Patsy Cline

Virginia Patterson Hensley — Patsy Cline — grew up in Winchester, Virginia, and won a spot on the Grand Ole Opry after appearing on Arthur Godfrey’s television talent show in 1957. Her voice was unlike anything else in country: a huge, operatically controlled instrument with absolute pitch and a capacity for emotional directness that seemed to bypass the listener’s defenses entirely.

Producer Owen Bradley’s decision to add lush string arrangements to her recordings divided the country music world — traditionalists saw it as pop capitulation — but Cline’s voice was so large and her emotional intelligence so precise that the combination worked. “I Fall to Pieces” (1961) and “Crazy” (1961) — the latter written by Willie Nelson, who had been trying to sell the song without success — became two of the most recognized recordings in country history.

She was killed in a plane crash in Camden, Tennessee, on March 5, 1963, along with Hawkshaw Hawkins, Cowboy Copas and pilot Randy Hughes, returning from a benefit concert in Kansas City. She was 30 years old. The recordings she left — less than a hundred sides in six years of recording — were sufficient to establish her as the most influential female voice in country music history, the standard against which every subsequent woman in the genre has been measured.