Walking After Midnight

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Since I was in northern Virginia on my vacation I had to make one of my patented musical pilgrimages. In particular, a trip to Winchester, Virginia, the hometown — and final resting place — of one Virginia Patterson Hensley. The tour guide said that Patsy lived in over a dozen different houses in Winchester in her youth, but the place designated the “Patsy Cline Home” was where she lived the longest, and where she lived when her career began. The house is fully open for touring. Sadly, most of the furnishings are not original (the guide explained that Patsy’s family was poor, so they didn’t have quality furniture the way you find original furnishings at, say, Helen Keller’s home in Alabama). They are, however, very accurate for the time (trust me, my grandparents had chairs that looked like the ones at the dining room table! ). The house features photos, including the photo of Patsy above. It is the last photograph that was taken of the legend, on March 3, 1963 in Kansas City. She was there with a number of other country stars to do a benefit concert for the family of a local DJ who’d been killed in a car wreck in January of that year. The camera with the photograph is the one used to take the picture. I’ve been to Camden, Tennessee, at the plane crash site. It was good to go to the place where Patsy spent her youth and her all-too-short career took off. PHOTOS: *Display showing the last photograph taken of Patsy and the camera used to take it *Historical marker in front of the house