Honky Tonk Angel (61 page)

Country music pioneer Ernest Tubb passed away in 1984; but, due to a family dispute involving his estranged wife, Olene, it took five years for his resting place to get a headstone.

Del Wood was one of the most vocal artists in her disdain for country music’s swing toward pop/rock. She was highly critical of Opry officials for giving more exposure to newer stars, whom she would often insult, sprinkling her remarks with expletives. As her career faded, Wood became more and more bitter. She appeared frequently on the Opry through summer 1989. Wood died following complications from a stroke that October.

Patsy’s beloved friend Roger Miller went on to win thirteen Grammy Awards and write a Broadway musical,
Big River
, which won him a Tony Award. He died in 1992 after fighting lung cancer. Miller was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1995.

Beloved comedienne extraordaire and Hall of Fame inductee Minnie Pearl continued to be a huge presence on the Opry into 1991. She died in 1996 at age eighty-three and was buried with her famed straw hat with the price tag.

Faron Young also died in 1996 at age sixty-four of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after being diagnosed with emphensyma and prostate cancer. In 1993, he’d
been ranked by
Billboard
as the twentieth-most-successful Country Singles Artist of All Time. Young was a 2000 Hall of Fame inductee.

Owen Bradley, musical innovator and producer of some of the biggest acts in country music, died in 1998. The brilliant songwriter Harlan Howard passed away in 2002.

Doyle and Teddy Wilburn remained Opry members until Doyle’s death in 1982 at age fifty-two. Teddy continued solo. He died in 2003, days before his seventy-second birthday.

Porter Wagoner died of lung cancer in 2007.

Samuel L. Hensley Jr. died, presumably of cancer, in Bunker Hill, West Virginia, November 1, 2004. He was sixty-four. Three daughters survived him. Another daughter is deceased. He had seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild. After his divorce, Sam relocated to California. His partner Rebecca William has a son.

In December 2006, Williams sold over one hundred items associated with Patsy from his estate to CPC and Legacy. The sale included a sewing machine of Mrs. Hensley’s, several of her design sketches, and framed Gold and Platinum Records from Decca/MCA for sales of
Patsy Cline’s Greatest Hits.

Julie had four children. She named Virginia, from her first marriage (to Michael Connors, which ended in divorce), after her grandmother. Sadly, she was killed in a 1994 auto accident. She was fourteen and had appeared in music videos. Fudge has three grandchildren, making Charlie, at age seventy-six, a great-grandfather.

Randy, who closely favors Patsy, has remained largely unseen and unheard. He doesn’t participate in fan club activities. Mrs. Hensley often told of how he’d doted on her and she on him. She observed that he was more like Patsy, and that Julie was daddy’s girl. Little is known about him except that he is or has been a musician.

In a message sent to fans, Julie noted that Randy “has played around with drums and guitars, but hasn’t done anything professional. He enjoys music, movies, and exotic animals.... He likes hunting, usually with a bow. He has been known to go shark fishing. He has never been married, and says he doesn’t intend to. He has had some girlfriends, but not a special one that changed his mind.”

Among Patsy’s relations, singer/songwriter Matraca Berg is a third cousin, and actress Jennifer Love Hewitt, through her grandmother Charlotte Shipp, is a distant cousin.

In a fascinating turn of events, Patsy may be descended from royal blood.

Patsy has often been referred to as the Queen of Country Music. As farfetched as it sounds, there’s the possibility she may be descended from the German royal family. Patsy may have known, which could be why she often wore a jeweled tiara.

Charlie could be “royal” by marriage—consort to Princess Patsy; and Julie and Randy could be a princess and prince.

Hilda Hensley, for nearly half a century as Patsy’s protector, was, as one fan put it, “considered a saint.” It comes as a bit of a shocker that in her youth she may have been a gal that several men chased until they caught her.

Charlotte Brannon Bartles and Barbara Henesy O’Donnell—unknown to each other—vow that their fathers, Chester Brannon and Darwin Henesy, not Samuel Hensley, was Virginia Hensley’s father.

Chester Brannon, a Winchester native, avid fancier of women, racecar driver, and amateur pilot, enjoyed taking Hilda to the local car races.

Darwin Henesy, a nephew of R. J. Funkhouser, one of West Virginia’s legendary entrepreneurs, was a Charles Town native, avid fancier of women, racecar enthusiast, industrial spy, Pennsylvania quarry manager, World War II pilot, jeweler, auto dealership owner, and banker.

Where Samuel Hensley—farmer, quarry worker, and later a blacksmith who had a penchant for singing—fits into the puzzle isn’t easy to decipher. It will never be known if Hilda Patterson met Sam at a church social, as the story goes, or if she was introduced to him in a last-ditch effort to save face when she became pregnant.

In 2005 Charlotte Bartles, née Brannon, in her book [with Linda Sowers]
Patsy Cline: Our Father’s Other Daughter
, revealed that her father, called Chet, was Virginia’s father and her half sister. It hadn’t been the best-kept secret among close friends and kin of Hilda, Patsy, or the Brannon families. They were cousins, aunts, and uncles by marriage who often visited each other.

