Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [60]
She even bought curtains and drapes for my house because I was too broke to buy them. And she offered to pay me to go on the road with her just to keep her company. She was a great human being and a great friend.
Patsy loved to cook, and she’d call me up all the time to come over and eat something. Or she would come over to our house and eat rabbit, when Doo shot some. That’s the one thing she loved. Remembering nice things about her, it makes me mad when people say bad things about Patsy. One singer was quoted in some article last year as saying Patsy was “a beer drinker and a cusser, which she got from coming up in a hard life, but she was mostly a good-hearted person.” Well, I never saw Patsy drink too much beer or cuss much more than an ordinary woman, but it was certainly true she was a warm-hearted person, and she ain’t around to defend herself, so I’d rather remember the good part about her.
Patsy was a good old country girl from Winchester, Virginia. I didn’t know it at the time, but her real name was Virginia Patterson Hensley. She started as a dancer but turned to singing, and she worked some mighty rough places. The first time people ever heard of her she was on the Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts in 1957 singing this song “Walking after Midnight.” She drove ’em wild with that song. Then she did songs like “Crazy,” “She’s Got You,” “Faded Love,” “Leaving,” “On Your Mind,” and “I Fall to Pieces,” one after another. She was really like Hank Williams, the way she got this throb in her voice and really touched people’s emotions.
I remember the last time I saw Patsy alive. It was in Nashville on a Thursday. She came over to my house to hang drapes. Now, that year she was named “Top Female Singer,” replacing Kitty Wells. At this ceremony she told me I would be named number one singer next year. I told her she was wrong, she’d be number one for years to come. Now, imagine the “Most Promising Singer” and the “Top Female Singer” hanging drapes. Pretty wild bunch, wouldn’t you say? Those drapes are now in Doolittle’s office. I’m gonna put ’em in my museum that I’m putting in the mill back home.
Later that same Thursday night, I went over to Patsy’s house because she had some tapes she wanted me to hear from a recording session. At that session she cut “Sweet Dreams.”
I remember that while we listened to the tapes, Patsy embroidered a tablecloth. She did that to relax. Her little boy Randy was on a rocking horse, rocking very hard. I was worried that he’d fall off and get hurt, but Patsy said not to worry. That night we made plans to go shopping when she returned from doing the benefit show in Kansas City for some disc jockey who had gotten hurt in a wreck.
Just before I left her house about midnight, she said she had something for me. Then she gave me a great big box filled with clothes for me to take home. One thing in that box was a little, red, sexy shorty nightgown. She told me, “This is the sexiest thing I’ve ever had. Red is the color men like.” I never did wear that nightgown, though. I’m gonna put that in my museum. (Maybe I just might wear it one of these days—just for my old man, of course. It’s made out of two small Band-Aids and one a little bigger.)
I remember that before we said good-bye, we’d usually hug each other, but that night I was carrying that huge box. Patsy said. “Aren’t you going to hug me?” I put down the box and hugged her. Then came the last words I would hear from her. She said, “Little gal, no matter what people say or do, no matter what happens, you and me are gonna stick together.”
On Sunday evening, March 6, 1963, Patsy, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Cowboy Copas, and Randy Hughes, the pilot, were flying home from the Kansas City benefit, in a twin-engine Comanche, when they ran into a storm near Dyersburg, near where I live today. On Monday morning I wondered why I didn’t hear from Patsy. I was gonna call her up and say, “You lazy-head, why ain’t you here?” Just then, I got a call from Patsy’s booking agent, who told me she