After country legend and trailblazer, Patsy Cline, died in a plane crash, her remains stayed in her Tennessee home for visitors to pay their respects after her death. One mourner was friend, Loretta Lynn, who recalled there was a chill in the house and Cline was still present enough to tell her how to warm the place up.
Loretta Lynn ‘sat up’ with Patsy Cline
As Lynn recalled in her memoir, Me & Patsy: Kicking Up Dust, she arrived at the home Cline shared with her husband and children like she had many times before. But on this particular occasion, she was there for Cline’s wake.
Sadly, the first thing she missed was her friend’s warm welcome. She wrote that usually went something like, “It’s about time you got here, Little Gal!”
In the living room, Cline’s body laid in a closed gold casket with a portrait of her placed nearby. Lynn noted it wasn’t like any of the “sittin’-up ceremonies [they] had in the hills” where the family might display the deceased. In this case, it just wasn’t possible considering Cline died in a plane crash.
“I stood by the casket, wishing I could see Patsy one more time, but the casket was closed,” Lynn remembered. “The plane crash had been too awful to leave it open.”
Cline’s husband, Charlie Dick, was doing his best to receive guests, considering he was suddenly a widower and single father to two young children. But Lynn recalled the home was cold and she wondered if he’d forgotten to turn on the heat.
Loretta Lynn heard Patsy Cline tell her to ‘turn on the damn heat’ at her wake
As Lynn sat with Cline’s casket and wondered what her life was going to be like without her friend, she got goose bumps from the chill in the air. And she received an unexpected response when she called out to no one, “Dadgum, it’s cold in here!”
That’s when she heard Cline’s voice tell her, “Well, turn on the damn heat!”
“I swear I heard her plain as day,” Lynn wrote in her memoir. “So I got up and did just that.”
And she was glad her friend’s voice was still there to tell her what to do. “She’ll always be a part of me,” she declared. “That’s what real friendships do. We made each other better.”
Patsy Cline forever changed Loretta Lynn’s life
In Lynn’s memoir, she shared how her friendship with Cline changed her life forever. “As time has gone on, I haven’t stopped loving Patsy or thinking about her and talking to her, even,” she wrote. “Not for one single day.
Cline taught Lynn how to dress and act like a star and how to spice up her love life in important ways. But most of all, she was her “confidante and friend.”
“We cooked together, chased after our kids together, helped each other around the house, and talked about our husbands like girlfriends do,” she explained. But she really wanted people to know how “good” her friend was.
To best sum it all up, she wrote, “Patsy was the real deal.”
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