Honky Tonk Angel (2 page)

... Love that runs away,
Dreams that just won’t
let me be,
Blues that keep on
bothering me,
Chains that just won’t
set me free . . .

—“Just out of Reach” by V. P. Stewart
 (© 1958 Four-Star Music Company; copyright
renewed by Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.)

T
he anguish of Patsy Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Cowboy Copas, and Randy Hughes as their Piper Comanche crashed straight into the Tennessee hill country in March 1963 was so intense it is all but unimaginable. Their pain has returned to haunt their loved ones throughout their lives.

Charlie Dick, Patsy’s widower, has a deep love for Patsy that nothing and no one has ever been able to fill. He had a hard time accepting her death, especially under the rocky emotional circumstances of their marriage. Charlie kept the living room of Patsy’s dream house locked. He left their bedroom as it was, and slept in another room. Her clothing remained in the closets. He left her makeup, hairspray, and combs in the bathroom. Friends who visited had the eerie feeling that Patsy was in the house.

But with two children to raise, Charlie remarried in 1965. Still, he could not forget his Patsy. Especially when drinking heavily, he would play Patsy’s records over and over, which led to friction with the new Mrs. Dick, singer Jamey Ryan.

On one occasion, Charlie repeatedly played Patsy’s recording of the Bob and John Wills classic “Faded Love.” At the end, Patsy sang:

On the final repeat of the word “love,” Patsy, who had bet Charlie she could reach the high note without modulating, took a very audible deep breath, then sang out.

This particular night, as the record kept playing, Jamey asked Charlie to shut the phonograph off and come to bed, but he continued to replay the song. Finally, she said, “Honey, it’s late. Come to bed. Patsy’s dead. I’m your wife now.”

As Patsy sang that last, sustained note, Charlie yelled, “Listen, she’s not dead! How can she be? Here she is living, breathing!”

Mrs. Hilda Hensley of Winchester, Virginia, feels she disappointed her daughter, Patsy Cline, only once.

“Singing was Patsy’s life,” she reflected. “Country singing. I know, more than anything, Patsy would have considered her election to the Country Music Hall of Fame the greatest honor of her career. It’s the one I treasure, but on the night of her election I let her down. When Johnny Cash read her name, I fainted. When I came to, that part of the Country Music Association awards show was over. I was angry that nobody told me about her election. Since the bronze plaque which hangs in the Hall in Nashville had to be cast, someone had to know. No one said anything on Patsy’s behalf. That was the very least I could have done after all she did for me.”

Each year an active and inactive member of the country music industry are inducted into the Hall of Fame. Though five nominees in each category are announced in advance, only the company that produces the plaques, the executive director (then Mrs. Jo Walker) of the C.M.A., and the accounting firm that tabulates ballots know the names of the inductees. They are sworn to secrecy. During the broadcast, a previous honoree reads the nominees’ names and unveils the plaques. Acceptance remarks are not made.

At the seventh annual awards, on October 15, 1973, one exception was made. Cash, not yet a Hall of Fame member, was selected to do the presentation. Chet Atkins, the internationally renowned guitarist and record producer, was named in the active category. Then Cash read Patsy Cline’s name.

As Charlie remembered, a hush fell over the audience. Patsy’s membership was another break with tradition. She was the first solo woman artist to be so honored—a tribute to her trailblazing career in country and pop music. Sylvia Mae Hensley, Patsy’s sister, let out a scream of shocked surprise. No one recalls Mrs. Hensley fainting, only that she sat silently in shocked disbelief.

That night Mrs. Hensley relived “a lot of heartaches and some beautiful memories.” She said, “It wasn’t at all sad. She was a wonderful daughter. I saw her start from nothing and watched her accomplish great things. She made her dream come true. All she ever talked about and wanted was to be a country singer. God
in heaven knows she did it the hard way, and had very little to show for it except her children.”

Everybody has asked Mrs. Hensley how Patsy got interested in country music. “It must have been in her blood,” she explained. “She didn’t take after me or her daddy. Patsy’s love of music accounted for her drive to become a singer.”

Before setting her goal, Patsy Cline was quite impressionable. As a child, Virginia Hensley, as Patsy was then called, idolized Shirley Temple. All the way home from the one-hundred-seat Elkton Theatre in Elkton, Virginia, where she and her mother had seen a Shirley Temple movie twice, she would tap dance down the streets.

For hours, then days, afterward, she’d say, “Mama, I want to be a dancer just like Shirley Temple.”

“What?” replied her mother. “Now listen, Virginia, you know we can’t afford dance lessons.”

But it didn’t do any good. Before Mrs. Hensley could get the words out, Virginia was tap dancing all over the house.

“I’d stand, watch her and shake my head,” her mother recalled, “and couldn’t help but laugh.”

Mrs. Hensley hoped and prayed that dancing was a phase her daughter would soon pass through, but at age four Virginia still hadn’t given up the dream. When Mrs. Hensley saw a notice for a children’s dance competition, she entered her precocious child: “To my amazement, she took first prize. Without any formal training! Then something funny happened. That was the end of dance. Now came the music phase. Not singing, but playing the piano.”

