SEPTEMBER, 2025
HERITAGE MUSIC REVIEW
ELECTRONIC EDITION: Now free to email subscribers and supported by tasteful, music-oriented advertising with a unique news-format approach.
A monthly guide to early rock, blues, country, folk, and traditional jazz in the Seattle area and beyond.
Editor and Publisher: Doug Bright
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Editor's Note: Links to the books and albums mentioned in this issue come from my participation in the Amazon Associates affiliate program, which enables me to earn commissions on the products I recommend when readers buy them through this website. The links represent my judgment of the most relevant and reasonably priced musical packages available. Heritage Music Review does not collect, store, or share confidential information generated by its readers' purchases. Enjoy!
CONTENTS—September, 2025
NEW COLLECTION Unearths PATSY CLINE's "LOST RECORDINGS”
WHAT's IN STORE: News From The Musical Marketplace
CHECKIN, OUT THE SOUNDS: September Music CALENDAR (next message)
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NEW COLLECTION Unearths PATSY CLINE's "LOST RECORDINGS"
By Doug Bright
Of all the giants of country music history, none, not even Hank Williams, has attained the universally acknowledged status of Patsy Cline. Since the release of the biographical blockbuster film
"Sweet Dreams”
in 1985, her record sales have amounted to about 15 million copies according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Fortunately, thanks to a couple of comprehensive anthologies, everything she ever recorded commercially is currently available, but now, thanks to a relatively new but highly respected reissue label Called Elemental Music based in New York and Barcelona, Spain, 52 tracks' worth of previously lost Cline recordings have been unearthed.
The first truly definitive compilation of Cline's recorded work was released in 1992 by MCA Records with help from Nashville's Country Music Foundation. Simply entitled
The Patsy Cline Collection,
it was a four-disc box set presenting the bulk of her work in meticulously documented chronological order, enhanced by a well-written biographical booklet with plenty of vintage photos and extensive recording session data. What didn't appear there was recently supplemented in a three-disc package from the UK-BASED budget label Enlightenment. Entitled
The Complete Studio Recordings,
it compiled Cline's three original Decca albums, three more that the label released after her death, and singles that weren't included on any of her albums. Available in CD, vinyl, and digital formats, the new package, named after one of its key tracks, is appropriately entitled
Imagine That.
Co-producer Martin Melhuish, a highly respected Canadian journalist and roots music authority, developed an obsession for the music of Patsy Cline very early in life. "Mom taught me how to use the record player when I was four years old," he writes in the booklet for the new Cline collection. "That's my earliest memory of hearing music. The song was
"She's Got You”
and the singer was Patsy Cline. That haunting voice left fingerprints on my heart to such a degree that nearly 40 years later, Patsy remains my favorite singer. By age nine I'd collected all of the
studio recordings,
thanks to Santa, birthday parties, and chore money."
"Out of fascination and gratitude for the many ways Patsy's music inspired my youth and beyond," he continues, "I built a discography website. I registered the domain name on Christmas Day of 2013. Publishing online provides a forum for collectors and estates to reach out with leads on new appearances and recordings, and that's how our project first came to being."
It all started when a collector discovered Melhuish's site and asked him about the rarity of an old acetate disc in his own collection. "He sent photos and I nearly jumped out of my skin," Melhuish recalls. "My inbox displayed two songs previously unheard and just begging for release. Knowing that acetates need proper handling, I enquired with industry contacts.”
"In spite of Patsy's continued popularity," Melhuish elaborates, "a total of 74 tracks sat unreleased before work began on our project. Some have traded as bootlegs among collectors, while others were newly discovered thanks to research for this album. Presented in loose chronology, this
set
follows Patsy from regional beginnings to hosting radio shows as a national headliner by 1963.”
