Fan Mail

It has always made sense to me that you would become friends with your fans - after all, they are obviously people with great taste in music! Many people that have become dear to me started out as people I got chit-chatting to at one of my gigs.

I have also ended up meeting musicians I admired from afar and becoming friends.

Some fans have shown me immense acts of kindness. When I was on tour in Europe and so poor and stressed about how poor I was, a mystery $1000 was deposited into my bank account. I later found out it was from Hondo, an old family friend and devoted fan of music that always came to my gigs - who lived in a boarding house and, to my knowledge, was living pretty hand to mouth himself. He had heard about my predicament from my parents, dropped off the cash and insisted they deposit the funds for me but keep him anonymous. This gift gave me so much freedom, food and peace I would not have otherwise had.

I have also been the lucky recipient (along with many of my musical compadres) of the attention of a group of four lovely chaps who collectively referred to themselves as ‘The Wall of Men’, that would travel super long distances from the outskirts of Sydney together to attend my various performances over the years, always arriving early to get a good spot, and not leaving til the end. They feel like family now.

Lovely Ron from ‘the Wall’, who is no longer with us here on Earth, also once sent me a gift of $1000 in crumpled notes, tucked inside a beautiful card with a red rose on the front, to put towards a recording of me and my dad. He insisted he didn’t want it paid back. He would also send me hand-burnt bootleg CDs of Neil Young concerts and once told me he only listened to Neil Young, Nick Cave and me.

Lovely Paul from ‘the Wall’, who is very much with us, once gave my girlfriend and I an entire case of Zubrowka Bison Grass vodka that I think had been left behind at his house by a Polish girlfriend, which kept us happy at cocktail hour for months. Dear Jeff from ‘the Wall’, pictured below wearing a band t-shirt with my face on it, with me, Sam and Cec after a show, made high quality mini-disc recordings of hundreds of gigs and shared them with me, preserving the highs and lows of so many sweaty nights that would have otherwise been left to dust.

Photographer Derby walked into a gig I was playing with my then band Automatic Cherry in the mid 1990s and took a bunch of photos, turning up at the next one to give me a packet of photographs, a generous act that was to be repeated ad-finitum, provided me with photographs I could use for promo that I otherwise couldn’t have afforded to have, and most importantly to me, has given me an extensive archive tracking my musical adventures. We ended up becoming great friends and collaborating on various photo shoots, album covers and occasional boozy lunches. He has gone on to become an amazing and prolific photographer.

David, another fan turned friend, videoed every gig I played for a couple of years, often including soundchecks, a gave me a treasure trove of meticulously notated VHS copies for my own archives.

I met Leesa, one of my dearest forever friends, at one of my gigs, and she started helping me out by walking around gigs with a hand made cigarette-girl-style merch tray convincing punters to buy my stuff. No one could resist her charms and I went from selling hardly anything to selling out. Especially when she verbally rebranded my admittedly very small and strange looking handmade tea towels as ‘Loene Carmen jizz rags’. True. I’ve just spent an hour looking for photographic evidence of Leesa and said items to no avail, but I can assure she looked so great, and is now a highly in-demand international tour manager.

I lived right around the corner from the fairytale style ‘Snow White’ cottages where Elliot Smith lived for a while in LA, and I thought about him daily as I made my unavoidable pilgrimage to Gelsons, the local supermarket. Sometimes I would will myself to not stare at his place, imagining him writing songs in the bathtub I read once that he illegally installed in the attic, as I drove or walked by, but it was a magnet I couldn’t resist.

But this story isn’t about me, its about how easy it is to imagine how easy it would be to make a genuine connection with someone whose music you love, because it can feel like they can see into your soul and know exactly how you feel. It was definitely not hard for me to imagine Elliot and I would be friends if we had met.

