accident, for example, she’s the only person badly injured, although in real life, her bother almost died. Here is the serious Hollywood filmmaking that Jessica Lange loved—but without any facts.

The movie’s final scene of random violence—instant death in a plane crash—reinforces the image of innocence and good intentions betrayed. Rather than crashing due to pilot incompetence, as was documented in Federal Aviation Administration investigative records, the plane in the movie simply runs out of gas and then fails to clear the side of a mountain. Pilot Randy Hughes’s errors were in fact far more insidious.

Sweet Dreams concludes with a dignified funeral, showing close family and a modest crowd of friends and mourners (in actuality, there were thousands in attendance), followed by Patsy’s mother taking her children so that Charles can continue to work. The last scene emphasizes the tragic effects of domestic turmoil for the survivors. A grief-stricken Movie Charlie stands in the living room of Patsy’s dream house, remembering their romantic ecstasy when he first danced with Patsy in the parking lot at the Rainbow Inn. I’m crazy, Patsy sings on the lush soundtrack, crazy for loving you. This last touch, integrating her most famous hit into part of the narrative, is a method that filmmakers have long used to add pathos to endings.

Sweet Dreams Poster

Sweet Dreams was not a hit—and critics loathed the film, only praising the singing, which was actually Jessica Lange lip-synching Patsy’s voice. In 1985, the two most famous film reviewers in the United States were Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. Siskel wrote: [Patsy Cline’s] voice was big, throaty and hungry, the kind that sounds intense but also effortless and dignified. Ebert interprets this to mean that Patsy Cline was a woman who called her own shots, partied hard, and had the vocabulary of a sailor. All the moviegoer would experience was that Cline had a great voice, wanted to become a star, had a boring first marriage, and a sweet-and-sour second marriage, and then died too soon. Clearly, two thumbs down.¹¹

On October 2, 1985, Variety correctly foretold a box-office disaster, finding no surprises in this predictable film, filled with performances not integrated into the film at all. Clearly Hollywood expected no great box-office return. And that was the case.

The Village Voice film critic noted the gender stereotypes: The filmmakers focused on Patsy’s relationship with Charles, almost to the exclusion of her career, and in the process reduced her stature as a singer and a woman. The film never suggests that she fought back, or that she drank. If Charles is portrayed as a villainous, sexy heartbreaker, Patsy comes across as a honky-tonk angel, his female victim. What evolves on the screen is a classic battering relationship—the passion, the drinking, the adultery (his), the brutality (his), her pregnancy, and his charming speeches to win her back. Was this anything close to the truth? It seems that nothing was.¹²

The pop music critic for the Washington Post put it best: Whose Life Was That, Anyway? He found Sweet Dreams to be a "one-couple version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Critic Richard Harrington was right when he noted the danger that, after 1985, Sweet Dreams would become the official take on Patsy Cline as a person, performer, and key figure in music history. After a month in theaters, the studio pulled the film, as it fared poorly. But through the end of 1985 and into the spring of 1986, publicity continued, as Jessica Lange was nominated for an Academy Award as best actress. She lost but was in the news until the Awards show in March 1986. The soundtrack album did far better than the movie. The audio cassette entered the U.S. country charts on its way to peaking at number 29.¹³

In response to the movie, Charles Dick, along with brothers and Mark and Doug Hall from Canada, answered Hollywood: They created a documentary, The Real Patsy Cline, released in November 1986, to set the record straight. Charles Dick’s co-partner, Doug Hall, told the Toronto Globe and Mail that "Charlie wasn’t too happy with the movie Sweet Dreams. He felt the real story should be told." The Real Patsy Cline showed that Charles was a supportive husband.¹⁴

No documentary, however, could counteract the images offered in a feature film. Sweet Dreams played constantly on cable TV and was released on home video, first VHS and then DVD. The movie’s repeated exposure captured new fans, who went out to purchase Patsy Cline’s original recordings.

Hollywood had made Pasty Cline a poor country girl who, with sheer talent—not hard work and self-teaching—came to possess a unique pop singing style. With Hollywood’s help, the world praised Patsy Cline as a skilled country singer, but one who certainly never sounded hard country to suburbanites. What new fans embraced was a powerful and appealing singer, one who had transformed country music to a form of popular music.

