Patsy Cline’s Home On State Registry

Star Staff Report

The home of a Winchester woman, who made country music history, has been named a state historic landmark.

On Wednesday, the State Review Board of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, meeting in Lynchburg, agreed to designate Patsy Cline’s home to the state register.

The house will now be considered for listing on the national Historic Landmarks register.

The white frame house at 608 S. Kent St., probably built in the mid-19th century, sheltered Cline from 1948, when she was 16, to 1953, when she married her first husband, Gerald Cline. It was also her home intermittently until 1957.

Yesterday, the Board of the Department of Historic Resources voted to place 608 South Kent Street on the Virginia Landmarks Register. In addition, they recommended the house be placed on the National Register of Historic Places. This, on top of the recent Historical Marker unveiling over Labor Day weekend, is exciting news to share.

Marker Unveiling Tops Annual Trek For Cline

By: Charlie Jackson
The Winchester Star

Many make the trek annually.

But this year the trip was just a little more special.

Country music icon and Winchester native Patsy Cline was unveiled for all to see in two separate events Saturday.

The day began with roughly 60 people crowded around an unassuming home on a quiet Winchester street.

Cline’s husband, Charlie Dick, and daughter Julie Fudge were greeted by adoring fans requesting photographs and autographs.

Dick and Fudge obliged and a ceremony to unveil a historic highway marker at Cline’s childhood home began.

“I remember a lot of things about this house,” Fudge said from the front porch. “It feels like home.”

Fudge and Dick reached up and pulled the protective drape off the sign as fans clamored to take snapshots at 608 S. Kent St.

Country Star Tells How Singer Inspired Career

By: Charlie Jackson
The Winchester Star

Country music star George Hamilton IV knelt down and placed a Baby Ruth candy bar with a red rose stuck inside the wrapper at the grave of Patsy Cline in Winchester Sunday afternoon.

Hamilton was one of nearly 30 people — some family, others friends, and all fans — who came to Shenandoah Memorial Park to pay tribute to the late country music icon.

Hamilton talked about the inspiration Cline was to him early in his career and even now.

After the brief ceremony, Hamilton shared stories of his encounters along the country music road with his friend.

It was early in his career in the mid-1950s and he had just released his first album titled “A Rose and a Baby Ruth.” He performed the song on the Town and Country Jamboree, which eventually turned into the Jimmy Dean Show, with Patsy Cline also performing that evening.

The first time the two met, Hamilton spoke of an “instant connection.” Cline was performing “Life’s Railway to Heaven.” She told Hamilton it was her favorite gospel song.

“I told her it was mine too,” he said, shortly after performing the song next to Cline’s tombstone.

‘Sweet Dreams’ Realized With Marker, Museum

By: F.C. Lowe
The Winchester Star

“Long-awaited” announcements will be made this weekend in Winchester.

Not only will a highway marker be unveiled but also a museum site will be revealed for Winchester native and country music legend, Patsy Cline.

“This is an exciting weekend,” Judy Sue Huyett-Kemp of Celebrating Patsy Cline said, especially with the much anticipated announcements.

The Always Patsy Cline Fan Club will convene as usual on Labor Day weekend in Winchester along with a few extra activities.

Patsy has been chosen as artist of the week on a BBC radio 2 program. Tracks to be played selected by requests. It is only Sunday afternoon 5pm to 7pm UK time on BBC Radio two, The Ed Stewart Show. This can be heard online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2 and then navigate to the listen live page.

The producer tells me there will be "Crazy" (as it is for gone conclusion this will get most requests) and 2 or 3 other tracks.

However, if a few requests for other tracks arrive at stewpot@bbc.co.uk then maybe "Crazy" will be replaced by another track. Don't get me wrong. "Crazy" is good but it is probably the only track that the majority of the UK public have heard. So lets educate them by getting other tracks played on the BBC.

Yes, stewpot@bbc.co.uk is the right address. Ed Stewart, who many years ago got the nickname Stewpot from one of the children's programs he presented.

The current issue of CMA Close-Up Magazine has a great article on Celebrating Patsy Cline, Inc. This press coverage really helps to get us into the "major leagues" and on the "radar" of the "movers and shakers" in the country music industry. We have already received calls from the Grammy Awards and several artists wanting to get involved with the Museum after having read this article. Also, the issue is loaded with great photos of the CMA Music Festival.

Curb Sees Past and Future In Old Studio
Record Label Owner Plans To Restore Columbia Studio A For Education, Historical Purposes.

By: RICHARD LAWSON
Staff Writer

Record label owner Mike Curb and a small crowd are walking around a Music Row office building trying to figure out what part of it was once the recording studio in which country legends, including Johnny Cash, recorded music.

Hidden by surrounding office space, it was known as Columbia Studio A going back to the early days of Music Row. The space is connected to the Quonset Hut, a recording studio regarded for years as the foundation of Nashville's country music industry. In recent years, the space has been hidden by Sony Music Nashville's headquarters offices.

Standing in the label's former vault yesterday, soon-to-be new owner Curb, Sony Nashville's finance chief Jeff Allen and real estate broker Ira Blonder study a tattered 42-year-old architectural plan trying to determine the location.

"You can see Studio A from the outside," Curb says repeatedly of the space poised to be his next contribution to country music history, learning and tourism.

On The Trail of Patsy Cline
Busloads Tour The Area For Glimpse of Singer’s Life

By: F.C. Lowe
The Winchester Star

If you build it, they will come is the theme of the movie, “A Field of Dreams.”

In that case, they built a baseball field and legendary players returned to play but not in the realm of reality.

In Winchester, it (a Patsy Cline museum) hasn’t been built, but they still come by the busloads in search of Patsy Cline.

These visitors are very real. They seek some hint of her existence in the town where she was born in 1932 and lived until she made it big in Nashville.

And the tour guide, Judy Sue Huyett-Kempf of Berryville, enthusiastically gives them all the information she can about the singer, who perished in a plane crash in 1963.

Huyett-Kempf, a member of Celebrating Patsy Cline, calls herself a self-appointed historian for Patsy. Their paths crossed many times, she said.

As Miss Apple Blossom, Huyett-Kempf remembers being at the ribbon cutting for the opening of the Ward Plaza shopping center in Winchester in the early ’60s and Patsy was there. She also traveled to Brunswick, Md. where Patsy performed.

But she admits the true Patsy fans know more than she does. “They can’t get enough.”

(Courtesy of Philip Martin)

Philip Martin and Karen Helm sign the lease on the building, at 48 S. Loudoun Street in Winchester, that will house The Patsy Cline Museum

Patsy Cline Getting New Home In City

By: Charlie Jackson
The Winchester Star

Patsy Cline has a new home — 48 S. Loudoun St. — and she’ll be on display for all to see in eight months.

“We’re in the final negotiations now,” said Philip L. Martin, president of Celebrating Patsy Cline, Inc.

At a meeting of Winchester’s Finance and Administration Committee Monday morning, Martin said a formal announcement of the museum’s plans will come in the next week.

Celebrating Patsy Cline Inc., intends to have a grand opening on March 5, 2006 — the anniversary of a tragic plane crash that took Cline’s life at age 30.

Martin said the home at 48 S. Loudoun — approximately 25,000 square feet — may be temporary. The museum will work to get its exhibits constructed and membership built before deciding to expand or relocate to a bigger facility.

Exhibits will follow Patsy Cline’s life from her childhood days in Winchester to her more celebrated days as a country music star in Nashville, Tenn., to her death.