Virginia had a half sister, Tempie Glenn, from Mr. Hensley’s first marriage, who was being groomed by Elkton music teacher Sally Mann into an accomplished musician. (She later went on to the Shenandoah Conservatory of Music.) When Virginia visited, she spent hours listening to Tempie Glenn play the piano and came home mesmerized. “Mama, I want to play the piano just like Tempie Glenn!”

“What?” exclaimed Mrs. Hensley. “Now, listen, Virginia, you know we can’t afford piano lessons.”

But Virginia drove her parents crazy until, on her seventh birthday, they bought her a piano. It was either that or having her go to any house in town with a piano to “visit.”

“Virginia played by ear,” Mrs. Hensley said. “When I took her for lessons, right in the middle of the practice the teacher said, ‘She’s got a natural gift. You’ll be wasting your money. I don’t think I could teach her to play.’”

Mrs. Hensley noted that from the time she was ten, Virginia had a new fascination. “She never missed the Grand Ole Opry and knew every detail about each singer.”

Saturday nights Virginia sat in front of the radio and sang along with tunes on the broadcasts. She’d get excited and burst out, “Mama, I want to be a singer just like Ernest Tubb”—or Mother Maybelle (Carter) or Roy Acuff or Tennessee Ernie Ford or Rose Maddox or Red Foley, or she wanted to yodel like Patsy Montana.

Mrs. Hensley uttered her standard reply: “What? Now, listen, Virginia!” She
hoped and prayed that this phase, too, would pass. But it was a lost cause. Virginia wouldn’t let go. She really and truly wanted to be a country star.

Her cousin Herman V. Longley, Jr., of Elkton remembers that “even from an early age [Virginia] was a go-getter. If she wanted something, she set her goals and went after it with a vengeance.”

Mrs. Hensley discovered that nothing could defeat Virginia. “When she told the children at school that she was going to be a country music singer, even they took her seriously.”

Patsy Cline’s grandfather, Solomon Job Hensley, was born at Hensley Hollow in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains on April 12, 1858, the sixth of eleven children. Sol, as he came to be called, was, for his time, an educated man. Mountain schools went only to the seventh grade, and it is believed he completed his education. He was an avid reader. “Grandfather looked forward to the daily newspaper,” said Longley, “which he not only read but thoroughly digested. He was a man everyone respected and looked up to. They had to.” He stood at least six feet tall and weighed approximately 250 pounds.

He met Margaret Elizabeth Shifflett when she was nineteen, a year older than he. They married September 26, 1878.

Sol, thanks to land acquired by his father and mother, Benjamin and Rebecca, became a massive landowner. According to Longley, a son of Sol’s daughter Lelia Ann, “He wasn’t the wealthy man some in the family have presented him as. Today, I hear the grandchildren talk about Sol and Margaret having maids and servants. I have to laugh. The only maids they had were the daughters, and the only servants were the farmhands. Grandfather had money, but lived a simple, Spartan life.”

In quick succession, Margaret gave birth to Ida, Bess, Lelia, and Cicero, who died in 1884 at age six. Sol and Margaret left Hensley Hollow with his father in the spring of 1888. Together, they bought a farm of more than 200 acres approximately two miles west of Elkton in Rockingham County. They named it Solsburg and grew wheat and corn there. They built two homes, which still stand on State Route 981: one is a stone bungalow and the other a simple frame house that became the homestead. It was here that the other children—Mattie, who died at six months at the end of 1888, Samuel Lawrence, James, Alice, Ruth, and Ashby—were born.

When Benjamin Hensley decided to end the partnership with his son in 1889 after Rebecca’s death, his son bought his share of the farm. Benjamin bought another farm a mile west of town while Sol increased his landholdings, slowly at first and then more rapidly.

In 1907 he purchased a 130-acre farm near Penn Laird. Hensley eventually added 460 acres of grazing land in the Blue Ridge Mountains (now a part of Shenandoah National Park), which he named Cedar Falls, and 640 acres, known as Allendale, on the James River near Scottsville.

Sol had a great appetite for land, and, it appears, ladies. One encounter with the latter was to change the course of his life and respectability. He was on his way from Solsburg to Cedar Falls and stopped to water his horse at a spring.
Resting near the water was an attractive girl, Polly Shifflett (no relation to Sol’s wife). That meeting led to a tempestuous affair. A few months later, Polly was pregnant. She was fifteen.

A scandal errupted, not so much over Polly’s age—in that era, men much older than Sol married young girls—but over the fact that Sol described himself as a “hit and miss man.” He claimed the baby couldn’t be his. Sol was married and a respected family man, with no intention of divorcing his wife. The matter went to trial at Harrisonburg, the seat for Rockingham County, and became a sensation. After weighing the testimony, the judge decided, “No matter your past performance record, you, Solomon Hensley, have obviously scored a run this time. And you’ll pay up.” Sol settled a fortune on Polly and her family but staunchly denied being the father.