The Life and Times of Patsy Cline

“Chatty, intimate, compulsively readable”-Washington Post “Definitive . . . reads as her life was lived, like the melodramatic but hopelessly 'true' lyrics of a Nashville ballad.” -Los Angeles Times “Essential reading for anyone seriously involved in a romance with country music.” -LA Weekly "The Life and Times of Patsy Cline is not only the story of a remarkable woman and her triumphs and tragedies, but is also a history of country music as an art form and as an industry. Compelling, candid, and ultimately readable, it is a fascinating portrait of this beloved vocalist. . . . It will certainly stand as the definitive biography." --Brooklyn After Dark "[Patsy’s] story is told candidly but lovingly in Margaret Jones’ exhaustively researched biography. . . . Although Jones is skilled at conjuring up the hard-living lot of country musicians on the road in the ‘50s and ‘60s (don’t miss the hilarious story of how Patsy accidentally turned sweet June Carter on to amphetamines), the single most compelling tale in the book is of the torturous 1961 session that produced her signature tune, Willie Nelson’s ‘Crazy.’ Recovering from a near-fatal car accident, embroiled in a hopeless marriage, afraid her career might be over, Cline returned again and again to this most despairing of American standards. ‘It may have been the most dangerous moment of her recording career, and, from an emotional standpoint, her life,’ writes Jones." --Baltimore City Paper "Cline’s career as a star was very short-six years by generous count-but she was a professional singer for nearly half of her 30-year-life. And though her songs were written by others, they often reflected the drama that enveloped her. That drama is the substance of The Life and Times of Patsy Cline, a thoughtful biography written by Margaret Jones. . . . Jones constructs her picture of the singer from hundreds of interviews, as well as from other books and memoirs. It’s a painstaking job, made more difficult by the several faces Cline presented to her contemporaries-and by the different spirits she carried inside herself. . . . Nor does Jones sensationalize her material. The facts, right up to the tragic plane crash that killed her, are quite dramatic enough, and Cline, clearly a person who required a certain level of angst in her life, could generate her own emotional steam bath when necessary. . . . The Life and Times of Patsy Cline, for all its tragic ending, is in many ways an inspiring book, the honestly told story of a supremely talented woman who subordinated almost everything to her art." --Santa Barbara News Press "Patsy Cline, who died in 1963 in an airplane crash at age 30, is still-and increasingly, it seems-the most respected female country singer dead or alive. She had the voice, of course, big and pure, but more than that she was everything we now think the ideal woman should be: determined, independent, hard-driving, straight-talking and tough. As it happened, she was also everything we regret: a sucker for bounders, a boozer, a pill popper and crash diet veteran with, as it might be put, low self-esteem. The story of her life as told here details these contradictions and provides an illuminating look at the music business in its crucial years, the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.… Patsy did just fine spitting out what bugged her in concrete matters, complaining, for instance, that the standard ‘girl singer’ ruffled attire of the mid ‘50s made her look like a ‘damn butterfly.’ But when it came to larger things, though she was as tormented as the next person, she hadn’t the wherewithal to put it into words. In the end, her biography convinces one of her essential ordinariness, an ordinariness offset only somewhat by gargantuan will and generosity." --Boston Globe "Cline comes strutting out of the pages of Jones’ book, slaps the reader on the back with a ‘Hey, Hoss’ and a smile. Her salty language was as much a part of her as was her music. . . . If you close your eyes in between chapters, you can almost hear the music." --Nashville Banner