I'm not a big country music fan, but some country western stars have reached into the broader culture, and Patsy Cline is certainly one of them. She would have been 79 today; sadly, she died too young, at 31, in March of 1963, in a plane crash.
What might she have made of the 1960s musical culture? How would she have changed? When you think of the famous women who died young in the early 1960s -- Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Patsy Cline -- it's almost as if they are trapped in a time warp. It's like the 1960s and everything that happened from Kennedy's assassination to the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and the Beatles and the Stones and Woodstock and all of it never happened. Seeing her picture and then thinking about what musicians looked like only a few years after that... what a whirlwind! As a kid (I would have just been turning 4 when she died), I didn't really understand how fast things were changing.
Here, of course, is her most famous song:
And of course, that song helped boost the career of its writer -- some redheaded guy named Willie Nelson...
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