Blindspotting: Patsy Cline, "Showcase"

The Legacy: Like you need me to tell you, but what the hell, let's do this anyway. After scoring a huge hit with "Walkin' After Midnight" in 1957, Patsy Cline wandered the musical desert for a few years, trapped by the constraints of her contract with a label that continually missed the mark in terms of finding material worthy of her peerless instrument. It's a stretch that's become little more than a footnote — if that — in the general public's understanding of Cline's career, but at the time, it mattered a great deal; for four years, she was literally a one-hit wonder, with a full dozen non-charting singles furthering the gap between her boundless commercial potential and any likelihood she'd ever get to fulfill it.

Fortunately, she had a true believer in producer Owen Bradley, who wouldn't stop searching for a hit no matter how many times they whiffed. (It helped a lot that Bradley was also a VP at Cline's label, Decca.) Finally, after firing off an album's worth of flops, the duo delivered "I Fall to Pieces," which overcame a slow start on the charts — not to mention Cline's initial reluctance to record it — to become her second No. 12 pop single and first country chart-topper. It might have been an even bigger hit had Cline not been in the hospital when it reached peak popularity, the victim of a serious car accident that left her unable to perform in public for weeks; fortunately, Cline and Bradley had an even bigger hit up their sleeves with her cover of Willie Nelson's "Crazy," which proved the most successful pop single of her career.

The tragic caveat, of course, is that Cline didn't have long to live. Although she triumphed over the car accident that nearly killed her, she died in a plane crash less than two years after Showcase's late 1961 release. There's absolutely no shortage of Patsy Cline product available for anyone who wants to listen, but she only released three LPs while she was alive — and as popular as her biggest hits were, she'd still only scratched the surface of mainstream breakthrough status. Showcase peaked at No. 73, while the final album of her lifetime, 1962's Sentimentally Yours, appears not to have entered the pop charts at all.

First Impressions: Of course, it's well worth noting that singles were still the heavily favored format when those LPs were released. It isn't hard to imagine Cline putting out platinum albums if she'd survived into the '70s and '80s, but that isn't really my point; I'm dwelling on this stuff in order to help establish how wildly her stature has grown since her passing, to the point that I doubt she'd be able to comprehend any of it if she were somehow reanimated. (Please don't, Sam Altman.)

My initial pick for today's record was k.d. lang's Shadowland, but after thinking about it for a few minutes, I decided that'd be a silly mistake, given how little time I've spent with the recordings that inspired lang to make it. As it turned out, spending time with Showcase presented its own set of problems.

First and foremost, I need to acknowledge the tremendous talent that went into this record. There's simply no arguing with Patsy Cline as a singer, or the brilliant songwriting that fueled her most enduring works. Whether or not you love the classic countrypolitan sound — and I have to admit that I'm sort of ambivalent about it — you just can't quibble with this stuff. It does exactly what it sets out to do.

The more I listened, though, the more I thought about how listening to Showcase makes me feel, which is nostalgic — and not nostalgic for Patsy Cline's era, which was over long before I was born, but instead for my own childhood. That might lead you to assume that my parents played Patsy Cline at home when I was a kid, but I assure you they did not; they were both Top 40 people who played the hits of the day in the family van and had precisely zero country records in their vinyl library.

These songs — this sound — take me back to the very early '80s because they were made during the era that still dominated family-friendly pop culture when I was a little kid. When I came home from school, I watched Leave It to Beaver reruns; Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley were still on the air; the old movies that local stations played were heavily skewed toward this period. This all started to change toward the middle of the decade, but you get the point — entertainment for kids hadn't yet developed into the 24-hour industry it's become, and as a result, a lot of the stuff I ingested was reheated comfort food for my parents' generation.

What this creates, I think, is a sort of double lens of nostalgia that domes over the entertainment of the era, amplifying its significance while baking it into a shape it was never supposed to take. When you listen to Showcase, what you hear is a set of songs that truly work largely because Cline's voice is raw and alive in a way that undermines their stolid, mannered surroundings as much as anyone's possibly could — but that vitality is easy to miss when songs that sound like this have been so subsumed into the cultural lexicon that they always feel like they're being beamed down from a celestial firmament. If you want to hear Patsy Cline the human being, she's still in here, in all her glory. If not, what you're left with is a quaint echo of Technicolor times.

On numerous levels, this is just how nostalgia works, and it hasn't warped our perception of Patsy Cline any more than it's done the same thing to hundreds upon hundreds of other cultural artifacts. If I'm more sensitive to it at this particular moment because of a certain sociopolitical movement fueled by misguided nostalgia for times and things that never really existed, well, that isn't her fault at all, and it ultimately doesn't have anything to do with records that — great as they are — still only offer snapshots of a still-embryonic talent that might have forged some truly thrilling trails if things had turned out differently.

Favorite Song: I do love to reach for a deep cut in this section, but c'mon, man — "Crazy" is a perfect song. There's no other choice.