Patsy Cline Was Country Musicas Greatest Thrush

Early in her career Patsy Cline worked in cowgirl outfits that her mother designed and hand made.

There may not be a Don McLean song to commemorate the occasion, but sixty-three years ago, March 5, 1963, was surely another day the music died.  On that day a small plane carrying Patsy Cline and fellow Grand Ol’ Opry stars Cowboy Copas and Hankshaw Hawkins went down on the way home to Nashville from a Kansas City benefit.  The three stars and two others were killed in the crash in remote woods near Camden, Tennessee.  

Learning that the plane was missing in the area friends from Nashville joined in the frantic search.  The crash site was discovered by Roger Miller, one of the many young artists Cline mentored. 

                                Roger Miller, overcome by grief, at the crash site he discovered.  Hankshaw Hawkins's guitar strap and a boot lie at his feet.

Born Virginia Patterson Hensley in Winchester, Virginia in 1932 to a sixteen-year-old seamstress and her blacksmith husband, she was performing in local talent shows and clubs by her mid-teens.  During a short-lived marriage to Gerald Cline in the early ‘50’s she began performing as Patsy Cline. 

Cline was soon being featured on a local Washington, DC TV program along another rising young country star, Jimmy Dean and signed a contract with Four Star Records.  She enjoyed middling success recording, at the label’s insistence, material not suited for her rich voice and emotional delivery.  Still, she was getting enough attention to be invited to occasionally appear on the Opry. 

In 1957 she competed on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, one of the most popular shows on television.  Godfrey insisted that she abandon the cowgirl outfits her mother made for a sophisticated cocktail dress.  She sang her recently recorded Walkin’ After Midnight and won the competition handily.  The song was released as a single and soared to the top of the country music and pop charts.  Cline regularly appeared on Godfrey’s radio show and became a featured performer on the Ozark Jubilee on ABC. 

                                    Patsy on her 1957 wedding day to Charlie Dick.

Cline was touring regularly and was a fast-rising star when she married Charlie Dick.  Despite rumors of abuse, she always called Dick the “Love of my life.”  Together they had two children, Randy and Julie, who her mother helped raise while she was on tour.  After her death Dick dedicated much of the rest of his life to preserving Patsy’s memory.

With a new manager Cline was finally released from her restrictive Four Star contract and signed with Decca in 1960.  She enjoyed country and pop success with a string of hits that featured full orchestration and elaborate production values, the so-called Nashville Sound.  Her first Decca record I Fall to Pieces set the standard for the new sound. 

By 1961 Cline became a member of the Opry and was soon one of its biggest stars.  She befriended and mentored many artists, especially women like Lorretta Lynn, Dottie West, and Barbara Mandrel.  But she could also hang out with male performers matching beers and dirty jokes.  Incredibly generous, she often supported struggling performers, even bringing them into her home.  Cline was the best loved woman in Nashville. 

Her high ride almost ended in a near fatal car crash in 1961 in which she was thrown through the windshield.  Dottie West rushed to the scene and cradled her injured friend picking glass out of her hair.  Cline declined treatment in the hospital until the other driver was cared for.  That driver died, and the delay may have made Cline’s injuries worse.  She suffered a broken hip, several broken ribs, and a deep, long gash on her forehead. 

After her auto accident in 1961, Cline's appearance dramatically changed as she used wigs and heavy makeup to cover a serious scar on her forehead.

The rest of her life she had to hide the scar under wigs and heavy make-up.  Ever the trooper, she returned to touring while still on crutches. 

Her recording of young songwriter Willie Nelson’s Crazy became the biggest hit of her career.  Cline became the first woman in country music to have her own show at Carnage Hall.  She also sang at the Hollywood Bowl and headlined her own show in Las Vegas. 

Patsy Cline was only 30 years old when she died.  As so often happens after the tragic early death of a star she has since become a cultural icon.

                                              Jessica Lang earned an Oscar nod for Best Actress for her portrayal of Cline in Sweet Dreams.