Hilda, only fourteen, met Chet, eighteen, in 1931 when, according to Mrs. Bartles, Hilda came from Gore to the farm and apple orchard outside Winchester of Tom Brannon and his wife Lizzie to care for their five kids while she was pregnant with number six.

Chet, whose family spread was across the field, staggered home one night and fell into Tom’s hog pen. Hilda found him laying face down, shooed away the hogs, and stayed with him until morning. In the days that followed, Chet jumped the fence between the properties to call on Hilda, and they’d go off, spending hours alone.

Brannon, quite handsome and with a reputation as a daredevil, was shameless, dating Hilda and her Winchester friend Gladys Scroggins [later his wife] at the same time.

“When Hilda came to him with news she was pregnant, Dad wanted to do the right thing,” affirmed Chet’s daughter, “but her mother, Goldie, and her husband, Frank, were dead-set against it. They said Hilda was too young to get married. ”

But marriage, literally an old-fashioned hill country “shotgun” wedding, it was. The license from Winchester’s United Brethren Church, validated in Frederick County courthouse files, disclosed that Hilda and Sam wed on September 2, 1932—not 1929 as Mrs. Hensley had claimed. Documents and birth certificates on file indicate Virginia Hensley’s birth was six days later.

Mrs. Bartles asserted Sam would have known he wasn’t the father since Hilda was in her ninth month.

“I can’t imagine how frightening it must have been to find herself in such a situation,” she empathized, “barely out of childhood herself, poor, pregnant, and unmarried. She or her mother made a decision, and I’m sure they felt it was the best one for her and her unborn child.”

But the Brannons, she says, along with relatives and nonrelatives, including
Charlie, “knew who Patsy’s real father was. I still hear echoes of Patsy telling me she was going to see Daddy.”

One reason Patsy visited Chet, Mrs. Bartles claims, “was because he was generous. I had my measly allowance, but he’d give Patsy and Hilda real money. Patsy said several times she was grateful my father was good to them.”

She related that her father was never openly affectionate with her, “but lit up like a Christmas tree and oozed with charm at the sight of Patsy. I was in second or third grade, and it all didn’t sink in, but as I grew older I found it embarrassing to constantly hear Daddy tell family members Virginia was his daughter.”

On comparing 1950s photographs of Patsy and Charlotte, there is no doubting a strong resemblance.

After the family moved to Hancock, Maryland, and Virginia became Patsy Cline, Chet informed Charlotte, “Patsy’s your sister. You look just like her and you act just like her.” She laughed that she didn’t know whether to take that last part as a compliment.

It wasn’t uncommon for her father and mother to discuss Patsy and what she was doing careerwise “as anyone would talk about a member of the family. ”

Her parents rarely missed going to Washington on Saturday nights to catch Patsy perform with Jimmy Dean on the Town and Country Jamboree at the Capitol Arena. With Sam out of her life by 1957, Mrs. Hensley invited the Brannons to Patsy and Charlie’s wedding. They opted to attend only the reception.

Hilda and Patsy would drive the family car to Brannon’s Mobil Oil station for check-ups and repairs. They also visited his home with his wife and family.

On one occasion, Mrs. Bartles told a friend that Patsy and Hilda often came to visit. “She said, ‘Don’t you hate Hilda?’ I replied, ‘Why would I hate her?’ And I loved Patsy. ”

Chet Brannon told his daughter that there was jealously on her mother’s part concerning Hilda and Patsy. “If there was,” she said, “she hid it well. I never heard Mom badmouth Hilda. Whenever she came to visit, she welcomed her with open arms.”

Even after her rise to fame, Patsy didn’t deny Brannon was her father. Mrs. Bartles reports a friend trumpeting to Patsy in a Winchester restaurant, “You’re Patsy Cline, aren’t you? You’re Chet Brannon’s daughter.” Patsy purportedly replied, “Yes, but I’m not allowed to speak about it.”

“If anyone were to look at our father’s facial features,” argued Mrs. Bartles’s brother Bob, “you can see Patsy had a lot of them, especially the nose and jawline.”

A memorable day for Bob was in 1957 after Patsy had won the Godfrey show. “It was a Saturday afternoon. I was getting home from basketball and about to put my gym bag in my room. Mom told me, ‘Be very quiet. Patsy’s taking a nap on your bed.’ I went in on my tiptoes.”

Later, Patsy came to the kitchen, where Bob was sitting with his mother. Patsy told jokes and stories. “She’d let a cuss word slip and glance at Mom and me with a look of apology,” he recalled.

Her cursing might have been something she inherited from Sam. When he joined Hilda at another relative’s home for dinner, Sam stunned his host “not only insulting Hilda but also with incessant cussing and blasphemy.”

Bob said that Patsy had a wonderful laugh. “After she finished the punch line
of a story, she’d stomp her foot hard on the floor. Once, when she did that, the heel of her shoe broke off. I tried to fix it and Patsy shrugged, ‘Hell, I’ll get another pair. They were only eighty dollars.’ That kind of struck us. At the time, women paid twenty to twenty-five dollars for a pair of heels.”

When Chet came home from the station next door, he and Patsy were all smiles. He was delighted when word spread that Patsy had come to visit. Mrs. Bartles divulged, “Cars would line up outside with folks hoping to get a glimpse. Daddy was proud of her success and he’d invite people in to meet her.”