Last night I read an essay that kinda made me weep, written by a 40 year old woman with the fabulous name of Kirby Rock, who had written a fan letter to Elliot Smith (via his label (Kill Rock Stars) when she was a 17 year old budding musician and writer. In the Huffington Post essay she explains “He laid himself so bare in his music, and when I listened to his songs, it felt like reading a diary. It wasn’t just the lyrics – it was his soft singing style, his careful finger-picking, the way he layered vocal tracks so tenderly. I felt like I knew him, like I was a friend he trusted with his secrets.” She says she just wanted to thank him. She told him ‘I try to write my own songs and make them as unique and personal to me as your work is to you’ and said that he was worth the time it took her to write him and that she knew he’d keep ‘kicking ass’. Kirby never heard back, and she wasn’t surprised or disappointed by this. It was the only fan letter she ever wrote.

Shoot forward twenty six years later, to now, 2026, and Kirby receives an email out of the blue from Jamie Fisher, a writer working on a Elliot Smith biography (Nobody Broke Your Heart, Penguin Random House) who had discovered her fan letter amongst Elliot’s papers. They ended up on a phone call together where Jamie revealed that Elliot had replied to her, but the letter was never sent, for whatever reason. Amongst other things, Elliot wrote to her “I’m glad you see creativity in yourself, the world needs as much of it as it can get, so go out and kick ass!”. Jamie and Kirby both ended up in tears talking about the discovery. Kirby says that she had let the demands of life get in the way of her creativity, as happens to the best of us, and that reading his words all these years later, inspired her to get back into her writing and music.

Patsy Cline was known to exchange incredibly personal letters with a bunch of fans. These epistolary relationships have gone on to keep the flame of Patsy’s legend alive.

At a Houston honkytonk in 1961, Patsy started chatting and hit it off with a local woman, Louise Seger - described in various articles I’ve read as ‘tough-talking’ - before her show and they ended up sending each other letters until Patsy’s shocking death by plane crash in 1963.

Louise died in 2004 but her story is below. I bet she and Patsy and yakking it up in Honky Tonk Heaven.

Louise Seger called KIKK Houston radio throughout the day from home and her job to request Patsy Cline records. In early May (1961), while she was speaking to deejay Hal Harris, she learned that Patsy would be playing the Esquire Ballroom. She spread the news and gathered together a group of friends, all dressed in western clothes, or the appearance at the gigantic barn- like club on Hempstead Highway. Louise had insisted they arrive early, and they did. In fact, they were the first. While enjoying her beer Louise looked up.
"I saw this girl looking over the place," recalled Louise. "I thought she was Patsy’s agent. The only time I’d seen Patsy was four years ago on Godfrey. Then something went ding, ding, ding!" Patsy took a seat three tables over from Louise, who was about to burst. She told her friends, "I’m going over there."
All eyes were on her as she walked slowly to the other table.
"Excuse me, Miss Cline?"
"Yes," Patsy said, smiling.
"I just wanted you to know how much I admire your music. I have ‘I Fall to Pieces’ played for me four or five times every day."… Louise introduced herself and asked Patsy to join her group…Patsy kept looking around the club. "This is a mighty damn big place, isn’t it?"
"Yes, ma’am," answered Louise, "but, boy, it’s gonna be packed."… "I’m worried about the band. I don’t know any of the
musicians and I wonder if they know my music. Do you?"
"Yes, ma’am, every beat."
"Would you do me a favor and, during the show, watch the drummer so he won’t rush me?"…
Louise happily complied… Around midnight, after Patsy signed autographs and posed for photos, Louise heard Patsy calling for a taxi to return to the Montague Hotel. "No, you’ll go with us. We’ll go to my house so you can have something to eat."… At the kitchen table [they sat] and talked about "broken hearts, husband problems, children problems, loves lost, loves won. We sounded like two people writing country songs."… They traded stories until almost 4:00 A.M…
[Louise talked Patsy into staying the night, so she could arrange for Harris to interview her. She called him at home.]
"Louise, do you know what time it is?"
"I had to reach you before you left for the station. I’ve got Patsy Cline at the house."
"And I’ve got Marilyn Monroe in bed. Now, honey, you sleep it off and I’ll play ‘I Fall to Pieces’ for you in the morning."
LATER THAT MORNING, LOUISE SHOWED UP AT THE STATION WITH PATSY AND IMMENSELY ENJOYED HAL HARRIS’ REACTION :
"Hal fell through his asshole and hung himself !" . . .