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The two Hollywood movies helped Patsy Cline’s Greatest Hits sell millions of audio cassettes during the 1980s. On January 31, 1986, Patsy Cline’s Greatest Hits, originally released as a vinyl 33 1/3 record album in 1967, went gold, aided by the movie publicity. On November 16, 1986, the Sunday Chicago Tribune headlines proclaimed, MCA Finds New Music Talent: Patsy Cline. MCA Records’ head, Tony Brown, stated, Those old Patsy Cline records [produced by Owen Bradley 25 years ago] still sound great, and are still selling. Thus, in August 1987, MCA redesigned and rereleased her Greatest Hits compilation. Boosted by the waves of publicity, it climbed into the Billboard listing of top country albums—and stayed there.¹⁵

On May 25, 1991, came the big bang effect of SoundScan, the tracking system that more accurately measured sales. SoundScan replaced the days of Billboard’s calling record stores; now cash registers in stores (and later computer lines to new Web sites like Amazon), accurately estimated the sales of all forms of recorded music. There were so many specific data that SoundScan created new categories, such as Catalog Country, defined as albums promoted as country that had been out for more than two years.

In SoundScan’s first wave of publicity, Patsy Cline’s Greatest Hits appeared as number 1 in SoundScan’s Catalog Country. No one outside the music industry expected her retitled 12 Greatest Hits to go to the top of that category and remain number 1 for three straight years, and then hover around the Top Ten as the twentieth century ended. In no other category did a star sustain such popularity. SoundScan thrust Patsy Cline into a Golden Age of rediscovery, and initiated her rise to iconic status.¹⁶

By November 9, 1996, Country Weekly reported to a growing number of new country music fans that 12 Greatest Hits had sold more than seven million units, with 215 weeks on the Catalog Country chart. Patsy Cline stood alone as the top-selling female country singer. And in 2004, Guinness World Records entered her 12 Greatest Hits as the album by a female artist (in all genres) with the greatest number of weeks on the U.S. charts: 722 weeks total, with 251 of them at number 1. This occurred more than forty years after her death.¹⁷

Such sales were accomplished because a whole new generation of fans had started buying Patsy Cline. The press could not believe this phenomenon, and published thousands of articles seeking to explain it, usually starting with such phrasing as More than [fill in a number] years after her death, Patsy Cline is still a hot property on the record charts. Yet to industry watchers, it came as no surprise. On July 24, 1989, MCA certified that 12 Greatest Hits had sold two million units in twenty-two years, half since 1980.¹⁸

These sales jump-started Patsy Cline’s rise from legendary to iconic status. And this rise occurred between May 25, 1991, and November 26, 1996. Her music was swept up in an era when the new popular music of the United States was either country or rap, separated by race. Patsy’s biggest hits became Walkin’ After Midnight, Sweet Dreams (of You), Crazy, and I Fall to Pieces. Who was buying 12 Greatest Hits? SoundScan’s information underscored the fact that new buyers were white Baby Boomers (born from 1946 to 1964, just after World War II). The Baby Boomers had created the largest cohort in the history of the United States. These twenty-seven- to forty-six-year-olds (as of 1991) had seen Sweet Dreams and/or Coal Miner’s Daughter on cable TV or home video, and so while shopping at mall stores, such as the Sam Goody chain, they bought Patsy Cline. Record companies recognized that aging white music fans had abandoned hard rock for country and new-age music. Singers like Linda Ronstadt, who helped keep Patsy Cline’s reputation alive in the 1970s by singing Cline songs, gave up trying to woo teenagers in favor of wooing adults. In 1992, SoundScan and the Recording Industry Association of America certified 78 albums released before 1977 as gold (total sales of 500,000), platinum (1 million), or multiplatinum status—including Patsy Cline’s 12 Greatest Hits (with sales of 3 million).¹⁹

In 1995, Bruce Hinton, by then chairman of MCA Nashville, knew what the public was purchasing from his own accountants. But Hinton played off the SoundScan publicity, and called Cline a singing phenomenon. Her widower, Charles Dick, put these new sales, of which he received a percentage, metaphorically: In 1991 Patsy got hot as a pistol.²⁰

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In October 1991, taking advantage of SoundScan’s impact on the music business, MCA issued The Patsy Cline Collection, a four-CD (or four–audio cassette) box set, attesting to her soaring status. Box sets were reserved for what record companies knew were evergreens—musicians who sold continuously. The Patsy Cline Collection contained some 102 songs comprising her entire catalog of Decca recordings, as well as many—but not all—of her early 4 Star Records releases and some additional live recordings. (From 1955 to 1960, Patsy Cline recorded for 4 Star Music Company, and the recordings were distributed by Decca Records; in 1960, Patsy Cline signed directly with Decca.) This box set also included a forty-two-page booklet about Patsy Cline by Paul Kingsbury, of the Country Music Association. Kingsbury conducted original research, having had full access to the files of the Grand Ole Opry, including Patsy Cline’s initial public relations dictation to Opry PR staff and many rare photos. The Patsy Cline Collection went to the Top Country Albums at number 29.