The collection begins with two tracks featuring the aspiring young singer from Virginia's Shenandoah Valley backed by local bandleader Bill Peer, who had discovered Virginia Patterson Hensley four years earlier at age 18 and, recognizing her obvious potential, worked tirelessly to bring her to the attention of Nashville's movers and shakers under the stage name of Patsy Cline. The two songs presented here, recorded in September 1954, were intended as a demo to accomplish that very purpose.
On "A Long, Long Ride", which had been recorded by a young
Marty Robbins
the previous year, Peer's Melody Boys give her a remarkably jazzy accompaniment featuring a hot stride-style piano and electric lead guitar. "The Wrong Side of Town", co-written by Robbins' contemporary Ray Price, is a classic country weeper on the familiar topic of class consciousness and doomed romance. "Patsy's take on the song hints at future greatness," Melhuish correctly observes, "and demonstrates her special way with a ballad right out of the gate."
On January 26, 1957, just five days after Cline's groundbreaking presentation of
"Walkin' After Midnight”
on Arthur Godfrey's "Talent Scouts" TV show, she performed it on another televised series, Jimmy Dean's "Town and Country Jamboree". On the Godfrey appearance, accompanied by a full New York big band, she sounded a bit nervous and tentative, especially at first, but on the Jimmy Dean show, backed somewhat sparsely by a band called the Texas Wildcats, the flame ignites by the time she gets to the song's second bridge under the inspiration of the steel guitarist. She gives it another televised performance in March 1957, a month after Decca released the single that vaulted her to superstardom, on Tex Ritter's "Ranch Party" with a band that features Joe Maphis on lead guitar with piano, steel, and western-swing accordion, and this time she gives it all she's got.
On the same show, she delivers her minor country hit
“I've Loved and Lost Again”
from 1956. Although the topic fits one of country music's most familiar stereotypes, this number also protests a "crazy world" where "true love has no chance to win." "To be true to one alone don't seem to matter anymore," she complains. "They'll tell you you're out of style unless you've had three or four." If Patsy had lived to witness the "free love" mindset of the hippie era and the AIDS epidemic that eventually resulted from it, it's easy to imagine her saying, "I told you so."
The next offering is a live version of
"A Poor Man's Roses
(or a rich man's gold" from an episode of country star Red Foley's "Ozark Jubilee" on February 16th. It had originally appeared as the flipside of "Walkin' After Midnight". While both versions are driven by a rockabilly-flavored lead guitar, the live one is taken at a slightly slower, more relaxed tempo, rendering a more effective vocal performance.
In an appearance at the Grand Ole Opry on December 14th, 1957, Cline delivers "I Don't Wanta", an up-tempo number that had emerged that year on a single as well as her debut album, simply entitled
Patsy Cline.
By then, the record producers at Decca had fully implemented their strategy of branding her as a country-pop crossover artist, giving her full vocal backing from the Anita Kerr Singers. The Jordanaires, most famous for the vocal backing on Elvis's legendary
records
of the period, accompany Patsy at the Opry with a hard-swinging rhythm section featuring a hot pianist and lead guitarist. Buoyed by their obvious inspiration, she sounds as if she's having the time of her life, and the audience responds with all the enthusiasm the performance deserves.
The song appears again on this collection in Cline's December 1958 spot on Don Owens' regional "TV Jamboree" series for the Washington DC area, but the tempo is too fast to rival the truly memorable Opry version. Cline's take on the
Hank Williams
classic "You Win Again" fares much better.
The collection continues with more footage from "TV Jamboree" in the spring of 1959, beginning with the rousing traditional gospel number "That Lonesome Valley". "Old Lonesome Time", popularized by
Carl Smith
and co-written by fellow country star
Sonny James,
shows just how expressive Patsy could be with a ballad.
"Let The Teardrops Fall" had been released on a single in February 1958, but on Cline's 1959 "TV Jamboree" performance the band doubles the tempo, barely giving her time to get the lyrics out, but in an amazing demonstration of flexibility, she delivers it just as effectively nonetheless. "Yes, I Understand", gleaned from a slightly earlier episode, is taken at a slightly quicker tempo than the version that had recently been released on a single on which Cline harmonized beautifully with herself.
