“I haven’t shared this with a lot of people,” Jean begins. “The day of the plane crash I had a fifteen-month-old son, and I was eight months pregnant. We lived in this kind of old-fashioned home. And I was so huge with child that I couldn’t bend over the bathtub to give my fifteen-month-old a bath. In the kitchen we had this real old-timey sink, about three feet long. So that evening, I was bathing him in this sink.
“Randy Hughes’s wife Kathy had called me and told me that Randy had called her from Dyersburg [in West Tennessee] to say that they were coming on in. The weather looked rough, but they thought they could make it. And she said she heard Hawkshaw holler in the background, ‘Tell Kathy to call Jean for me.’ So she called me.
“Well, I was giving the baby a bath, and all of a sudden I thought I was going into labor. It really scared me. I got so weak that I couldn’t stand up. I started shaking all over. I broke out in a cold sweat. I had a little kitchen step stool, and I reached and pulled it over and sat down so the baby wouldn’t fall. I sat there for what must have been fifteen or twenty minutes. I was literally so weak and shaken that I couldn’t control myself. It was just a horrible feeling.”
As Jean later learned, “It was just about the time of the plane crash that I had this feeling come over me.
“I went on and put the baby down and went to bed about 10:30 or so. About 11:00 or 11:30 the phone rang, and it was one of Hawkshaw’s fan club representatives from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She called me and said, ‘What are you doing?’ I was pretty irritable, being eight months pregnant, you know. I said, ‘I am doing what all good people should be doing this time of night. I’m sleeping.’ She said, ‘Oh my God, you don’t know.’ When she said that, I knew something was very bad and wrong. She started crying, and she was getting pretty hysterical. I said, ‘I have to get off the phone. I have to call somebody. I’m here by myself.’
“So I got up and switched on the little bedside radio. Grant Turner, I think, was on the air. I called Smiley and Kitty Wilson, some very dear friends of ours. They came to the house. And we sat the rest of the night out, by the television set.
“It was a nightmare. It was hell.”
Meanwhile, Kathy Copas Hughes and her mother Lucille had driven to Nashville’s small Cornelia Fort airfield to get its lights turned on in anticipation of the plane’s arrival. Kathy was Randy’s wife and Cowboy Copas’s daughter.
“We sat in the car and waited and waited,” Kathy recalled. “It shouldn’t have taken Randy more than forty-five minutes to get home. We began to suspect something had gone wrong. We asked the attendant if he’d heard anything. There was no word. Then something snapped in me. I knew immediately something had, indeed, gone wrong. The attendant suggested it might be better if we went home and waited for further news or in case someone was trying to reach us.”
At home, they too heard the news of the missing flight via broadcaster Grant Turner on WSM. The phone began ringing just after 8:00 p.m., and soon the house began to fill with friends.
Patsy’s husband, Charlie Dick, was playing with their children Randy and Julie early in the evening. Around 7:30 he began to get worried. Around 8:00 some friends arrived at the house. They had heard the news of the vanished flight on the radio. Dottie West, Billy Walker, Mother Maybelle Carter, Roger Miller, June Carter, and other close friends were soon by Charlie’s side.
Future Grand Ole Opry star Jan Howard was roused from her sleep by a telephone call around midnight. It was songwriter Hank Cochran, who’d penned the Patsy Cline hits “She’s Got You” and “I Fall to Pieces,” and he was spooked. Two record albums had suddenly fallen off a shelf, one of Jan’s and one of Patsy’s. When he heard from Jan that everything was okay at her house, he said he knew that there was “something wrong” with Patsy. Like the others, Jan turned on the radio.
“An all-night disc jockey . . . was saying something about a plane being lost,” Jan recalls. “Then he mentioned the names of the passengers. Oh my God. It was Patsy, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Cowboy Copas, and Randy Hughes. . . . The phone rang again. Before Hank could talk, I said, ‘I’ve just heard. I’m going over to Jean’s.’ Jean Shepard was married to Hawk and was expecting a baby at any time.
“Driving over, I thought, ‘God! How could this be happening? We were playing cards with Jean and Hawk just a few nights ago.’”
Meanwhile, over at Hawk and Jean’s house, the Wilsons called her physician. Jean was in a daze. The doctor had to give her a sedative and began monitoring the baby’s heartbeat every half hour. Minnie Pearl and her husband Henry Cannon arrived and began keeping vigil with Skeeter Davis and Jean’s other Opry friends.