The letters between them were adapted into the long-running hit musical, Always … Patsy Cline.

In 1955, Patsy was supporting the Louvin Brothers at a County Fair in East Tennessee when seventeen-year-old Treva Miller (then Steinbecker), hit Patsy up after her show to ask for her autograph and how to join her fan club. When Patsy said she didn’t have one, Treva offered to start one. In an exchange of nearly 50 letters before Treva’s death by car-accident in 1960 - alongside the radio DJ she married after pestering him to play Patsy’s records - they strategise music business promo and share intimate details about music, money, marriage and divorce.

In 1956, Patsy is apologising for not being able to send Treva the $6 for monthly fan mail postage costs. She tells Treva that she and her mother Hilda are sewing Western costumes for cocktail waitresses at a hotel in Washington as a money making side-hustle. She is grateful to Treva for all the work she has done compiling Patsy’s write-ups ‘Well I’ve never been soo thrilled in my life as I was when I opened up the mail and found my own journal, and to see what a wonderful job you all have done. I think it is just wonderfull. The pictures are good and the write ups are fine. I didn’t realize there was enough news me to make a book as you all have done. Treva I think you have done wonderfull, and my thanks to you & Bruce can never be enough’. Treva is basically running the 1950s equivalent of Patsy’s social media.

She predicates her divorce from the showbiz disapproving, ten-years-older Gerald Cline, telling Treva in a letter she wrote from her trailer on tour ‘I’ve been married 3 1/2 years and in ‘55 in June I left him because he’s just so jealous of my singing. This past Nov we went back together but I’m afraid things aren’t going to work out.’ Eventually she writes ‘He told me if I was gonna sing, I wasn’t going to live with him. So I’m back home’. By 1957 she’s had a hit with ‘Walkin’ After Midnight’ and writes Treva: ‘Bill McCall still hasn’t give me my money on “Walkin.” I’ve got 2 lawyers working on it.’. Another time she tells Treva about a bunch of exciting music things she has coming up and says ‘so tune me in gal. I’m so happy about it I could pop. Ha!’.

In 1959, Patsy stepped in to replace Kitty Wells on a show at a Maryland nightclub, when Kitty had an issue with the liquor license - Patsy didn’t much care about where she played so long as she got paid. It was a family run venue and one of the sisters that ran it, Marie Flynt, was also an aspiring singer. She and Patsy connected backstage, beginning a deeply intimate back-and-forth correspondence detailing her toxic relationship with second husband Charlie Dick and her career travails and triumphs until a month before Patsy’s death in 1963. Its an incredibly revealing and fairly heartbreaking document of life of an up and coming country music artist, with some brilliant Southern turns of phrase I might have to test out sometime.

Patsy tells Marie about performing the 8.30 spot at the Grand Ole Opry the same night she went into labour with her son in January 1961 and by May of the same year she’s writing ‘On top of every thing else I was ready to get a divorce I’m tired of being left one night a week all night long & never knowing where he was. And tired of everything in all...Sun morn, he had been home 2 ½ hrs. from being out all night drunk...I’m sick of this shit...if these 2 kids weren’t here I would never have come home I’ll tell you that for sure. I’m at the point where I’m just sick in health, happiness & my mind & nerves are shot...Now! Some good news. My record is #5 in C&W and is 70 some in pop & still climbing. I’ve got a chance to be the star singer on the Don McNeill Breakfast Club Radio Network Show regularly (waiting to hear from them) and the Opry is going on T.V. Network coast to coast..’.

