In September 1952 Hensley auditioned for the country bandleader Clarence William “Bill” Peer, who had a radio show on a station in Martinsburg, West Virginia. She auditioned in Nashville for the Grand Ole Opry but was deemed too young.
She also began singing professionally at night and on weekends to supplement the money her mother made as a seamstress.ĭuring the next few years Hensley won amateur contests, sang both country and western tunes and popular standards on local radio stations, and performed with a number of bands. Hensley quit school shortly after her sixteenth birthday and to help support her family began working, first in a poultry plant and then later at a bus depot and as a soda clerk at a drugstore. They had returned to Winchester by 1948, when Samuel Hensley deserted his wife and three children. The Hensley family moved nineteen times in sixteen years to various towns in the Shenandoah Valley, including Lexington, and during World War II to Portsmouth.
Until 1937 Hensley lived on her paternal grandparents’ farm near Elkton and with her maternal grandparents in Gore, just outside Winchester in Frederick County. Her parents, forty-three-year-old Samuel Lawrence Hensley, a blacksmith, and his second wife, sixteen-year-old Hilda Virginia Patterson Hensley, had married six days before the birth. Cline was born Virginia Patterson Hensley, in a Winchester hospital, on September 8, 1932.
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