The press welcomed the new box set. On October 18, 1991, USA Today featured the headline Patsy Cline collection glows with a legend’s lasting shine. The national newspaper underscored the established image that Kingsbury had reproduced: Patsy Cline lived hard, died young and left a lovely memory that lingers in her music. Three decades later, she is a pop/country legend. Unlike box sets assembled to focus on an artist’s hits or career stages, The Patsy Cline Collection ($49.98 on CD, $39.98 on audio cassettes) served up a chronological ordering (from 1954 to 1963) of almost all 102 recordings made during her short career before she was killed in an air crash at age 30.²¹

On November 29, 1991, the Associated Press also spread across the United States Joe Edwards’ review, which simply restated the PR released by MCA, although in a different style: She was brassy yet tender—a woman who stood up for her beliefs and cleared a path in country music for other women to follow. Edwards recycled the public relations issued by MCA records to thousands of newspapers across the USA during the pre–Internet Age. Paul Kingsbury, with his status at the Country Music Association, assisted in the creation of an icon with a quote: She sounded fresh then and still sounds fresh. Kingsbury never explained what technology had been used to make these records fresh, while others from the same era sound like mono monstrosities.

The MCA box set was a creation of Andy McKaie, who as vice president of catalog development and special markets oversaw all MCA reissues and anthologies. McKaie noted that, to keep the price of The Patsy Cline Collection under $50 for the CD package, he had MCA rent some—but not all—of the recordings she had made with Owen Bradley and were property of the 4-Star label, which by then, Sony Music had absorbed. McKaie helped MCA participate in an unprecedented boom in CD reissues in the early 1990s as he and his staff searched for extras for each box set. For The Patsy Cline Collection, they found rare radio recordings of limited sound quality and commissioned the Kingsbury booklet. MCA management was pleased; The Patsy Cline Collection box set was certified gold on March 27, 1993.²²

McKaie also added colorized images from 1960s photographs to fashion a new image of a woman who had died nearly thirty years before. Each CD presented a different colorized photo to segment four (chronological) periods for potential buyers. On the first CD, McKaie chose a photo of Patsy Cline dressed in a tailored shirt and jacket, looking like a 1950s career girl—not in her oft-seen cowgirl outfit. On the second CD, he used a picture of her dressed in a dark lace evening gown, looking like a pop diva. On the third CD, he had her wearing a patterned shirtwaist, looking like a well-groomed early-1960s housewife. And for the fourth and final CD, called Sweet Dreams, McKaie had Patsy Cline draped over a pillow, in a pink and black dress. McKaie chose no images of a cowgirl; he wanted her to look like an idealized suburban woman of the 1960s. He chose to sell her in 1991 as a modern pop singer; MCA research indicated that buyers of The Patsy Cline Collection were principally Baby Boom women.

However, MCA only owned half the copyrighted session cuts; Sony owned the rights to the 4-Star material. So, on September 22, 1992, Sony’s Epic Record label issued Forever and Always, a compilation of 4-Star tracks. Then, on August 15, 1993, Sony issued Loved and Again, from additional 4-Star tracks. Moreover, from 1991 to 1996, other labels approached Sony to rent 4-Star tracks. In 1993, Rhino Records released compilations, In Care of the Blues and Walkin’ After Midnight. The Baby Boom CD buyer, who looked for cheap Patsy Cline CDs, found that most stores carried at least a dozen choices, mainly from small labels that had compiled the 4-Star material leased from Sony.

