In the spring of 1962, Patsy Cline’s “She’s Got You” sat at No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart for five weeks. In 1977, the same song climbed to No. 1 again. The producer was the same man, Owen Bradley. The singer was Loretta Lynn, the young woman Patsy had taken under her wing, and it had taken Loretta fourteen years after Patsy’s death to make a whole album of her songs.
A song sung from a stack of Coke crates
The friendship started with a radio dedication. In June 1961, Patsy Cline nearly died in a head-on car wreck near Nashville and spent weeks in the hospital. Loretta was brand new in town. After an Opry show, she asked Ernest Tubb to let her sing on his Midnite Jamboree, broadcast live from his record shop across the street.
The shop was so crowded that fans couldn’t see her, so she took off her shoes and stood on Coke crates. Then she dedicated Patsy’s hit “I Fall to Pieces” to the woman lying in a hospital bed.
Years later, Loretta laughed about her choice. “What a hell of a song to sing to someone who’s been tore all to pieces,” she said. But it worked. In her telling, Patsy sent her husband, Charlie Dick, to find her as she came out of the record shop. Patsy wanted to meet her.
“I just about gave up”
For less than two years, Patsy looked out for the newcomer from Kentucky. “She took me under her wing,” Loretta said in 2009, “and when I lost her, it was something else.”
Patsy Cline was killed in a plane crash on March 5, 1963. In her 1976 autobiography, Coal Miner’s Daughter, Loretta wrote that when Patsy died, she just about gave up and thought it was the end for her, too.
For several years after the crash, Loretta could not bring herself to perform the songs Patsy had made famous.
Back to the people who made Patsy’s records
When she finally did it, she went to the source. Owen Bradley had produced Patsy’s biggest hits at Decca, including “Crazy,” “I Fall to Pieces” and “Sweet Dreams.” He was also Loretta’s own producer. She brought in the Jordanaires, the vocal group heard on Patsy’s records.
Most of the album was cut at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, in late 1976. Loretta had already recorded two of the songs in earlier sessions: “I Fall to Pieces” in June 1975 and “She’s Got You” in June 1976.
The finished record held nine of Patsy’s songs, including “Walkin’ After Midnight,” “Crazy,” “Sweet Dreams,” “Faded Love” and “Why Can’t He Be You.” The last track wasn’t a song at all. “I Remember Patsy… A Conversation” runs a little over seven minutes, with Loretta and Owen Bradley talking about Patsy, including how Loretta first came to know her.
No. 1 again
I Remember Patsy was released on April 4, 1977, fourteen years after the crash. “She’s Got You” had gone out as a single that February, and it went all the way to No. 1 on the country chart, the same spot Patsy’s version had held in 1962. “Why Can’t He Be You” followed and reached No. 7. The album climbed to No. 2 on the country albums chart.
Loretta never claimed to be replacing her friend. “Nobody can sing Patsy’s songs like Patsy,” she wrote.
“I could do better”
The record was a hit, but it was not easy for the woman who made it. In 2020, while promoting Me & Patsy Kickin’ Up Dust, the book she wrote with her daughter Patsy Lynn Russell about the friendship, Loretta looked back on the sessions.
“When I did that album, I was a nervous wreck.”
She said she had been so nervous that she wasn’t singing well, and that she wanted to try it again. “I could do better,” she said.
That same year, she released a new recording of “I Fall to Pieces,” the song she had once sung from a stack of Coke crates for a friend in a hospital bed.