ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Patsy Cline’s voice and what she did with it. There is concordance between Patsy’s performing look and that of both Hank Williams and Elvis Presley. Patsy projected confidence not least by how freely she moved about the stage during performances, freely: like a man, one might say, owning the space. The apparent contradictions evident in the performance styles as well as the messy personal lives of these singers engender an ambiguity of a simultaneously exciting and culturally provocative sort. At the least, the contradictions constitute a partially masked refusal to adhere to standards of propriety established for a postwar culture of re-domestication, a culture built on self-contradictory and increasingly complex erotic economies of controlled role playing. Patsy’s singing betrays no break between her low chest voice and her high head voice. The low and middle range is richly colorful, the high range crystalline.
