Who Was Ginny Hensley?

A Little Riff on Patsy Cline, Beginning in Lexington, VA

PatsyClineartIn Honky Tonk Angel, the Intimate Story of Patsy Cline (St. Martin’s, 1993, a reprint from a 1981 Leisure Book), the earlier of the two Cline biographies I’ve recently become familiar with, Ellis Nassour devotes one sentence to the time Virginia Paterson Hensley (later to marry a Cline and promote a version of her middle name on the way to “Midnight”and “I Fall” and “Crazy”) spent in Lexington, Virginia, and claims her father was a fireman for the boiler room of Virginia Military Institute.  In the newer book, Douglas Gomery’s typographically flawed Patsy Cline: The Making of an Icon (Trafford, 2011) , the author devotes eleven pages to Ginny’s life in the Lost Cause capital from 1937 to 1942 and speculates considerably on what music she might have heard during those years, all based on extensive research on which musicians actually performed at VMI and Washington and Lee (Sam Hensley’s actual employer during that spell).

Not everything is speculation for Gomery.  The Hensleys lived just above Woods Creek in a house owned by WLU and featuring electricity and indoor plumbing.  While they lived there, Ginny attended school, treasured her radio and for a spell had a piano, on which she learned to play songs she heard on the radio.  She attended West Lexington School for three years, lived above the poverty line and was already known to have musical ambitions.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Gomery’s book is the detail in which he reveals the bands, leaders, singers and hits that flowed through Lexington, as WLU and VLI competed for prestige big bands for their various (and many) social events, especially WLU’s Fancy Dress Ball.  Visitors included Whiteman, Kemp, Krupa, Sinatra, Harry James, Ozzie Nelson and most notably, for Gomery’s money, the vocalist Dolly Dawn, whom he credits as Ginny/Patsy’s primary model and who, from all I can figure, previously sang as Loretta Lee but may have been born Theresa Anna Maria Stabile in Newark.

One thing that fascinates me about this biography (almost a hagiography, as the author’s current title is “Official Historian for Celebrating Patsy Cline”) is the meticulous research into the music scene in Lexington and the (feasible) link to the little girl on Woods Creek.  Gomery is certain that hearing all these amazing arrangers, musicians and crooners (along with the radio, of course) provides the bedrock of all Cline’s musical appetites and aptitudes.  However, he scarcely even claims that Ginny actually attended a dance or a concert, that proximity, permission and acoustics allowed her to actually eavesdrop on the goings on of the “white elite paradise,” as Gomery calls Lexington.  Granted, once he says, she “may actually have heard Glenn Miller if her parents allowed her to walk the hundred yards from her house to sit across from the VMI gym and listen.  But geography is a strange thing — Gomery has Hollins College 70 miles from Lexington — today it’s about twenty miles closer.  And his caution here suggests either that Ginny’s musical “allowance” was not generous or that the WLU dance sites were much closer and listening in an easy matter.  However, he does not say it.

But I do want to believe.  I want to have some testimony to aid my imagination — either the small girl lurks in the shadows of the musical venues or she just eases open the sash of her bedroom window and listens as blues, boogie-woogie and swing fill the atmosphere.  Because I desperately want to picture her breathing the night air and trying to accompany the music that may have come from a source invisible to her, I’d be an easy sell.  But Gomery never bothers with the mechanism. Does the Boilerman’s Daughter get a courtesy pass to attend events?  Does she have to steal out the window to get close to the tremelo and glissando and blaring horns, the mercury of Ginny Simms’ and Dolly Dawn’s voices?  Perhaps I’ll never know, but I relish the thought, even if I have to invent the details.

Why do we need two biographies of the now-iconic and legend-shrouded Grand Ole Opry star who did not sound country and made her reputation with bluesy pop songs before she was killed in a plane crash at 30?  My answer’s simple.  We need Gomery for the early life, the encyclopedic accounts of who, when, where and why concerning every Moose Hall concert, recording session, Arthur Godfrey TV appearance, costume decision.  We also need read him for the chapter entitled “Patsy Cline’s Musical Heritage,” which explores how pitch, tempo, instrumentation, phrasing and bending or flatting toward blue notes made Cline’s vocal performances remarkable, original and complex in ways she, who could not read music, might have been able to explain emotionally but not musically.

Not that Nassour is a slouch in following the narrative.  And he is the better (more correct, less cliched, less repetitious) writer of the two.  But he also exposes the dark, battling side of Patsy, her two hard marriages (to Gerald Cline and Charlie Dick) and attendant C & W lifestyle, which Gomery soft-pedals.  It is in Honky-Tonk Angel that I became familiar with the tough gal who called most men and some women “Hoss” and who cusses like a sailor and (during her first marriage) displays an unrestrained, unapologetic and wild sexual appetite, at times selecting her “victim” at first sight and at others laying siege to a fellow performer until he gives in.  This is the “rough south” Patsy, who balances out the generous, chatty, fiercely professional woman the keepers of her reputation would emphasize.

Patsy Cline came to maturity in the fifties and was not immune to the allure of housewifery, but she was also a competitive, ambitious and confident vocal artist who negotiated a remarkable path between the cowgal singer in fringe and Stetson and the cocktail pop smooth torch singer, but either she internalized the hurt songs and heart songs like “Sweet Dreams” and “She’s Got You,” or she was a remarkable actress.  Either way, her life story makes a fascinating appendix to the songs which she inscribed on the American psyche, and one accessible and valuable introduction I keep close at hand is the MCA Records CD “The Patsy Cline Story,”  which includes a quarter of her approximately 100 recorded songs.  YouTube’s not a bad place to start, either.  Happy trails.


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.