Love Always, Patsy: Patsy Cline's Letters to a Friend
Patsy Cline's epistolary voice is as warm and direct as the rich alto that throbs through "I Fall to Pieces" and "Crazy." "He told me if I was gonna sing, I wasn't going to live with him," she writes of her soon-to-be-ex-husband, "so I'm back home." Second husband Charlie Dick gets better press: "he is my life, my world, just my everything." But she's not exactly starry-eyed about the joys of childbirth: "those labor hours are living hell ... I was a screaming mess." These letters, written between 1955 and 1959 to a Tennessee teenager who became president of her fan club, chronicle the years of Cline's rise to stardom. "Walkin' After Midnight" was her first big hit, in 1957, but the correspondence ends before songs like "Sweet Dreams" put this country girl on the pop charts. Editors Hazen and Freeman (who own the letters) are the kind of memorabilia collectors who tell you on the book jacket that they "currently live in the house Elvis owned before he bought Graceland," which makes them the perfect people to annotate Cline's casual references to contemporary variety shows and artists with interesting and often obscure information about record companies, television programs, and other pop culture tidbits.--Wendy Smith