Excerpt
The Patsy Cline Historic House is officially closed on this wintry day, but the door is open. A few garden club volunteers are decorating the squat Christmas tree, and someone has baked a black walnut cake to share when the lights are strung and the delicate ornaments are hung, just so.
Three months ago would have been Patsy Cline’s 80th birthday; three months from now is the 50th anniversary of her premature death, at 30. But still the people come, from as close as Culpeper and as far as Tokyo, to visit the hometown that was slow to embrace her and linger in the modest house where she spent several years, harboring dreams as big as her voice.
They say that Patsy speaks to them, giving them strength to carry on through hardship. “I’ve seen grown people fall to their knees when they come into the house,” says Judy-Sue Huyett-Kempf, the house’s executive director.
“Spooky, and almost overboard,” adds Mel Dick, Patsy’s brother-in-law. “But sincere.”
Perhaps the Patsy faithful are responding to the been-there intimations of struggle and heartbreak in her voice, the note of aching resilience that she came by honestly. If that famous Beckettian thought — “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” — were set to music, Patsy Cline would be the one to sing it.
In this way, the modest tin-roof house at 608 South Kent Street stands as a monument to the complicated — and therefore authentic — American life. We trip forward through the year with laughter one day and tears the next, then bid it farewell with holiday music and cake, ready to try again.
Ms. Huyett-Kempf leads an intimate tour through the house — this lamp is original to the home, Patsy’s mother gave that coat to her hairdresser — before telling a life story she knows as well as her own.
“Could you turn Patsy down a little bit?” she calls out to someone near the sound system.
Patsy Cline was born Virginia Hensley in Winchester in 1932, the first child of a 43-year-old blacksmith with his 16-year-old bride. Her mother, Hilda, eventually took her three children and moved into this converted log cabin, keeping poverty at bay by sewing for the rich.
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