At 6:00 p.m. every evening at Shenandoah Memorial Park in Winchester, Virginia, a bronze bell tower funded with the help of Loretta Lynn and Dottie West chimes hymns across the gravesite of Patsy Cline, marking the hour her plane went down in the Tennessee woods on March 5, 1963.
In late February 1963, just days before her final trip out of Nashville, the thirty-year-old singer sat down with a sheet of Delta Air Lines stationery and wrote out a makeshift will instructing her mother, Hilda Hensley, to raise her two young children, Julie and Randy, if she failed to return home.
During those final weeks of winter, after finishing her last Decca studio sessions on tracks including “Sweet Dreams” and “Faded Love,” Cline invited her friends Jan Howard and Dottie West into the studio to hear the playbacks. Having already survived two near-fatal emergencies—including the June 14, 1961 head-on car collision in which West had ridden beside her in the ambulance and picked windshield glass from her hair—Cline told Lynn, West, and Howard that trouble came in threes and that she would not survive a third.
Days before departing for a benefit show in Kansas, Cline opened the closets of her new suburban home in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, and handed out her stage dresses, shoes, jewelry, and new curtains to Lynn and other women in the Nashville circle. When Lynn asked why she was giving away her belongings, Cline said she wanted the people she loved to have them, embraced her younger friend, and told her to stand up for herself in her marriage and career when she was gone. Outside the RCA building in Nashville, she similarly remarked to Jordanaires vocalist Ray Walker that she would soon leave it all behind.
On Sunday, March 3, 1963, Cline performed three shows without pay at Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall in Kansas City, Kansas, to raise money for the family of radio disc jockey “Cactus” Jack Call following his death in an automobile wreck. After fog grounded outgoing flights on March 4, West asked Cline to skip the small charter plane and ride back to Nashville in the car with her and her husband, Bill West. Anxious to get home to Julie and Randy, Cline declined the sixteen-hour drive, telling West not to worry and that when it was her time to go, it was her time.
On the afternoon of March 5, Cline boarded a single-engine Piper Comanche piloted by her manager, Randy Hughes, alongside fellow Opry stars Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins. After refueling in Dyersburg, Tennessee, Hughes took off into heavy rain and low clouds at 6:07 p.m., and thirteen minutes later the aircraft plunged into a wooded hollow off Mt. Carmel Road near Camden, Tennessee, ninety miles west of Nashville.
All through that night, search parties combed the Benton County timber while Cline’s husband, Charlie Dick, and fellow singer Roger Miller drove west from Nashville toward the search area. When word of the wreckage came over the radio shortly after dawn on March 6, Lynn dropped to the floor of her house in tears, surrounded by the dresses and household items Cline had placed in her arms days earlier.
From the mud at the Camden crash site, searchers recovered Cline’s gold wristwatch—stopped at 6:20 p.m.—along with her beaded white stage shoes and her bronze mechanical cigarette lighter, items that were later preserved at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.
After thousands of mourners gathered for services in Nashville and in her hometown of Winchester, Virginia, two days later, the women Cline had mentored stepped in to keep her work and household memory alive. Howard helped look after Cline’s children in the months after the funeral, while Lynn and West joined forces to help erect the memorial bell tower over her grave in Winchester.
In 1973, ten years after the Camden crash, Cline became the first solo female artist inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Four years later, in 1977, Lynn walked back into producer Owen Bradley’s studio to record her tribute album, *I Remember Patsy*, taking Cline’s 1962 ballad “She’s Got You” back to number one on the country charts while keeping the clothes her thirty-year-old friend had given her hanging in her closet for the rest of her life.