Patsy Cline: The Flight Home, March 5, 1963

The weekend of March second, nineteen sixty-three, Patsy Cline flew to Kansas City for a benefit concert for the family of a disc jockey named Jack Call, who had been killed in a car accident. She brought Hawkshaw Hawkins and Cowboy Copas with her. Their manager, Randy Hughes, flew the single-engine Piper Comanche.

The concert was on a Saturday. On Sunday the third they planned to return to Nashville, but the weather was bad, and they stayed. On Monday it was still bad. By Tuesday, March fifth, Hughes decided the weather was passable and they took off from Dyersburg, Tennessee, where they had stopped to refuel. They were about ninety miles west of Nashville when the plane went down near a town called Camden.

All four were killed. Patsy Cline was thirty years old.

She had been recording for about a decade by then, and in the two years before the crash she had recorded the songs she would be remembered for. Crazy, written by Willie Nelson, came out in nineteen sixty-one. I Fall to Pieces was released the same year. Both were still on the charts when she died.

Friends later recalled, in the way that people reconstruct these things after tragedy, that she had said goodbyes to bandmates in the days before the trip that had seemed unusually final, that she had talked about her premonitions of death. Whether those accounts reflect something she genuinely felt or whether memory shaped them afterward is not established in the record. What is established is that she was returning from a kindness for a dead colleague when the plane went down.

The Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville holds the most extensive collection of documents from her career. The forty-year-old recordings she made in the years before the crash have now been in continuous circulation for longer than she was alive.