Both Jean and Bob Moffett mentioned Patsy Cline in the comments after an earlier post about George Jones. I found this video of Patsy performing Lovesick Blues on Community Jamboree in 1960, with a charming Ferlin Husky introduction.

I made the same mistake most everyone must make when they hear that tune sung by anybody. You figure it’s a Hank Williams song. Well, it ain’t.

It was written by Tin Pan Alley composers named Cliff Friend and Irving Mills, way back in 1922. It was recorded a bunch of times after that, including by a minstrel show singer named Emmet Miller and a country singer named Rex Griffin. Hank must have heard on the radio and liked it, and he performed it on the Louisiana Hayride radio show in 1948. The audience loved it, so Hank recorded it in 1949, and it spent 16 weeks at Number One on the Billboard Top Country and Western singles chart. People forget the minstrel show versions of things right quick when you have a smash like that.

The name Cliff Friend probably doesn’t ring a bell for you, but maybe it should. He’s one of those anonymous guys whose name you used to see going round and round on the label in small print on the center of a 45 record. But Cliff never really got much public acknowledgement for his most popular tune, one that makes Lovesick Blues pale in comparison. He co-wrote The Merry-Go-Round-Broke Down.

What the hell is The Merry-Go-Round-Broke Down? You can be forgiven for asking, but trust me, you know it:

Maybe you prefer the later versions:

By the way, to go even further down this rathole, the wild lap steel Hye-Wye-En glissando that opens up the later versions of the Looney Tunes song was played by Freddie Tavares. Besides being a crack lap steel player, he was a lead designer of the Fender Stratocaster guitar. You can see him at work alongside Leo Fender in 1959 in an earlier blogpost, Minor Seventh Heaven.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, let’s get back to Patsy Cline singing Lovesick Blues on teevee. It’s fantastic.

People often think they’d like to be singers or other forms of famous musicians. If you’ve never had a curtain rise in front of you and been confronted by 2,000 eyeballs, or 1,999 if Peter Falk is in the audience, you might not understand how unnerving it might be. To take it up a notch, Patsy has to stare into the cold, dead eye of the TV camera, and somehow connect with anonymous people in a virtual audience as if they’re in front of her. She makes it look easy. It ain’t, or we’d all be doing it.

I was going to commend Jean and Robert for their enthusiasm for Patsy, but I’m not sure exactly why. I’ve literally never met any human being who doesn’t think Patsy Cline is excellent. Stoner, greaser, big band devotee, punker, jazz aficionado, blues singer in a porkpie hat, hip hop breakdancer, it doesn’t matter. Everyone loves Patsy Cline.

So I guess I can only thank Jean and Robert for reminding me to post a video of her. It’s the least I can do, and I always do the least I can do.