By MARY EVA CASSADA
Special to The News & Record
Tony Ellis and Joe Adams might be forgiven for their overriding sense of deja vu tonight when the curtains go up on “Always … Patsy Cline.”
After all, they used to play with the Legend Herself.
Ellis, the fiddle player, and Adams, the steel guitarist, live within 30 miles of each other in central Ohio; this week they’re down South to help recreate the sounds and scenes that made a country gal from Winchester a mover and shaker in country music. The show is a special summer Prizery fund-raiser.
Both men, now in their late 60s, would go on to spend their careers (or part of them) in the field: Ellis played with Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys among others; Adams with Johnny Paycheck, Charlie Walker, Ferlin Husky and on Merle Haggard’s demo tape to Capitol Records. So why now would they come to Southside Virginia?
“It’s a good chance to play some of Patsy’s music,” said Ellis. His time with her “was a very notable point in our musical lives.”
And such fond, warm memories.
Ellis met the revered Cline in a decidedly unglamorous fashion. At a country music jamboree in Warrenton’s Whippoorwill Lake, where Ellis had gone to hear a well-known banjo player, he found Cline rushing down a hill, “through the leaves and branches” in “her cowgirlie outfit and little hat” headed for the stage but blocked by a barbed-wire fence.
Always the gentleman, Ellis parted the wires so Cline could climb through, and they introduced themselves.
Later, when Cline was in Nashville, Ellis would go to her home for jam sessions that he describes as “incredible.”
Ellis recalled that Cline loved the old traditional “Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane,” and he would play it on the banjo.
“We’d play til the wee hours of the morning,” said Ellis.
Like a wild Nashville party?
“There was no rowdiness at all,” Ellis insisted.
Adams, the steel guitar player, remembered meeting up at a Nashville bar called Tootsie’s (“Really, a trashy place,” Adams said.) After it would close down for the night, a group would head to Patsy’s for music-making.
And what was it like, being in the company of such a celebrity?
“It was just like talking to anybody,” Adams said. “She was just really fun. … She was a very fun person” whose interests ranged beyond the confines of her job.
Still, music was what cemented the friendships.
Even at the time, both men realized Cline had a special spark.
“What she did was absolutely incredible,” said Ellis. “It was like Johnny Cash and what he did or Elvis and what he did.”
“She was probably 20 years ahead of her time in terms of the songs she sang,” said Adams, recalling not only her evocative voice and her choice material but her decisions to back her singing with orchestras and big bands at a time when female singers were often chirpy window-dressing. “That was kind of unique in country.”
“She set the standard for female singers that’s never been equaled,” he said. When Loretta Lynn made her way to Nashville in Cline’s wake, “She wanted to be like Patsy. Everybody wanted to be like Patsy.”
Then there’s the hallmark song, the unforgettable, haunting “Crazy” – four decades later the No. 1 song Adams plays for female artists.
“That was written by Willie Nelson for her,” said Adams. “She’s the one who made Willie the money.”
Cline died in 1963 in a plane crash at the height of her career. She was 30.
Performances are also Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.; July 29, Sunday, matinee at 3 p.m.
August 2, 3, 4 at 8 p.m.
All seats are $20 and proceeds go straight to The Prizery. Call The Prizery box office at 572-8339 or purchase tickets online at www.prizery.com.