Traveling back to a song I first heard at my grandparents house. My aunt lived there, too. My mother’s sister. She had this great 8-Track collection of old country and soundtracks from musicals like The Sound Of Music, and Mary Poppins. Besides the soundtracks, my favorite of those 8-Tracks were the ones of Patsy Cline.
Do you remember 8-Tracks? Do you have a favorite Patsy Cline song?
“Why can’t I forget the past,
start loving someone new?
Instead of having sweet dreams,
about you.”
“Sweet Dreams (Of You)” by Patsy Cline
from the album, The Patsy Cline Story (1963)
My Top 5 – September 29, 2011
1. My Aunt Annette was the country music fan in the family. She especially loved the women of country music. She had an 8-Track player and a couple of shoeboxes full of tapes. When I’d spend weeks in the summer at my grandparents, where she also lived, I would often hide out in Aunt Annette’s bedroom and listen to her music. This song, and Loretta Lynn’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man)” were my favorites. A summer or two later, I’d add Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” to that list favorites. I loved those unrequited love/heartbreak songs the women in 8-Track country sang to me.
2. I went on to love the biopic Sweet Dreams, along with Coal Miner’s Daughter, because of the music Aunt Annette introduced me to. The heartbreak of both movies, and the friendship between Patsy and Loretta, deeply affected me.
3. “Sweet Dreams (Of You)” would be particularly bittersweet to me later in life when it became part of a collection of songs that I shared with a man I once loved. He would tease me that I had a soft spot for tear-jerker songs, and that somehow I associated them with love songs. That it was honestly a kind of screwed up way to look at, and sing about, love. Perhaps he was right, though now I’d argue that the bittersweet and the tears ended up defining the love we had, and lost, in the end.
4. I think we all have that one person who haunts our dreams. The one who personifies the “what-if’s”, even if we know we should forget them completely. Close your eyes for a moment. Who did you think of? There’s someone. There always is.
5. This song is in my list of all-time favorite cover songs (written/recorded originally by Don Gibson).
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