Cline was featured in at least two notable feature films and two made-for-TV movies. In 1980 she was played by Beverly D’Angelo in the Loretta Lynn biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter.  Five years later she got her own biopic, Sweet Dreams, staring Jessica Lang and Ed Harris as her husband Charlie Dick.  The film was criticized for putting Cline’s career on the back burner instead of focusing on the melodrama around her tempestuous marriage.  None-the-less Lang garnered an Academy Award Nomination for her star turn.as co-produced by Lynn’s and Cline’s daughter, Julie Fudge.

Cline was also prominently featured in Ken Burn’s epic PBS series Country Music.

On the stage, the 1985 off-Broadway two person play Always...Patsy Cline based on the friendship and correspondence of the star with a Houston fan has become a staple of regional and 

In 1995 Big Dreams and Broken Hearts: The Dottie West Story, a film about the life and career of Cline’s friend Dottie West played on CBS with Tere Myers as Patsy.  Yet another take on the relationship with Lynn, Patsy & Loretta was 2019 Lifetime flick with Broadway star Megan Hilty as Cline.  Directed by the Academy Award-winning screenwriter Callie Khouri the film a staple of regional and dinner theater productions.  A 1991 production, A Closer Walk with Patsy Cline is a straightforward account of Cline's career featuring many of her most famous songs.  It is also regularly staged.

                                       Cline was the first woman solo artist to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1971.

To this day no one sings a song with emotional intensity of the girl from Winchester.

 

Fisk Freedman’s School Rise to a Premier Black University

The historic Fisk University gate and sign. 

Within months of the end of the Civil War the leaders of the northern American Missionary Association (AMA) which was affiliated with the Congregational churches including John Ogden, Reverend Erastus Milo Cravath, field secretary; and Reverend Edward Parmelee Smith, founded the Fisk Free Colored School, for the education of Freedmen in Nashville, Tennessee. It was one of several schools and colleges that the AMA, which was led by ardent abolitionists, helped to found. 

Classes opened on January 9, 1866 with about 200 students.  As word spread, the enrollment quickly jumped to more than 900, a testament to the thirst for knowledge among recently freed slaves. The all-male students ranged in age from 16 to more than 70 years old. 

                                    The school was named for General Clinton B. Fisk of the Tennessee Freedmen's Bureau and an early benefactor.

The school was named in honor of General Clinton B. Fisk of the Tennessee Freedmen’s Bureau, who made unused barracks available to the school, as well as establishing the first free schools for White and Black children in Tennessee. Later he endowed Fisk with a $30,000 which gave the school a firm early financial base that was wanting in other newly created Freedmen’s schools. 

In response to a Reconstruction Era Tennessee state law to support public schools—a deeply radical idea in the South, Fisk was incorporated as a Normal School for the college training of teachers in August 1867.  The college was co-educational and James Dallas Burrus, John Houston Burrus, Virginia E. Walker, and America W. Robinson were the first four students to enroll.  Broughton and the two Burruses were the first African Americans to graduate from a liberal arts college south of the Mason–Dixon Line and all went on to distinguished careers. 

The AMA’s Rev. Erastus Milo Cravath organized the College Department and the Mozart Society, the first musical organization in Tennessee. 

Rising enrollment added to the needs of the university. In 1870 Adam Knight Spence became Principal of the Fisk Normal School. To raise money and meet the needs of the growing student body and ambitious building plans his wife Catherine Mackie Spence traveled throughout the United States to set up mission Sunday Schools in support of Fisk students, organizing endowments through the AMA. 

The original Fisk University Jubilee Singers toured the North and Britain to support the school and its construction program. 

A student choir was organized which became known as the Fisk Jubilee Singers.  In 1871 the Singers began to tour the North in support of the school and then sailed for England in 1872 where they performed for Queen Victoria.  The successful tours, the first of many, raised more than $50,000, enough to construct the school’s first permanent building, Jubilee Hall, which was completed in 1876 and is now designated as a National Historic Landmark.  Through the rest of the 19th Century the school continued building programs that resulted in a modern campus. 

