I've always enjoyed most of the contents, although not all of it of course. Patsy was locked into a terrible contract early in her career, and was mostly only allowed to record songs that were owned by the holder of her contract. He tried to turn sows ears into silk purses via her awesome talent. I guess in a way he succeeded, because she just shines in these inferior works, although they didn't sell very well at the time.
I've had my favourites on each disk, and over the years would mostly just skip over the stuff that sounded hokey or dated in the first few bars, or that sounded harsh at the beginning, because Patsy's voice was so powerful that she just overwhelmed the limited technology of the 1950's. Pity the poor technician that wasn't fast enough on the "gain riding" and left us with a harsh spot in the recording when Patsy really got going. If only digital had existed back then!
Anyway, I took it into my head to finally rip my favourites off of the 4 cd's and burn them to a single disk. The gods did not smile on my efforts, for it took four tries to successfully burn a diskful. I had lots of problems with errors appearing on the new cds, and causing awful skipping and skating during playback on my stereo sets cd player. I'm not sure why, but it doesn't matter. While I was ripping and listening, I found a couple of tracks that somehow I'd never properly appreciated before.
So as has happened a number of times before in the previous 20 years, I am once again freshly blown away by the awesome talent of the late Patsy Cline. What a shame she had to die in that plane crash in the early '60's. We lost the chance for so many other awesome recordings she certainly would have made had she lived.
I don't even like country music, but for Patsy Cline I will always make an exception.
Tonight I am enjoying "That's my Desire" and "Imagine That"
I look forward to being totally blown away by whatever it is that I've still not learned to appreciate properly just yet as well. WOW.
If you want to be modern, you can download tracks from the internet I suppose, but you will be cheating yourself if you do. Try to buy the 4 cd boxed set if you can. It was produced by The Country Music Foundation, and is called simply "The Patsy Cline Collection". MCAD-10421 It comes in a nice box, and has a very informative booklet on Patsy's life and career. I still have the booklet, but I just had a look upstairs, and I see I've thrown out the nice box it all came in during some cleaning jag I was on at some point in the past.
(Damn!)
