Patsy Cline's Dream House — Goodlettsville

In 1962, Patsy Cline and her husband Charlie Dick purchased a red-brick ranch house at 815 Nella Drive in Goodlettsville, Tennessee — a Nashville suburb north of the city — for $30,000 and furnished it to Cline's exacting specifications. She called it her dream house and spoke of it in interviews with the pride of someone who had spent most of her life in rented rooms and other people's spaces. The four-bedroom house with its two-car garage and spacious grounds represented the material arrival of everything she had been working toward since she was a teenager performing for free at Shenandoah Valley dances: the career, the house, the ability to afford what she wanted.

She lived in the house for less than a year. Cline died in a plane crash on March 5, 1963, eight months after moving in. Her death came at the moment of her greatest commercial and artistic success — she had recorded 'Crazy', 'I Fall to Pieces', and 'Sweet Dreams' in the previous two years, and her crossover from country to pop audiences was accelerating. Charlie Dick and their children remained at the house after her death.

The house at 815 Nella Drive has been preserved as a historical landmark and is available for tours. It is furnished with period pieces and memorabilia that recreate its appearance during Cline's brief residence. Goodlettsville, a small city immediately north of Nashville, has embraced its Patsy Cline connection and developed heritage tourism around the site. The house is the most tangible surviving connection to the domestic life Cline built in the last year of her life — modest by contemporary celebrity standards, extraordinary by the standards of the working-class girl from Winchester who had wanted it for so long.