Of all of the posthumously launched albums which have helped to maintain the legend of Patsy Cline alive and properly, one of the vital fascinating is Stay At The Cimarron Ballroom. It was recorded at that venue in Tulsa, Oklahoma on July 29, 1961 (ticket value: $1.50), and launched for the primary time on the identical date in 1997.
The MCA launch was a valuable alternative to listen to a totally genuine reside efficiency by the nation queen from Gore, Virginia, and to expertise a live performance that came about a couple of weeks earlier than her twenty ninth birthday. She performs signature hits like “I Fall To Pieces” and “Walkin’ After Midnight,” in addition to requirements akin to “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey” and songs that she by no means recorded on a studio album, akin to “When My Dreamboat Comes Home” and the Connie Francis hit “Stupid Cupid.”
‘I’m out of wind’
Stay At The Cimarron Ballroom is a gripping recording, and never simply due to Cline’s stellar vocal efficiency and undoubted star high quality. The album can also be putting for the inter-song chat, particularly when it locks the live performance in a really particular time-frame. “I’m kind of out of wind, this is the first time I’ve worked since I got out of the hospital,” she tells the group at one level. Six weeks earlier, on June 14, she had been concerned in a critical automotive accident, a head-on collision in Nashville.
A member of the viewers can clearly be heard laughing on the remark, at which Cline, as assertive as ever, snaps again: “What are you laughing about? You wasn’t there!” Then she laughs herself, and provides: “Oh me…I tell you, those women drivers are rough on us good folks.” She then calls to her band for a B-flat chord and goes into ‘I Fall To Pieces.’
‘The sweetest music this side of heaven’
“This is the sweetest music this side of heaven,” she says, earlier than going into “Shake, Rattle & Roll.” Then, popping out of “San Antonio Rose,” Cline returns to the topic of the accident. “I’d like to take everybody’s attention for just a moment,” she says.
“Y’know, a lot of folks have been asking, ‘Well, what happened to you? You look kind of beat up.’ Well, as I told you before, that’s what women drivers does for you. Not all of them. These Tulsa women, they’re different.”
Patsy then explains in extraordinary element that the crash broke her hip, and that she has already had some cosmetic surgery, with extra to come back. “They say they’re going to give me a face lift and it’s going to make me like new. Until then, I’m so glad to be back,” she says.
“I just want to thank each and every one of you. I received over 1,200 cards, get well cards and letters, and boy, you’ll never know what it meant to this old gal to know that there was that many people left on this good old Earth that still think of me once in a while, and I sincerely appreciate it.” With insufferable irony, it was solely 20 months later {that a} airplane crash did take her life.
Purchase Patsy Cline’s music on vinyl or CD now.