By far the collection's strangest track is a "TV Jamboree" performance of "Waltz of the Angels", which Cline had been performing since 1956 but had never recorded. As Martin Melhuish explains in the booklet, Patsy was having a very bad microphone day. "A ghostlike vocal bleeds into other mics as the sound engineer makes adjustments," he
elaborates.
"We have included the full performance, since the backing is good and Patsy is heard well enough to capture the mood."
An abbreviated version of
"Dear God
(I know I'm not worthy) was Patsy Cline's final performance on "TV Jamboree". "More than three years after making a one-take studio recording, she still sings it with reverence and conviction," Melhuish correctly observes.
The next item in this new Patsy Cline treasure chest is a demo from a session held in July 1959 at Fernwood Farms Recording Studio in Norfolk County, Virginia. The song is the well-known standard "Have I Told You Lately That I Love You", an early country hit for
Marty Robbins
that also served as the flipside of
Ricky Nelson's
double-sided 1957 hit "Bebop Baby". In the simple rendition presented here, Patsy is backed only by Marvin Carroll's guitar and vocal harmony. It's hard to say whether this demo was intended to market Cline and Carroll as a duo, but though Patsy gives it her best, the combination isn't particularly memorable, so I don't wonder that nothing came of the effort.
A musical picture postcard of down-home hospitality, "Come On In (and make yourself at home" had been a staple of the Patsy Cline repertoire ever since she gave it a fiddle-driven debut on a Decca
single
in 1956. A later
version,
recorded in New York with a full vocal chorus and brass section, emerged in February 1958. The first live rendition presented
here
comes from November 1959 on "Jubilee USA", the TV version of "Ozark Jubilee". After a spirited delivery backed by a hot country band and cheered by the audience, the host, probably Red Foley, remarks, "You really belt out a song! Thank you so much!"
The other one comes from a November 1960 Grand Ole Opry radio transcription, with Don Helms, best known for his work with the late great
Hank Williams,
on steel guitar. The band swings, and judging by the way she delivers the song, Patsy is enjoying herself. After an enthusiastic response from the Opry audience, host Don Gibson thanks her for being on the show. "You made us all look good," he quips.
From the same Opry show comes a modern country-style hymn called "Nobody But You". Cline had never recorded it, but she had been performing it ever since 1956, so the audience greets it with an immediate cheer of recognition. In sharp contrast to his hard-swinging contribution to "Come On In", Helms accompanies this one with the lyricality that graced the ballads he had recorded with Hank.
If Marvin Carroll wasn't a particularly marketable duet partner for Patsy Cline, Slim Wilson certainly would have been. A key figure around Springfield, Missouri, where "Ozark Jubilee" originated, he sings lead while Patsy harmonizes on a beautiful rendition of "Let's Go To Church (next Sunday morning", which had been popularized in the late Forties by
Jimmy Wakely and Margaret Whiting.
Recorded on the same November 1959 Jubilee show as "Come On In", it's one of the highlights of the new Cline collection.
In March 1960 Decca released Patsy Cline's interpretation of a song written in the 1920's but eventually linked forever with Hank Williams, "Lovesick Blues", but months before it was released, as Martin Melhuish explains, "The first version of "Lovesick Blues" in this set is Patsy's earliest known recording of the Hank Williams standard, done in a similar honky-tonk vein." It comes from a Nashville TV show called "Community Jamboree" hosted by country star
Ferlin Husky,
and it's a country music masterpiece, showcasing Patsy's yodeling expertise and ending on a blistering high B Flat that would challenge an operatic soprano. The second version comes from a June 1960 episode of an Armed Forces Radio series called "Country Style USA", and though it's sung with equal enthusiasm and skill, the faster tempo gives it an unnecessarily rushed feeling that reflects the rocked-up production strategy of the Decca
single.
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(This article will be continued in the next issue of Heritage Music Review.)
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