Patsy & Loretta

Janine Turner,Joe Tippett,Kyle Schmid,Megan Hilty

A semi-fictional account of the friendship between country music stars Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn in the early 1960s is presented. Before their meeting in 1961, they led somewhat parallel lives as poor and simple country girls trying to make it big in the business - Patsy's career whose at the time was far more advanced than Loretta's - and both being in loving yet far from perfect marriages. While Patsy largely controlled her career with her management team regardless of the wants of her then second husband Charlie Dick, Loretta's husband, Oliver Lynn, more commonly known as either Doolittle or Mooney, controlled Loretta's life, including her career, he wanting to maintain her simple image without any "whorish" embellishments such as makeup. The reason for their meeting could have easily have gone the other way instead of friendship. In that new relationship, Patsy largely became a mentor to Loretta, both in how to forward her career and by association how she needed to stand up to Mooney. Their friendship was not always a smooth one, largely in Loretta's implication, whether she actually meant it or not, that Patsy did not focus enough time on family, especially her children. That friendship would have a premature end with Patsy's tragic death in an airplane crash two years later.—Huggo