6 September 1961: As for here, it’s the same ole thing I took him on the last half of this tour & he proceeded to get drunk every dam night...I get so dam fed up I could scream. I’m at that point again where it don’t matter where he is to me anymore. He’s just not man enough to take it is the only think I can see. I mean the having me where I am now & a wife. But I’m gonna put away as much of this money as I can & then when I get sick enough of it I’ll be able to live with out my dam man...

8 July 1962:. ...I got the hell beat out of me two weeks ago and had his ass locked up to get sober & cool off. Then I slapped him with devorce papers and he moved out for two weeks. Then with the lawyers & his begging and pleading, I went soft and let him come back. But the devorce hasn’t been dropped. I can go ahead with it anytime things don’t go like I want them to. All I have to do is pick up the phone & say ‘go ahead with it’ & it’s over in four months. So he knows I mean what I say. No drinkin and no calling me names anymore...

Beginning of August 1962 she writes that she’s pregnant again with her third child, ‘I’m in bed now trying to keep it. Had the Dr last night and he said he thought I’d lose it yet. I sure am sick I know that. I’ve got low blood and it’s kinda early after losing all that blood from the wreck he don’t think I could carry it the whole time any way. I sure didn’t want to get this way but looks like I don’t have much to say about it’. By the end of the month she has miscarried.

‘Not enough blood and run down was the only thing they could find. So I’m up and out on the road again. Been trying to get a letter wrote to you but just didn’t feel like it these last 2 wks...Well, I don’t remember if I read in your letters that you got my new album or not but I’ll send you one anyway...So N.Y. says it’s selling like wild fire. The Showcase sold 60,000 copies up till June 30th. That’s not bad Heck at 18¢ each for me? And this new one they say will do better than that. Honestly Ree, I can’t believe that I’m at long last able to make a little money off of records. I never got a check for records for 7 years that I recorded & now it’s like a dream. But I sure am greatfull for it & thank God for all these great things that have happened...My one song I found for my next session is one called ‘Why Can’t He Be You’. Another darn ballad, but Decca says that’s what they want, that that’s my way of getting thru to the people, so guess I can’t do anything else. But I sure would like to change the pace once in a while...Don Gibson has divorced his wife and Johnny Cash & June Carter are all hung up. What a mess...

End of 1962 she writes to Marie about a hellish promotional tour: ‘that Decca man canceled my plane tickets to Toronto for that nite & had me do 4 T.V. hops of nothing but jigs. And I told him I wanted to eat & stop for a drink & he said ‘Did you come here to promote or fool around & act like a star. I have my orders from my boss here & I’m going to see to it that you fill the bill.’ I got a sandwich at Midnight that nite & got to bed after 2 a.m. and cried myself silly on the phone to Randy & Rome...Well, it looks like it Heart Aches all the way dam it. They said in Philly & Detroit that this one had already sold more than Fall To Pieces did at its peak. I still can’t believe it. Anyway, I shouldn’t complain if it’s a hit period...’.

By her last letter, Patsy is excited by how well her career is going and that she’s being recognised wherever she goes. She tells Marie about her manager Randy’s solution to getting her to a million places at once to keep up with demands. ‘Some time Randy flies his own plane and takes me to my dates, and it’s less money for me when he does...I’ve been busier than a one arm man in a nest of bees...I recorded a jewel of an album this time I think. I don’t know when they will release it but they want it out as fast as possible I know. We really got some wild arrangements on some of the songs.’

Ruth Franklin, the author of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, recently wrote in her Substack newsletter Ghost Stories about driving four hours to a barn in the middle of nowhere to spend days searching through stacks of papers, dust and mouse droppings to find a stash of sixty letters written by Shirley to a fan she never met - letters that filled in so many gaps in Shirley’s story and were revelatory in their personal and intimate details. Ruth writes ‘A hazard of women’s biography, I was beginning to learn, is that one’s subject tends to correspond with other women, whose papers often go unpreserved.’ Its a great story, you should read it if how history gets made is as much your thing as it is mine.

Hoping you’re busier than a one arm man in a nest of bees and so happy you could pop!

Lo x

Leave a comment