ROCK / Is she lonesome tonight: Friday is the 30th anniversary of Patsy Cline's death. Why are we still playing 'Crazy' after all these years? Mary Harron explains

'YOU ARE the most innocent, the most nervous, most truthful and honest performer I have ever seen,' Arthur Godfrey told the young Patsy Cline after her first appearance on his TV talent show - her big break. Innocent was not how most people saw Patsy, even then: she had come up the rough way and was, on the surface at least, hard-boiled, promiscuous, and ruthlessly ambitious. But Godfrey wasn't wrong. She had just sung the song that was to be her first hit, 'Walking After Midnight', with these eerie words:

I walk for miles along the highway

Well that's just my way

Of saying I love you

I'm always walking after midnight

Searching for you Behind her the rhythm is bouncy, but she sings those lines as if howling at the moon.

'Sincerity' is a cliche in country music, but it works in precise ways. Because the music depends on the telling of a story, it is vital for singers to find the mode that reflects the musical inner soul. For example: you'd think Patsy Cline would do a great version of 'Your Cheating Heart', but she doesn't. She's mournful, but not bitter enough: she lacks vengeance. Her true mode is existential loneliness: an isolation so complete that it comes as a surprise to hear she had a husband and children.

This sets her apart from the other great country singers, whose musical personas are their own lives magnified. Loretta Lynn is the artless mountain girl, even in a Nashville mansion. Tammy Wynette is an angel kneeling on the kitchen floor surrounded by weeping children and unreliable men - tender and wounded and helplessly optimistic. Their personal history seeps into their music until it seems the function of personal tragedy is to provide more songs. This is true whether or not they write their own material, because a singer constructs a persona simply by the songs she chooses.

Patsy Cline doesn't give you that kind of detail. There's no Tennessee mountain home, no trailer park, no runny-nosed kids or dishes in the sink. I always picture her in two settings. One is walking along that midnight highway. The other comes from what may be her best song, 'She's Got You', where she sits alone in her living-room, late at night, with a few objects in front of her: a photograph, a ring, a record spinning on the turntable.

This is pure urban dislocation. All very modern, and that may be one of the reasons why Patsy Cline is still selling 30 years after her death: the album Patsy Cline's Greatest Hits reached triple-platinum status last year. Her life story, however, is classic country. So much so that it was romanticised into a Hollywood movie, which focused on a sanitised version of her stormy marriage and starred Jessica Lange, a radiant piece of miscasting. The real Patsy was homely: a painted-up, sexy bulldog.

A more complex and interesting version of Patsy is found in Ellis Nassour's new biography Honky Tonk Angel (Virgin pounds 14.99, out on Friday), which also has the dirt on who she slept with during her scrabble to the top. She had a hard life, and it told on her. She was born poor in Virginia and her father walked out when she was 16, reducing her to singing on street corners for her family's supper. She worked behind a drugstore counter, sang at night and made a true country-music marriage to the aptly named Charlie Dick, who loved her but also drank, sponged, cheated on her and beat her up from time to time.

The only failing in Nassour's book, apart from a tendency to quote long conversations that he could not possibly have heard, is an overdose of premonition. ('She pulled back the drapes and stared into the early morning darkness. A strange mood overcame her . . .') She talked of early death and she was right; she was only 30 when the plane her manager was piloting went down in flames in the Tennessee hills. Her recording career had lasted eight years and three albums, but it was enough to make her country music's first female star.

Before her there was Kitty Wells, with her pure hillbilly whine, but Wells was old-fashioned and decorous: in contrast Patsy was modern, touched by rock'n'roll. You can hear her fine early rockabilly style, with its yodels and growls, on Rhino Records' Patsy Cline, Her First Recordings. (Fanatics can get the box set, The Patsy Cline Collection, on MCA, which has her complete works, including live performances and unreleased takes.)

She found her natural mode working with producer Owen Bradley, the architect of the Nashville Sound, who smoothed out her astonishing swoops and glides and steered her towards ballads. Cline turned into a torch singer as sophisticated as Peggy Lee, but with hard country roots that gave her an emotional kick. Her nearest vocal neighbour is not another woman but Willie Nelson, and her most famous recording, 'Crazy', was written by him. 'I'm crazy for feeling so lonely / Crazy, crazy for feeling so blue . . .' Wild and plaintive, it's a perfect anthem for hopeless obsession.

As in many of her songs, the lover has no real identity: he's more a vehicle for that cosmic loneliness she was so good at conveying. How she did it is a mystery. The biography gives the impression that she never spent one day on her own: she went straight from mother to husbands to children to travelling with the band. Perhaps that made her isolation worse. Maybe she just knew, as another country song says, that it's our fate 'to walk this lonesome valley all alone'. Or maybe she just had a great voice. As one of her musicians, Lightnin' Chance, put it: 'Patsy had a story to tell, and no one ever knew what it was'. -

(Photograph omitted)