Praise for Margaret Jones’ The Life and Times of Patsy Cline

“This fine biography of country music star Patsy Cline begins with a compelling and telling image. It’s May 1957. Twenty-five-year-old Patsy is riding on the top of the backseat of a red Oldsmobile convertible in the Apple Blossom Festival parade in her hometown of Winchester, Va.... Margaret Jones has relied heavily on personal interviews—lots and lots of direct quotes here—to produce this comprehensive biography of country music’s first ‘crossover’ superstar. The result is a chatty, intimate, compulsively readable picture of not only the tragic Patsy, but also of those who knew her and the world which produced her and her music. The book is long on atmosphere and fact.” —Washington Post Book Review

“Author Margaret Jones is a virtual unknown, but her book The Life and Times of Patsy Cline deserves to be the definitive work on the subject. Jones has dug deeper, done more interviews, uncovered more facts, and gotten more history correct than nearly any book on the market today. Richly detailed ... it succeeds both as biography and as a research work on country music of the ‘50s and early ‘60s.... Jones uses her own exhaustive interviews and research to create one of the best country music biographies of all.” —Country Music Magazine

“Now Margaret Jones has written a definitive chronology of Cline’s short life that reads as it was lived, like the melodramatic but hopelessly ‘true’ lyrics typical of a Nashville ballad: Tough girl from the other side of the tracks, abandoned by a feckless (and possibly incestuous) father, despised and ignored in her hometown of Winchester, Va., has the voice of pure gold—and knows how to use it.... Meticulously researched—Jones interviewed and quotes everyone from husbands to colleagues to fans—The Life and Times of Patsy Cline presents a multisided portrait of its subject, a woman about whose secret self few people seem to be in agreement.” —Los Angeles Times

“Author Margaret Jones’ The Life and Times of Patsy Cline is the first portrait of the hillbilly torch singer with real fur on it—the book offers a depth, breadth and height of reality that is both fascinating and repellent.... Jones ... neither revels in nor strays from the dirt. The emerging picture of Patsy Cline is often shockingly squalid, violent and sorrowful. Though her battles with her second husband, Charlie Dick, are old hat, the truth of Cline’s poverty-stricken, unstable life is a real surprise. For all she reveals, though, Jones exhibits admirable restraint. No dime-store psychology here: the revelations of Cline suffering incest at her father’s hand are told mostly through blunt first-person recollections from confidantes like June Carter and Loretta Lynn. Coddling the reader with only a bare minimum of sociopolitical subtext and hot jargon, Jones simply sets the stage for a read-between-the-lines demonstration of the trauma and the devastating effect that her abuse would later have on Cline and her attitude toward sex, pregnancy, and children—a strangely ambivalent, manipulative and particularly ugly part of the singer’s life.”—LA Weekly

“Cline comes strutting out of the pages of Jones’ book, slaps the reader on the back with a ‘Hey, Hoss’ and a smile. Her salty language was as much a part of her as was her music.... If you close your eyes in between chapters, you can almost hear the music.” —Nashville Banner

 “Patsy Cline, who died in 1963 in an airplane crash at age 30, is still—and increasingly, it seems—the most respected female country singer dead or alive. She had the voice, of course, big and pure, but more than that she was everything we now think the ideal woman should be: determined, independent, hard-driving, straight-talking and tough. As it happened, she was also everything we regret: a sucker for bounders, a boozer, a pill popper and crash diet veteran with, as it might be put, low self-esteem. The story of her life as told here details these contradictions and provides an illuminating look at the music business in its crucial years, the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.... Patsy did just fine spitting out what bugged her in concrete matters, complaining, for instance, that the standard ‘girl singer’ ruffled attire of the mid ‘50s made her look like a ‘damn butterfly.’ But when it came to larger things, though she was as tormented as the next person, she hadn’t the wherewithal to put it into words. In the end, her biography convinces one of her essential ordinariness, an ordinariness offset only somewhat by gargantuan will and generosity.” —Boston Globe

“… She was strong-willed, generous, quick-witted, and cheerfully foul-mouthed. She wanted to be a star on the Opry, but she had city show business in her soul, too: she loved Sophie Tucker and Helen Morgan; she sang Gershwin and Kern; she never denied loving Elvis Presley when she got to anti-rock Nashville, and she never stopped wooing country fans with her quasi-swing version of ‘Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?’ That she hit the top of the country and pop charts with heartache ballads like ‘Crazy',’ ‘Sweet Dreams’ and ‘Walkin’ After Midnight’ had more to do with convention than with temperament. She was a two-fisted extrovert, but pop still liked its girl singers to be sweetly wistful while country was clinging to the matriarch of family values, Kitty Wells. Cline’s big, pretty voice and legato line made her perfect for pop. She used country devices—the twanged or stretched-out vowels, the incipient sob in the throat—cannily but not cynically. And her ability to growl, belt and drift behind the beat or across the bar line showed a real feel for blues and jazz phrasings.”—The New York Times