Loretta Lynn Says She and Patsy Cline ‘Would Have Tore up Nashville’

Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline only knew each other for a short time before Cline’s death in a plane crash in 1963. But in the years after they met, the two stars formed a close friendship that Lynn still recalls fondly today. “I’ve often wondered what she would be doing today if she was here,” she told Sounds Like Nashville. “It would be something else. I can’t even imagine. It’s too bad we weren’t together more and longer. We would have tore up Nashville that’s for sure.”

On April 7, Lynn released her new book, Me & Patsy Kickin’ Up Dust, which chronicles the pair’s friendship as well as the early days of Lynn’s career and the advice Cline gave her on topics including clothing, contracts and men in the music business. “The most important thing Patsy taught me was do not let people run over me and take up for myself,” Lynn said. “Be my own person.” One of the stories recalled the time Faron Young patted Cline on the bottom as she and Lynn were entering the Ryman Auditorium. Lynn kicked him in the shin, and she and Young later became friends. “I loved Faron Young,” she said. “Faron was a real good guy.”

In another incident recounted in the book, Lynn wrote about a time when she and Cline’s husband Charlie went to pick up food at a restaurant. While they were waiting for their order, a woman came in and sat on Charlie’s lap, at which Lynn asked the woman to show her where the bathroom was. Instead of the bathroom, Lynn, who knew the restaurant well, walked into a broom closet and, after the woman followed her in to tell her it wasn’t the bathroom, slipped out again and locked the woman in. “I was so mad! I thought that’s ridiculous,” Lynn said. “Patsy would have done the same thing for me. She’d probably knocked her out of his lap.”

“I helped her through stuff and she helped me,” Lynn explained of her friendship with Cline, adding that leaving her family to tour was “very hard on me.” “If I would have known how hard it was going to be, I don’t know if I still would have wanted to sing because I loved my family and I didn’t want to be away from them,” she said. The 88-year-old wrote Me & Patsy Kickin’ Up Dust with her daughter Patsy Lynn Russell, who was named after her late friend. “I hope the girls that read this book get good friends like me and Patsy was,” Lynn said. “If you’ve got a good friend, you’ve got everything.”