Patsy cline biography early life

Early Years

Cline was born Virginia Patterson Hensley, in a Winchester hospital, on September 8, 1932. Her parents, forty-three-year-old Samuel Lawrence Hensley, a blacksmith, and his second wife, sixteen-year-old Hilda Virginia Patterson Hensley, had married six days before the birth.

Until 1937 Hensley lived on her paternal grandparents’ farm near Elkton and with her maternal grandparents in Gore, just outside Winchester in Frederick County.

Patsy cline biography early life

The Hensley family moved nineteen times in sixteen years to various towns in the Shenandoah Valley, including Lexington, and during World War II to Portsmouth. They had returned to Winchester by 1948, when Samuel Hensley deserted his wife and three children.

Hensley quit school shortly after her sixteenth birthday and to help support her family began working, first in a poultry plant and then later at a bus depot and as a soda clerk at a drugstore. She also began singing professionally at night and on weekends to supplement the money he