Things got worse. The next day, gawkers and sightseers began showing up outside Jean and Hawk’s house. Governor Frank Clement ordered the Tennessee Highway Patrol to post guards to watch over her and the other victims’ families.
Searchers found the plane’s wreckage near Camden, Tennessee, on the morning of March 6, 1963. A 6-foot crater on a hillside where the plane had hit was filled with water. Clothing, personal effects, plane wreckage, and pieces of flesh were strewn over a 60-foot area. One police officer described it as the most gruesome accident scene he’d ever seen. No one survived. The victims had to be identified by their wallets.
Returning from Kansas City, Randy Hughes had landed with his famous passengers at Dyersburg, Tennessee, to refuel. He was told there that proceeding any farther was extremely dangerous because of severe weather conditions. Instead, he blundered onward into the turbulence. He was not an experienced enough pilot to fly by instrument readings when visibility became impossible.
“It was a crash that never should have happened,” says former WSM disc jockey Ralph Emery. “The weather was bad and showed no sign of clearing despite Randy’s assurances to Patsy when they set down in Dyersburg, Tennessee. Bill Braese, the airport manager, even pulled Randy aside and warned him not to take off. But Randy was a daredevil at heart.” Randy Hughes was well known at the Grand Ole Opry, because in addition to being Patsy’s manager, he was a guitarist who’d backed many of the show’s stars, both onstage and in the recording studio.
GRAND OLE OPRY STAR Bill Anderson was particularly affected by the loss of Cowboy Copas, whom he greatly admired. “He was a jewel of a human being,” Bill recalls. “Once, on a tour of Michigan, the promoter had not provided a band for several of the acts who were working as singles, and Cope stayed out onstage every night after his part of the show was over and picked guitar behind me and all the others. I never forgot his unselfishness and true professionalism.” Bill also remembers Cowboy as an amusing mimic and a hilarious storyteller.
At age forty-nine, Cowboy Copas was the oldest of the accident’s victims. He was also the first to become a star, having rocketed to fame in 1946 with his debut single, the World War II–themed “Filipino Baby.” Born Lloyd Estel Copas on July 15, 1913, he was a native of Blue Creek, Ohio, a small town in the southern part of the state, near its Ohio River boundary with Kentucky. Cope, as he was called by his friends, began his musical career after dropping out of school at age fourteen. He was an excellent flattop acoustic guitarist who teamed up with fiddler Lester Vernon Storer, known professionally and costumed as “Natchee the Indian.” Accordingly, Cope took the nickname “Cowboy” and was advised to say he was born on a ranch in Oklahoma to add to the image.
He married Lucille Markins Copas in 1934 in Covington, Kentucky, which is across the river from Cincinnati. As Cope went from show to show, from radio station to radio station, the newlyweds literally lived in their automobile. He eventually joined the cast of the Boone County Jamboree at WLW in Cincinnati. But his biggest early career boost came when he began touring as a vocalist in Pee Wee King’s Golden West Cowboys, then one of the flashiest and most successful road attractions in country music.
In the wake of “Filipino Baby,” Cowboy Copas was invited into the Grand Ole Opry cast in 1946. In 1948, he sang the classic “Signed, Sealed and Delivered” and had the first h
it version of the immortal “Tennessee Waltz.” In 1951–1952, Cope had big hits with “The Strange Little Girl” and “’Tis Sweet to Be Remembered.”
The flip side of “The Strange Little Girl” was a tune called “You’ll Never Ever See Me Cry,” which the star recorded as a duet with his sixteen-year-old daughter, Kathy Copas. They also recorded duets such as “Copy Cat” and “I Love You (My Darling, I Love You)” in the early 1950s. Kathy joined her father on the Opry stage and became a part-time member of The LaDell Sisters at Opry shows.
Because “Signed, Sealed and Delivered,” “Tennessee Waltz,” and such Cowboy Copas favorites as “Tennessee Moon” and “Kentucky Waltz” were all in 3/4 time, WSM announcers dubbed the singer “The Waltz King of the Grand Ole Opry.” He sang “Signed, Sealed and Delivered” and “Blue Pacific Waltz” in the 1949 feature film Square Dance Jubilee.
“These were good years,” son Gary Copas reminisced. “It wasn’t uncommon for Dad to have two and sometimes three records on the nation’s top-ten country song listings. In one week’s time more than 3,000 people wrote WSM for a picture of Dad. He was traveling 150,000 miles a year and singing to thousands of fans. In 1948, he was voted the #1 country and western performer by Cash Box magazine. Then the good years turned to lean years.”
