A Soundtrack for Heartache
by Casey N. Cep
Country music has its share of happy-go-lucky, love-struck tunes, but heartbreak has always ruled country radio. Sweet and sad like a sugar packet, some of them are about how a barstool can be your best friend; the better ones are revenge-fueled fantasies that burn your lips like Caroline reapers. They come and go like heartache itself, but there’s almost always a song about lost love somewhere near the top of the country charts.
The great country muse of the broken hearted is and always will be Patsy Cline. Crazy or not, she fell to pieces with the best of them. She’s on every one of my busted and broken playlists (“Gone Girl,” “Nor Hell a Fury,” “Camelot in Flames,” even “Fare Thee Well”) and I’ve sent her songs around like casseroles whenever heartbreak finds my friends. There’s just nothing better for a broken heart than Patsy Cline. Maybe it’s because I bought a class ring or maybe it’s because photographs are some of my only souvenirs, but my favorite of all her songs is “She’s Got You.”
It’s an easy enough story: the singer loves someone who no longer loves her. But the song has the economy of a sonnet: a signed picture, records, and a class ring are the only objects; me, you, and her are the only characters. The back and forth of the song isn’t between Cline and the one who left her, but Cline and the objects that person left behind.
“I’ve got your picture that you gave to me,” Cline begins, “and it’s signed with love, just like it used to be,” which would be fine, of course, if it weren’t for the fact that “I’ve got your picture, she’s got you.” The same sad fact is true for the records and the class ring: They’re still here, same as always, but the one who wore them and the one who gave them is gone, gone, gone.
A gospel group called the Jordanaires sings the backup ohs and ahs, bops, and why oh whys as “the Cline,” as Patsy liked to call herself, sings her anguished inventory. “I’ve got your memory,” she says, but then wonders, “or has it got me? I really don’t know, but I know it won’t let me be.” That little refrain grows and grows until it’s a desperate plea to “let me beeeeeeeee.”
It’s not surprising that the song first appeared on an album titled Sentimentally Yours, or that singer-songwriter Hank Cochran wrote it just for Patsy Cline. She sings every single syllable of it so perfectly that you can just see the embossed, wallet-size yearbook picture and the bright, gaudy Jostens class ring. It’s the Romeo and Juliet of country music: young love that ages and matures into something much more than itself. In only three minutes with only three “little things,” Cline convinces you that she’s had and then lost the greatest love of all time.
Roseanne Cash did a beautiful, smoky cover of the song a few years ago when she made a record called “The List.” Patsy Cline’s “She’s Got You” was one of the one hundred essential country songs that Johnny Cash listed for his daughter when she turned eighteen, and it made the cut of the twelve that Roseanne Cash covered for her record honoring her father’s list. Hard not to agree with them both that it’s one of the greatest songs in country music.
Country Time is an occasional column about country music.