***I Fall To Pieces Each Time I Hear Her Sing- Pasty Cline Sings The 1950s Standards -A CD Review-Take Two

A YouTube film clip of Patsy Cline performing She's Got You.
CD Review

Pasty Cline: True Love- A Standards Collection, Patsy Cline, MCA Nashville Records, 2000

For those of us of a certain age, those growing up in the early 1960s meaning of course that we are those phantom post- World War II baby-boomers everybody keeps worrying about, worrying about that we, now AARP and Social Security worthy, will live too long but back then nothing but hell-raisers and we were going live forever, the timeless voice of Patsy Cline, whether we were aware of it or not, formed the backdrop to many a school dance or other romantic endeavor. You know that last dance chance at the school dance, the always gym Saturday night school dance that parents invented to keep an eye on hormonal teenagers although it never stopped the adventurous. That last dance to dance a slow one, a two left feet slow one with that certain other wallflower you were eying, or whom you had kid flirted with in class. Yes Patsy time would tell whether your clever little asides had hit pay dirt, or whether you were walking home in the dark wondering was it your breathe, deodorant or something because it certainly could not have been your lame patter that you had honed to perfection in front of your bedroom mirror. But enough of that. Back to Patsy.

I was not a fan of Patsy Cline’s, at least not consciously, growing up because between an undeclared but very real war against my parents’ music, particularly my Appalachia mountain born father’s Hank Williams/Ernest Tubbs/Grand Ole Opry stuff, and my DNA-embedded love of rock and roll (now classic rock and roll, you know Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley) she fell on the other side of the line. But recently I have come to appreciate her talent and her amazing voice since then. In another earlier review in this space I have called her the ‘country torch singer’ par excellence. And she does not fail here. I believe that this compilation does justice to her work, work cut short before her full maturity by a fatal accident, but that reflects her move away from a countrified sound to a pop status. Patsy, like many another torch singer, Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday come to mind, needs to grow on you. The best way to do that is grab this album and sit back. You won’t want to turn the damn thing off.

Stand out covers here devoted to the themes of love, lost love, found love, misplaced love, and perhaps, hate if things every got that far out of hand are Always; You Belong To Me; I Love You So Much It Hurts (a personal favorite); and, the title song, True Love. But listen to the whole thing when you are in the mood.