Bill Anderson: Hello everybody I'm Bill Anderson. Welcome to another "Visit with the Legends." (Crazy plays, edit out) She only lived to be 30 years old and she recorded only 106 songs in her entire lifetime. And yet today, some 43 years after her death, she's been called the most important ever woman performer in country music. There've been books written about her life, a full-length movie based on her story, a live play that ran for several years at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and later toured the country, and she's in the Guinness Book of World Records for having had a recording in the charts for 771 weeks, with 251 of those weeks at #1. The album was called "Patsy Cline's Greatest Hits," and today we're gonna remember Patsy, we're gonna revisit her music and her life, and we've got some very special guests in the studio and standing by in other places around the country to help us celebrate Patsy and the wonderful musical legacy that she left us. Charlie Dick is here, Charlie was Patsy's husband from 1957 until her death in the crash of a private plane in 1963. Charlie, always good to see you. Thanks for coming.
Charlie: Same to you Bill, nice to be here.
Bill: And with you of course, your daughter and Patsy's daughter, Julie Fudge. Julie, great to have you with us.
Julie: Hi, thanks for having me.
Bill: And seated in between Charlie and Julie, one of Patsy's good friends at the Grand ole Opry, touring buddies, and the lady that has several unusual connections with Patsy Cline, my buddy Jan Howard.
Jan: (Laughing) Hi, it's great to be here.
Bill: Good to have all of you. Charlie, it's been probably over 4 decades, and you and Patsy were married for what, about 6 years?
Charlie: Yeah we got married in '57 and then she died in March of '63.
Bill: Do you ever get tired of talking about her? I know you've probably done 8 million interviews..
Charlie: Well, I don't have much choice (Laughing). Because people say, you know uh, do you miss Patsy and all that, well sure you miss her but you don't have a chance to miss her. Somebody brings her up every day so, there's always something going on.
Bill: Yeah. Is there any new ground to plow? I mean do you ever find something new, does something come up that maybe you'd never talked about before.. do you learn something occasionally in these different interviews?
Charlie: Yeah, I've found some of these fans, that they know more about Patsy than I do. (Laughs) And then you check back, and I mean you know, it's nothing- probably not anything I haven't heard, but they know more details about it than I do.
Bill: Yeah. You know in so many ways, and this is really strange and I don't know of anybody else that could fall into a category like this- Patsy's been gone for over 40 years and yet listen how current she is: In 2002, she was ranked #1 on the Countdown of the 40 Greatest Women in Country Music. That's amazing, all these years later. And then 2003, four of the songs that she recorded were among the 100 Greatest Songs in Country Music, and this again is from CMT Country Music Television. What do you think is the secret to that longevity?
Charlie: I don't know, I guess it was just the right place at the right time when the music was changing, getting away from a little more hard country and but yet it wasn't rock/pop like it is now and uh, she just was one of the ones that happened to be there at the right time I guess. And Owen, you know, was a great producer and then they had some great songs to pick from.
Bill: We're talking about the life and the music of Patsy Cline. Let's go back to the very beginning, Patsy's first big hit song- Don Helms on the steel guitar- and Walkin' After Midnight... (WAM intro plays, edit out) (end of Part I)