Jubilee Hall, Fisk's first permanent building and now a National Historic Landmark,

Early in the 20th Century Black teachers were finally added to the Faculty, including the Burrus brothers from the first graduating class. 

From 1915 to 1925 Fayette Avery McKenzie, a Progressive Era sociologist and expert in and an advocate for Native Americans, served as President of Fisk.  He was notably successful in developing Fisk as the premier Black university in the United States, securing academic recognition as a standard college by the Carnegie Foundation, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago, raising a $1 million endowment fund to ensure quality faculty.  Despite laying a firm foundation for Fisk’s accreditation and future success, McKenzie’s on campus authoritarian management alienated students and much of the faculty resulting in protests that led to his forced resignation. 

In 1930, Fisk was the first African-American institution to gain accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). Accreditations for specialized programs soon followed. 

                                    Charles Spurgeon Johnson, Fisk's first Black President.

But it was not until 1947 that Fisk had a Black President—Charles Spurgeon Johnson, an acclaimed sociologist and scholar who had also been the editor of Opportunity magazine, a noted periodical of the Harlem Renaissance. 

In 1952, Fisk became the first predominantly Black college to earn a Phi Beta Kappa charter and honored its first student members on April 4, 1953. 

In 1960 students from Fisk including John Lewis, Dianne Nash, James Bevel, and C.T. Vivian organized the Nashville Sit-ins at the lunch counters of major dime and department stores downtown.  It was the largest and most sustained such non-violent civil disobedience campaign yet in the South which after a long, sustained effort, led to the city becoming the first in the South to de-segregate public accommodations.  Lewis went on to be Chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).  He and the others became key figures in the Southern Civil Rights Movement, most notably in the Selma campaign for voting rights. 

Civil Rights pioneer Dianne Nash, third from left, and other Fisk Students in one of the 1960 Nashville lunch counter sit-ins.

Despite Fisk’s notable achievements in academics and as training ground for Black leadership, the school has struggled financially in the 21st Century as opportunities for talented Afro-American students opened up at all of the country’s elite and prestigious universities and as liberal arts colleges in general fell out of favor to career-focused educational programs. 

From 2004 to 2013, Fisk was directed by its 14th president, Hazel O’Leary, former Secretary of Energy under President Bill Clinton and just the second woman to serve lead the university. Under her leadership, Fisk successfully raised $4 million during the 2007-2008 fiscal ending nine years of budget deficits and qualified for a Mellon Foundation challenge grant. 

Fisk University graduates in 2008.

Despite this respite the wolf was soon at the door again and a succession of short-term presidents failed to stem the tide.  Trustees have warned that the school might be in danger of closing.  With only 700 students, a significant decline from peak attendance. 

In June of 2020 the University announced that it was renaming its Institute for Social Justice in honor of one of its most distinguished graduates, late Congressman John Lewis.

in 2017 SACS the university’s regional accreditor placed it on probation citing failings related to financial responsibility, control of research funds, and federal and state responsibilities.  Fisk announced a fundraising record and increased enrollment the following year.  In 2020, it was taken off probation and since then has maintained its accreditation, academic standards and is still included in lists of both top historically Black schools, and liberal arts colleges.  Attendance bounced back to 1055 students in 2022. 

Among the many distinguished graduates of Fisk are Lil Hardin Armstrong, pianist, composer, and wife of Louis Armstrong; former Washington, D.C. mayor Marion Barry; William Dawson powerful Chicago South Side Congressman from 1943 to 1970; Repetitive Charles Diggs of Michigan 1955-1980; W. E. B. Du Bois, leading Black intellectual and co-founder of the National Association for Colored People (NAACP); James Weldon Johnson, author, civil rights activist, and poet  who wrote the verse on which the song Lift Ever Voice and Sing is based historian; Ida B. Wells, civil rights leader and writer known for her anti-lynching campaigns and her Women’s Suffrage advocacy; John Hope Franklin; poet Nikki Giovanni; Julius Lester, children’s author, musician, photographer, and professor; Congressman and senior Civil Rights figure John Lewis; Dianne Nash;  Hazel O’Leary; and best-selling novelist Frank Yerby.