Cowboy Copas scored no more hits in the 1950s decade. But in 1960, he surged back with the number-one success “Alabam,” the biggest hit of his career. It sat at number one for three solid months. In 1961, it was followed by the back-to-back hits “Flat Top” and “Sunny Tennessee,” then a second recording of “Signed, Sealed and Delivered.”
“Perhaps the greatest single thing that can be said about Dad was that he was a friend to man,” Gary Copas said. “He was always ready to say a kind word of encouragement, shake a hand, or work a benefit show in order to help others.”
Like Hawkshaw Hawkins, Patsy Cline, and a number of other Opry stars, Cowboy Copas had traveled to Kansas City to put on a benefit show for the widow and children of country disc jockey Cactus Jack Call, who’d been killed in a car crash. Unlike most of the other stars, Cope, Hawk, and Patsy had elected to fly there in a plane owned by Cope’s son-in-law, novice flyer Randy Hughes. Because of Randy’s call to his wife, Kathy was the first to realize that a tragedy had occurred. She lost both her husband and her father on March 5, 1963. Their son Larry Hughes later became a successful country-record promoter for MCA Records and other labels.
On the Friday before he left, Cope delivered his newest single to WSM disc jockey Ralph Emery and made an appointment to appear on the broadcaster’s Monday-night show. That night, Ralph stared at an empty chair. But he played the final Cowboy Copas recording, just as he’d promised. It bore the prophetic title “Goodbye Kisses.”
HAWKSHAW HAWKINS ALSO HAD a posthumous hit. In fact, it became the biggest hit of his career. In late 1962, Hawk had recorded “Lonesome 7-7203,” written by fellow Grand Ole Opry star Justin Tubb (1935–1998). It first appeared on the country-music charts just three days before the fatal plane crash. The tune occupied the number-one spot on the country charts for a solid month in the spring of 1963.
Hawkshaw Hawkins was just forty-one years old at the time of his death. He was born Harold Franklin Hawkins on December 22, 1921, in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. As a boy, he reportedly traded five rabbits he’d trapped to get his first guitar. He also picked up his nickname “Hawkshaw” as a youngster. Hawk won a talent contest in Huntington, West Virginia, at age fifteen. This got him a spot on the city’s WSAZ radio station. Early in his career, he also worked at WCHS in Charleston, West Virginia, and at WCMI in Ashland, Kentucky.
During World War II, Hawk earned four battle stars for combat in the Battle of the Bulge in Europe. Then he was shipped to the Pacific. While in the Philippines, he performed on a Manila radio station.
After the war, he signed a 1946 recording contract with King Records and joined the cast of the Wheeling Jamboree on WWVA. His smooth, rich baritone voice, good looks, and commanding stage presence made Hawkshaw Hawkins an immediate favorite in the Mountain State. In his cowboy boots, he stood more than 6 feet 6 inches tall.
During 1947, WWVA received five thousand requests for Hawkshaw Hawkins photos. That was also the year that the CBS radio network picked up the Jamboree for nationwide broadcasting, furthering his fame. As an emerging country heartthrob, Hawk appeared on the cover of National Hillbilly News in July–August 1947. He had his first big hit the following year, his rendition of the Hank Williams tune “Pan American.” Later in 1948, he became one of the first country musicians to broadcast on television, appearing on an ABC regional network that hooked up Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore to his Hayloft Hoedown Saturday-night appearances in Philly.
By the early 1950s, Hawkshaw Hawkins had scored a number of top-ten hits, among them “Dog House Boogie,” “I’m Waiting Just for You,” and “Slow Poke.” He also popularized “Sunny Side of the Mountain” and used it as his theme song a decade before the tune became a bluegrass standard. In 1953, he signed with RCA Victor, and in 1954, he joined the cast of the Ozark Jubilee. It became a national TV show the following year.
“I met Hawkshaw when he first came to the Ozark Jubilee in Springfield, Missouri,” recalls Jean Shepard. “With a wonderful man, Mr. Red Foley, we did the Ozark Jubilee together. And then he came on to Nashville to join the Grand Ole Opry [in 1955], and I followed a few months later.
“Hawkshaw had become a member. I had moved to Nashville, and I talked to him about becoming a member. Mr. Jim Denny, who was the head of the Grand Ole Opry at that time, got up in the middle of this meeting. It was at what we called the Disc Jockey Convention back then. He said, ‘We would like to welcome the newest member of the Grand Ole Opry, Jean Shepard! Happy birthday, Jean.’ That’s why I can never, ever forget the day I became an Opry member. It was November twenty-first, my birthday.”
