In retrospect, it’s hard to realize that “Faded Love” would not immediately become the nation’s best-loved fiddle ballad. In late 1950, Bob helplessly watched as his father’s old tune struggled up the country charts, peaking at only #8. In an era when Hank Snow’s “I’m Movin’ On” stayed on the Billboard survey for almost a year (including 21 weeks at number one alone), the Playboys’ “Faded Love” managed just five weeks total. Even before the record finished its short run and radio stations stopped playing the song, MGM dropped the act. It would be ten years before Bob Wills’ name appeared once again on the charts.
For all practical purposes, “Faded Love” should have been forgotten, yet it wasn’t. The combination of the song’s beautiful old melody and the newly-added heartfelt lyrics wouldn’t let it die. It began to gain fresh life almost as soon as Bob’s record fell from the playlists. Within months, “Faded Love” was appearing not only on country albums, but in big-band and solo pop releases too. “Faded Love” remained alive via LPs and concert sets for over a decade. Then the song really began to bloom.
Patsy Cline had just come off her best year, and was expecting even more great things in 1963. Cline was about to go back into the studio to try to follow up her biggest hit, “She’s Got You,” when she heard folk-rocker Jackie DeShannon singing “Faded Love” on her car radio (DeShannon’s version barely tapped the pop chart at #97). As Patsy listened, she got caught up in the old song’s potential. She was determined to convince her producer Owen Bradley to let her record it. In what was to be her final recording sessions (a three-day period between February 4th and 7th of 1963), Cline laid down a dozen tracks. The first song she completed on the 4th was the Bob Wills swing standard, only she did it in her own torchy style, on which she was incomparable. Her emotional rendering of “Faded Love” is a haunting one, especially the finish of the song when it seems that she’s about to break down at the end, pausing and taking a deep, audible breath before singing the last note. Many thought the track was ruined, but producer Bradley did not ask for a re-take, a prophetic decision considering the plane crash that took Patsy’s life a month and a day after she recorded “Faded Love.” In the weeks that followed Patsy’s death, her distraught husband Charlie would constantly listen to her take that breath at the end of “Faded Love” and exclaim, “She’s not dead! Here she is living, breathing!”