Patsy Cline Was Too ‘Dadgum Proud and Stubborn’ to Talk to Loretta Lynn About 1 Painful Thing
Country music stars Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline told each other almost everything. But there was one subject Lynn said Cline was too “dadgum proud and stubborn” to talk to her about. And that was big trouble in her marriage.
Lynn said Cline would call her to vent when she was angry. But what made her think there were parts of Cline’s pain she hid even from her friends?
Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline were fast friends
In Lynn’s memoir Me & Patsy Kickin’ Up Dust, she wrote about some of her commonalities with Cline. First and foremost, they were mothers who decided to have careers. At the time, women were expected to be homemakers.
“‘Keeping house’ was a woman’s job, and her boss was her husband,” Lynn wrote. She added that trying to be a wife and mother while maintaining a career wasn’t normal yet. “What me and Patsy were doing was just making it up as we went along,” she shared. “There wasn’t any map.”
That was something Lynn and Cline bonded over, seemingly more than anything else. They talked to each other about their marriages, children, and work. But there was one thing Lynn said Cline never spoke to her about, though those around them were suspicious she was keeping a secret about her second husband, Charlie Dick.
Loretta Lynn said Patsy Cline was too ‘proud and stubborn’ to talk about certain problems in her marriage while they were friends
According to Lynn, some who knew Cline thought her second husband might have been abusive. And Lynn said she saw him get angry and mean herself, though she never saw him hit her friend. “No one would know when or what would set Charlie off, but when he got mad, the party was over,” she shared.
Cline never told her friend that Dick was abusive, and Lynn wanted to believe he wasn’t. But her husband, Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn, thought he was.
Lynn acknowledged there were things going on in Cline’s personal life she wasn’t privy to. “Patsy was a proud person, and she kept that all to her own self,” she explained. But the couple might have even been headed for divorce.
“I wish she would have talked to me more about what was going on with them,” she said, “but she was so dadgum proud and stubborn. If I had known how bad it was, I would have dropped everything to be there for her in a second.”
“But Patsy never said a word, and Charlie didn’t, neither,” she concluded. Then, Dick went to jail for “whipping [Cline] pretty bad,” and Dottie West told Lynn that divorce was imminent.
Loretta Lynn said Patsy Cline saved her pain for her singing
While no one wanted to see Cline in any kind of pain, Lynn said it was part of what made her last recordings so special. She said the “Crazy” singer was so emotional that she cried in the recording studio.
“You can hear her voice break on ‘Faded Love,'” Lynn pointed out.
But if Cline and Dick were headed for divorce, they didn’t get there before her tragic death. She was killed in a plane crash in 1963, leaving behind her husband and two kids.
How to get help: In the U.S., call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or text START to 88788.
