Keeping a Sweet Dream Alive

WINCHESTER, Va. -- A lot of people in Ginny Hensley's staid and upright home town regarded her as plain hillbilly trash back when she was poor and coming of age here in the Shenandoah Valley. This was just after World War II and into the 1950s, when she'd sing in any beer dive with a stage, when she worked regional radio and the Moose lodge circuit and boasted she'd get to Nashville.

Her betters liked to gossip what a hussy that young Virginia Hensley was, going around right in front of folks with her ruby lipstick and her short pants, crawling under the covers with this one and that one. . . .

"For instance, she would go to our drive-in theater and try to perform," says Judy Sue Kempf, 60, a tour guide. "She would get up on top of the roof of the concession stand, and do you know what happened? The people would actually throw things at her."

Kempf pauses, standing in the aisle of a bus packed with women in their sixties and seventies, grandmothers in leisure polyester and cushioned shoes. They've traveled two hours from Baltimore to see where Ginny Hensley came up, where she was no lady by local standards, on her way to being the fabulous Patsy Cline. This was before "Sweet Dreams," before "So Wrong," before that pure lonesome voice on the nickel jukeboxes the grandmothers sang with ages back.

This was before "Crazy."

Hurt looks come over some of the seniors, hearing the drive-in story, but the bubbly Kempf, Miss Shenandoah Apple Blossom of 1961, says not to fret: "Her roots are in Winchester, and there are some of us, at least, who are proud of that. And, by golly, we will get a museum for her, one way or the other."

Climb aboard for one of her Patsy Cline motor coach tours in Winchester, 75 miles west of Washington, and you'll soon realize this is her theme: that Patsy's strait-laced home town looked down on her, back when she was Ginny and later when she was making records; that Winchester couldn't abide a brassy, ambitious woman from the wrong part of town, especially one known for her loose ways.

Now, 42 years have passed since her plane plunged into storm-soaked Tennessee woods, and Kempf figures this city of 24,000 ought to have a museum celebrating its very own Nashville legend. It's a project she and some other folks here have been working on without success since 1994, hampered by a shortage of money, occasional disorganization and a lukewarm public response in a region where tourism is mainly about the Civil War and the annual Apple Blossom Festival, which is this weekend.

They dream of restoring Patsy's girlhood home and opening a downtown exhibit hall for the best Patsy memorabilia collected from scattered hands -- temples for the pilgrims who roll in from time to time on Highway 7 and the few hundred fans trekking here on Labor Day weekends to observe her birthdays.

Until then, though, you'll have to look for Pasty in her old places. And she's not always around.

The bus pulls to the curb on Pleasant Valley Road in front of radio station WINC (92.5 FM/1400 AM), where Ginny Hensley is said to have made her broadcast debut shortly after World War II, at age 15 or thereabouts. This is the first sight on the Patsy tour, and Kempf says that unfortunately the women won't be allowed inside. "It's too small," she tells them.

Anyway, they wouldn't see much of Patsy in there, just a photo of her hanging by the reception desk, taken when she was a member of the Grand Ole Opry.