At the Opry, Hawk became close friends with Don Gibson and Marty Robbins. His friendship with Marty was particularly strong. The two would take turns sneaking into each other’s performances and deliberately playing off key. They also competed on the baseball diamond, Hawk being a particularly fearsome batter. Despite his height, Hawk also raced micromidget autos opposite Marty. Neither man drank alcohol.
Like Marty, Hawkshaw Hawkins was a master showman. He told jokes easily and was always comfortable in front of a crowd. And he eventually incorporated trained horses, rope twirling, gunplay, and whip tricks into his act. Opry manager Jim Denny booked Jean Shepard into Hawk’s touring package. Although signed to Capitol Records, she also surreptitiously sang harmony on Hawk’s RCA discs.
“We began to work a lot of dates together. And, um, it was just inevitable. Hawkshaw and myself, we got married in Wichita, Kansas, at the Forum, onstage there. Hap Peebles was a great country-music promoter, and he arranged it. They broadcast the ceremony on the radio, too. Except I wouldn’t let them broadcast it when we went into the ‘I do’ parts, when the real personal stuff came in. So, yeah, we shared it with the fans, and I still see fans all over the country who say, ‘I saw you and Hawkshaw when you got married in Wichita, Kansas.’”
With approximately four thousand in attendance, the wedding day was November 26, 1960. The couple named their first child Don Robin, after Hawk’s buddies Don Gibson and Marty Robbins.
“Hawk was strictly a man’s man,” Jean recollects. “He liked to hunt, he liked to fish, he liked to ride horses. Strictly an outdoorsman.” The couple socialized with Opry stars Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper, Hawk’s old friends from WWVA. “We played canasta, and me and Wilma Lee would whip ’em every time,” notes Jean. When Stoney suffered a heart attack, Hawk visited him often to help nurse his friend back to health. On one trip to the house, he brought a chicken, wrang its neck, made chicken soup, and fed it to Stoney.
They called Hawkshaw Hawkins “Eleven and a Half Yards of Personality,” but capturing that charisma on disc eluded him thr
ough most of his recording career. Hawk had moved to Marty’s label, Columbia Records, in 1959. “Soldier’s Joy” was his most successful song with that company.
In September 1962, Hawkshaw Hawkins returned to his original label, King Records. In a three-day period, he recorded what turned out to be his last twelve songs. “Lonesome 7-7203” was originally intended for Jean Shepard, because songwriter Justin Tubb thought it sounded more like a woman’s song. She recorded it, but Capitol never issued her version. Hawk heard his wife’s recording and immediately sensed that the song was a smash. Before he left for Kansas City in 1963, he gave a copy of his version of the tune to WSM disc jockey Ralph Emery with the inscription “Play the hell out of this, Hoss.”
“Lonesome 7-7203” went on to become a country standard. It has been revived on the charts by Burl Ives (1967), Tony Booth (1972), and Darrell Clanton (1984) and has appeared on albums by Roy Drusky, Hank Snow, Loretta Lynn, Brian Gale, Carl Smith, Webb Pierce, Don Walser, Ernest Tubb, and Tex Williams, among many others.
On April 8, 1963, Jean had their second son, Harold Franklin Hawkins II. Marty Robbins wrote a touching song for the fatherless kids called “Two Little Boys” and assigned its copyright to them. Jean recorded it on the flip side of her 1964 smash hit “Second Fiddle.”
Alas, today Hawkshaw Hawkins and Cowboy Copas are known to most casual country fans as “the guys who died in the Patsy Cline plane crash,” their memories forever overshadowed by a towering legend. Patsy is arguably the greatest female country vocalist in history. More than forty years after her death, she continues to be the standard by which every female country talent must measure herself.
PATSY’SGREATEST HITSALBUM, released in 1967, has sold more than ten million copies. It is the largest-selling hits package by any woman in any field of music. She was the first solo female inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame (1973). The Grammy Hall of Fame includes her recordings of “Crazy” and “I Fall to Pieces,” and she has been given a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1995). She has been honored with a U.S. postage stamp (1993) and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (1999). In 2002, she placed first on the CMT countdown of the Forty Greatest Women in Country Music. Her life has become the basis for several TV documentaries, four stage productions, eight books, an Oscar-nominated feature film, and a number of tribute albums.
Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain Page 12