Every evening at six in the evening, hymns drift across Shenandoah Memorial Park in Winchester, Virginia, from a bronze bell tower that Loretta Lynn and Dottie West helped fund. The music rises over the grave of Patsy Cline and marks the hour her plane went down in the Tennessee woods on March 5, 1963.
Long before that final evening, Cline seemed to sense what was coming. In late February 1963, just days before her last trip out of Nashville, the thirty-year-old singer took a sheet of Delta Air Lines stationery and wrote a makeshift will. In it she asked her mother, Hilda Hensley, to raise her two young children, Julie and Randy, if she failed to return home.
Those last weeks of winter had been filled with music and quiet goodbyes. After finishing her final Decca studio sessions on tracks including Sweet Dreams and Faded Love, Cline invited her friends Jan Howard and Dottie West into the studio to hear the playbacks. She had already survived two near-fatal emergencies, including the head-on car collision on June 14, 1961, when West had ridden beside her in the ambulance and picked windshield glass from her hair. To Lynn, West and Howard, she spoke of a chilling pattern.
Trouble came in threes and she would not survive a third.
Days before she left for a benefit show in Kansas, Cline opened the closets of her new suburban home in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, and began giving away her stage dresses, shoes, jewelry and new curtains to Lynn and other women in the Nashville circle. When Lynn asked why she was giving her belongings away, Cline said she wanted the people she loved to have them. She embraced her younger friend and urged her to stand up for herself in her marriage and career when she was gone. Outside the RCA building in Nashville, she told Jordanaires vocalist Ray Walker in much the same spirit that she would soon leave it all behind.
On Sunday, March 3, 1963, Cline sang three shows without pay at Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall in Kansas City, Kansas, to raise money for the family of radio disc jockey Cactus Jack Call after his death in an automobile wreck. Fog then grounded outgoing flights on March 4, and West begged her to skip the small charter plane and ride back to Nashville in the car with her and her husband, Bill West. Anxious to get home to Julie and Randy, Cline turned down the sixteen-hour drive.
Do not worry, for when it was her time to go, it was her time.
On the afternoon of March 5, Cline boarded a single-engine Piper Comanche piloted by her manager, Randy Hughes, alongside fellow Opry stars Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins. After refueling in Dyersburg, Tennessee, Hughes took off into heavy rain and low clouds at seven minutes past six in the evening. Thirteen minutes later, the aircraft plunged into a wooded hollow off Mt. Carmel Road near Camden, Tennessee, ninety miles west of Nashville.
All through that night, search parties combed the Benton County timber while Cline’s husband, Charlie Dick, and fellow singer Roger Miller drove west from Nashville toward the search area. When word of the wreckage came over the radio shortly after dawn on March 6, Lynn dropped to the floor of her house in tears, surrounded by the dresses and household items Cline had placed in her arms days earlier.
From the mud at the Camden crash site, searchers recovered Cline’s gold wristwatch, stopped at twenty minutes past six in the evening, along with her beaded white stage shoes and her bronze mechanical cigarette lighter. Those treasured items were later preserved at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.
Two days later, thousands of mourners gathered for services in Nashville and in her hometown of Winchester, Virginia. The women Cline had mentored then stepped in to keep her work and household memory alive. Howard helped look after Cline’s children in the months after the funeral, while Lynn and West joined forces to help erect the memorial bell tower over her grave in Winchester.
Her voice never faded. In 1973, ten years after the Camden crash, Cline became the first solo female artist inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Four years later, in 1977, Lynn walked back into producer Owen Bradley’s studio to record her tribute album I Remember Patsy, taking Cline’s 1962 ballad She’s Got You back to number one on the country charts. For the rest of her life, Lynn kept the clothes her thirty-year-old friend had given her hanging in her closet.