Released: 1961
In a changing world, in Patsy Cline people had found something to rely on. In posession of a rich, sugared voice capable of unpicking most every lock, the singer was born in Shenandoah valley in Virginia and her career ebbed and flowed until signing to the Decca label in 1960. Able to fashion a unique warmth to anything she turned her mind to, following the switch she found herself with a team that matched her ambitions.
Like most self assured talents, she was also acutely aware of what material best suited her and having been coerced to record tracks she felt were unsuitable in the past, initially had reservations about I Fall To Pieces. These stemmed from the fact she would be working again with former Elvis backing singers The Jordanaires, based on an unfounded belief they’d leave her voice to play second fiddle.
In the end the song’s highly familiar “torch and twang” arrangement was not the straitjacket everyone feared it might be either, Cline teasing heartache and regret from every syllable. Here then was a tune doused in nostalgia and an America in part clinging on to it’s past, one however that jumped country’s rails and made it’s singer a star of the pop charts too.
Little did anyone know that it would also be a track made more piquant by tragedy. Not long after it’s release Cline was hospitalised after a car accident, leaving her unable to perform, before having made a full recovery from that she then died as the result of an aviation accident in 1963. A star in the making in both the old world and the new, she was now forever preserved in time.
The Voice Of Unreason 