On January 16, 1996, as the iconization of Patsy Cline was reaching a peak, MCA issued a CD called The Nashville Sound: Owen Bradley. McKaie asked the man who produced twenty-seven of Patsy Cline’s twenty-nine recording sessions to select ten songs of his favorite productions across all artists he had worked with. Bradley chose one each from Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty, Kitty Wells, Red Foley, Webb Pierce, Brenda Lee, and Ernest Tubb—but two Patsy Cline cuts: Sweet Dreams and Crazy. Owen Bradley admitted that his toughest challenge was whittling down his life’s work: It was like picking your favorite children, reflected the producer who first joined Decca as an assistant producer in 1947, then piloted the company as vice president and head of operations from 1958 until his retirement in 1976. But as his selections revealed, his favorite of all the singers was Patsy Cline, since she alone rated two selections.²³

In the notes for this important CD, Bradley thanked his Decca bosses Milton Rackmil and Paul Cohen; his assistant, Harry Silverstein; drummers Buddy Harman and Farris Coursey; guitarists Grady Martin, Hark Garland, Harold Bradley (his own brother), and Ray Edenton; acoustic bass player Bob Moore; pianist Floyd Cramer; and the backup vocal group the Jordanaires. Left unexplained, however, was Bradley’s reliance on drummers and piano players—hardly the core of country instrumentation. But how did Bradley craft Patsy Cline’s crossover hits? These are crucial questions that I will answer later in this book.²⁴

On June 23, 1996, a small independent label, Razor & Tie, released Patsy Cline: The Birth of a Star, culled by CBS engineers from Patsy Cline’s 1957 to 1958 appearances on Arthur Godfrey’s programs. By the 1990s, Patsy Cline fans embraced any newly discovered work. Birth of a Star featured two live versions of Walkin’ After Midnight, with Patsy Cline backed by Godfrey’s big house band—not the musicians Owen Bradley employed—and thus displaying an even stronger pop image amid brass and woodwinds. Because this was aimed at hard-core Patsy Cline fans, Razor & Tie left on the some of the recorded dialogue from the show. Fans could for the first time hear Patsy Cline speak at length. Birth of a Star proved to be a modest seller, for fans who celebrated all examples of her work as if they were rare artifacts unearthed at an archeological dig.

Thus, by the fall of 1996, with The Patsy Cline Collection, The Birth of a Star, and 12 Greatest Hits, it seemed inevitable that some major publication would declare her an icon. The cover of the New York Times Magazine declared her an icon in November 1996. Rosanne Cash’s profile of Patsy Cline backed up the claim. The elite culture had finally declared Patsy Cline worthy of praise, along with the likes of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, dancer Martha Graham, and writer Virginia Woolf. In addition, the Amusement & Music Operators Association (representing jukebox operators) announced that the most played jukebox record of all time was Patsy Cline’s Crazy. By these two measures—a profile in the New York Times Magazine and the number-one-played jukebox song—it seems fair to state that Patsy Cline had become an icon. The well-off elite could read about Patsy Cline in the New York Times, while middle-class and working-class fans who frequented restaurants and bars with jukeboxes paid to hear her in their favorite public places.

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As Patsy Cline rose to iconic status, other mass media in the United States featured her—movies, TV shows, popular magazines, and even a postage stamp. She became associated with modern courtship. For example, summer 1991 yielded a hit Hollywood film called Doc Hollywood, starring Michael J. Fox and Julie Warner. No small, modest movie, this film was released amidst summer blockbusters. Benjamin Stone (Fox), an ambitious young doctor driving to Los Angeles, gets off the interstate to avoid a traffic jam and ends up in the small South Carolina town of Grady. He is sentenced to 32 hours of community service at the local hospital—after running down the judge’s new fence. All he wants is to serve the sentence and get moving, but he gradually falls for the pretty ambulance driver, Viloula (Julie Warner). Will they fall in love? Of course. In a plot twist, she woos him while they are dancing to Patsy Cline singing Crazy, in a sequence of just dance and music. The movie sequence lasts two hours and twenty-nine minutes, the exact length of the recording.

On June 21, 1991, the public TV show Adam Smith’s Money World (Transcript No. 728) reported that Patsy Cline had become an economic icon in the music business. Business reporter Adam Smith noted the extraordinary sales of Patsy Cline’s 12 Greatest Hits. To Smith, Patsy Cline represented the ultimate example of a great business model. And this was no fan reporting; this was an economist on a TV show aimed at the investor (read, rich) elite of the United States. He ended this show with [Songwriters] look for phrases that move feelings and that generate crossover hits, songs which appeal to a mass audience. Then, as an example, the producers showed a black and white video clip of Patsy Cline singing Crazy. Patsy Cline had become the ultimate singer who appealed to everyone.

On the September 19, 1991, season premiere of The