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Patsy Cline’s Crossovers: Celebrity, Reputation, and Feminine Identity
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
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107 This essay draws on portions of “Posthumous Patsy Clines: Constructions of Identity in Hillbilly Heaven,” to be published in Afterlife as Afterimage: Posthumous Celebrity in Popular Music, ed. Steve Jones and Joli Jensen (New York: Peter Lang, Inc., forthcoming). Patsy Cline’s Crossovers Celebrity, Reputation, and Feminine Identity JOLI JENSEN Patsy Cline is far more famous now than she ever was in life. But who is this posthumously celebrated Patsy Cline? What is her connection to the Patsy Cline who recorded songs from 1957 until her sudden death in 1963, fell into obscurity, and then sparked a revival in the 1980s that turned Patsy Cline into a “country music legend”? Patsy Cline has had two careers—one when she was alive and trying to make hit records, and another after she became a posthumous star. The posthumous Patsy bears only a partial resemblance to the live Patsy, who we can now know only through interviews and pictures. We can explore how femininity is constructed in country music, and in popular culture in general, by what has happened to Patsy Cline’s image over time. Before and after her death, Patsy Cline’s image has been created and shaped in response to her gender. I begin this essay by describing the iconic posthumous Patsy as depicted in the 1991 collection of her recordings released by MCA Records. I then explore my earlier discovery and search for a biographical Patsy, in relation to the wider Patsy Cline revival. I show how the posthumous Patsy has been able to speak to various audiences across time. Throughout this account, I raise questions about how we interpretively construct the woman we want Patsy Cline to be, in relation to her own contradictory attempts to construct herself into what she wanted to become, in relation to what the music industry of the 1950s and early 1960s could allow. What did it mean to be a “girl singer” in the late 1950s and early 1960s? What does it mean now? By exploring how Patsy Cline was shaped by, and shaped, being a female country music singer, we illuminate some of what was at stake in country music’s definition of femininity then, and what remains at stake now. Gently Tinted Patsy Clines In 1991 MCA released a definitive, well-documented boxed set of Patsy Cline’s recordings, in chronological order. My version of the Patsy Cline Collection has four cassette tapes, side by side, and each tape has a different, but similarly tinted and enhanced, head shot of Patsy Cline. Each picture of Patsy has been adjusted for size, airbrushed, and colorized. Each tape has a different, but coordinating, color as a background except around her hair—in each picture, Patsy has the hint of a halo. In the first three pictures she is smiling at something off camera, in the last, she looks directly at the lens. Each cassette draws its title from one of her songs of the period. In the picture on the first cassette, titled Honky Tonk Merry Go Round, the earliest Patsy is dressed in a tailored shirt and jacket, with chin-length hair, looking like a ’50s career girl. The second picture, on the cassette Moving Along, has her in a dark lace evening gown, wearing (apparently) the same earrings as in the first picture. In the third, on the cassette Heartaches, she is wearing a patterned shirtwaist dress, looking like a well-groomed early ’60s housewife, and in the fourth, on the cassette Sweet Dreams, she is draped over a pillow, in pink and black lace, looking directly at the camera. In the last picture, the scars from her 1961 auto accident have been completely airbrushed out. The cover picture of the boxed set has yet another version of Patsy Cline, similarly tinted and enhanced, with her chin on her hands. At first glance she seems to be wearing white shoulder-length gloves and a cocktail dress, but a closer look shows instead that she is wearing fringed white buckskin gloves. What looks like a stole on her shoulders is fringe, and she is wearing dangling cowboy boot earrings and a neck scarf. So what seems at first glance to be an uptown evening gown is actually stylized western wear. This visual trick enacts the contradiction that characterizes Patsy Cline’s life and recording career—the tensions between uptown and downhome, pop and country music, a sophisticated sound and a rural sensibility. Patsy Cline’s Joli Jensen 108 [3...