How Country Queen Loretta Lynn Draws Strength From the Memories of Her Late Pal Patsy Cline
Coal miners’ daughters are made of tough stuff, as we learned in Loretta Lynn’s 1980 biopic, and she keeps proving it true. The Nashville legend, 87, suffered a stroke in 2017, followed by a fall in which she broke her hip, but now she’s back on her feet and going strong again. “I’m feeling great!” Loretta tells Closer Weekly exclusively in the magazine’s latest issue, on newsstands now. “I tell my friends, ‘I’m coming back, honey! Y’all come and see me!’”
No doubt her legions of fans will when she goes back on the road. “I’m going to work a few more dates and have a good time,” she says. “I’m looking forward to seeing all my friends again.”
She’ll be supported, as she always is, by her four surviving children, including twin daughters Patsy and Peggy, 55. “Patsy does my business work, and Peggy watches my medicine and everything else,” Loretta says proudly. “They’ve both got their own job when it comes to me, and they do it well!”
Patsy has just cowritten a memoir with her mom about her namesake, Loretta’s dear chum Patsy Cline. “I was telling her how I miss Patsy so much,” says Loretta of the impetus behind Me & Patsy Kickin’ Up Dust: My Friendship With Patsy Cline, which will be available on April 7. “We were like sisters through and through.”
Though Loretta was born five months before her, Patsy was already a country- music star when they met. “If she thought I was doing something wrong, she’d say, ‘It’s this way!’” Loretta recalls of her mentor with a laugh. “She taught me everything I know about the music business. I thank God for giving that gift to me.”
Their friendship was tragically cut short when Patsy died in a plane crash at 30 in 1963, but Loretta holds plenty of warm memories of their time together. “She was a good cook — the first time I ever ate boiled shrimp was at Patsy’s house,” Loretta shares. “We would play around and talk on the couch and be carrying on, then all of a sudden we’d be wrestling on the floor!”
They also supported each other through the ups and downs of life. “We’d bounce off each other because we both had husbands we’d get mad at and tell off,” Loretta says. “And she was a great mother. The last thing I saw her do was bathe both her kids in the tub on the night before she was killed.”
Over the many years since, Loretta has felt Patsy’s presence. “The first time I ever played Vegas, I was scared to death,” she remembers. “I looked up, and there Patsy sat, with her legs crossed and her hands in her lap, looking down at me and grinning. I said, ‘Well, you are always with me!’”
And Loretta believes we haven’t seen the last of Patsy Cline. “I think God will send her back this way,” she predicts. “And she will set the world on fire!”
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