Fascinating look at life of country legend

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This article was published 11/03/2017 (3222 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sometimes, you just know it’s going to be good.

That’s certainly the case with PBS’s American Masters, a series that for more than three decades has delivered consistently excellent performing-arts biographies to viewers of the U.S. public broadcaster. Regardless of the subject or field of artistic endeavour that is its focus, American Masters creates profiles that are thorough, compelling and emotionally engaging.

This weekend’s documentary examination of the life and career of Patsy Cline does not disappoint. It’s an excellent hour-long film that celebrates the achievements of a country-music legend who defied long odds, broke barriers, challenged gender stereotypes and achieved unprecedented success in a too-short career.

American Masters: Patsy Cline, which airs today at 5:30 p.m. on PBS’s North Dakota affiliate, Prairie Public TV, tells the story of a decidedly working-class heroine who became a female star in a male-dominated field simply because she refused to let anything stop her.

“She came through it,” modern-era country artist Reba McEntire says in the film, which is narrated by Roseanne Cash. “The car wreck, the bad marriage, the poverty she lived in, having to quit school and go to work. All of those things made her who she was.”

The film, directed by Barbara J. Hall, follows Cline’s life from the most humble of beginnings. Born Virginia Patterson Hensley in Winchester, Va., in 1932, she recognized her musical gifts early in life and sought every opportunity to use them. By the time she was a teenager, she was performing regularly on local radio and TV and in nightclubs.

A first marriage, to Gerald Cline, ended in divorce, reportedly due to disagreements over her desire to pursue a musical career.

Cline’s second marriage, to Charlie Dick, produced two children and lasted until her death.

The focus of this American Masters profile is rightly on Cline’s music, however, and Hall has included more than a dozen performance clips, from seldom-seen early rarities to such iconic hits as Crazy, Walking After Midnight and I Fall to Pieces. The film also includes interviews with numerous musicians, ranging from veterans McEntire, Dottie West and Wanda Jackson to contemporary artists LeAnn Rimes, Kacey Musgraves and Rhiannon Giddens.

Actress Beverly D’Angelo, who played Cline in the 1980 Loretta Lynn bio-pic Coal Miner’s Daughter, says the role inspired her more than any other she’s played, and adds Cline’s accomplishments as a pioneering female performer are hard to quantify.

“She brought dignity to a woman’s feelings,” D’Angelo says in the film. “I think that the way she sang, with such feeling and with such dignity, allowed any woman to feel, ‘You know, what? I am important. My feelings do count.’”

Adds the actress: “Patsy Cline had the most profound impact on my life of anybody I never met.”

American Masters: Patsy Cline airs just days after the 54th anniversary of the March 5, 1963, plane crash that took her life at age 30.

“It would have been amazing to see how she would have developed,” Jackson says. “We got cheated out of that.”

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @BradOswald