Patsy Cline Historic House

The modest Kent Street home where the country music icon lived from age 16 to 21, just before her breakthrough.

The small clapboard house at 608 S. Kent Street is where Virginia Patterson Hensley — later known as Patsy Cline — lived with her family from 1948 to 1953, between the ages of 16 and 21. These were the years she was honing her voice in local honky-tonks and trying to break into the music business, years before "Walkin' After Midnight" and "Crazy" made her one of the defining voices in country music. The house has been restored to its period appearance and is open for guided tours.

The interior is furnished to reflect how the Hensley family lived during those years — modest and working-class, with a young woman rehearsing obsessively in a house too small to contain her ambitions. The museum also holds photographs, costumes, and memorabilia from Cline's career. She died in a plane crash in March 1963, at 30 years old. The house is a short walk from the Old Town district, and many visitors combine it with a stop at her grave at Shenandoah Memorial Park.

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Cline's rise was not without resistance. When she auditioned for the Grand Ole Opry in the early 1950s, she was rejected. When she finally got her first national television appearance on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts in 1957, winning first place with "Walkin' After Midnight," her label had been so skeptical of the song that she'd almost refused to record it. She was 24 and had been performing since she was eight years old.

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