INCLINED TO BE JUST LIKE PATSY

By RICHARD CORLISS

She had all the makings of pop immortality: overnight stardom, singing Walkin' After Midnight on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts TV show; a string of pop and country hits (Crazy, She's Got You, I Fall to Pieces and the peerless heart crusher, Sweet Dreams); a rowdy domestic life; and the all-important early, violent death, in a plane crash when she was just 30. But Patsy Cline also had the goods: this woman could sing. Her bold contralto caught the pain and truth of a lyric without ever getting histrionic. "Oh, Lord," she famously said, "I sing just like I hurt inside." The way she transformed hurt into art made Cline the Callas of country.

Her death in 1963 prompted a slow fugue of commemorative albums (including a bizarre set of postmortem duets with the also deceased Jim Reeves) and the stately 1985 biopic Sweet Dreams, with Jessica Lange as Patsy. Now the singer has become a legend that won't die. There's Patsy Cline: The Birth of a Star (Razor & Tie records), an audio collection of her TV appearances with Godfrey. A stage show, Always...Patsy Cline, played for two years in Nashville, Tennessee. The star of Always, Mandy Barnett, has just released her own album of Cline-inflected tunes. And for weeks the hottest country CD on Billboard's pop charts has been Blue, in which 13-year-old Texas phenom LeAnn Rimes does similarly in-Clined material, including the title song, which was written originally for the dead star. There's musical multiplicity in the country air: the invasion of the Patsy Clones.

These tributes fall short of cult creepiness because they are inspired by Cline's music, not by biographical eccentricities. Square-faced and tending to stoutness, Cline left no legacy of iconic beauty or notorious anecdotes. She was all voice, in the days when pop intersected with country. On her albums, swirling violins would blend with Floyd Cramer's tinkly piano and the unobtrusive harmonies of the Jordanaires. She recorded songs by the top country scribes (Hank Cochran, Willie Nelson, Don Gibson, Carl Perkins, Buck Owens, Mel Tillis), but she also covered Cole Porter's True Love; and Walkin' After Midnight was a Tin Pan Alley tune that had been written for pop songbird Kay Starr. The source of Cline's material hardly mattered. She made it all seem part of a thrilling emotional biography, drawing out a note until it was exhausted, then punctuating it with a catch in her throat that sounded like the small sob of a strong woman.

Rimes has taken that popcorn-kernel-in-the-throat catch, married it to old-fashioned yodeling and become a crossover star. On the hit single Blue and on an Eddy Arnold duet of the venerable Cattle Call, her voice breaks with startling ease and, in a microsecond, pole-vaults from barroom belter in the low register to choir girl in the high. If there were no feeling behind it, this double-jointed vocalizing would be only a freak talent. But Rimes either knows the heartsickness behind country songs or can fake it brilliantly. There is a hint of girlishness in the choice of some lightweight material on the album (MCG/ Curb), and her singing sometimes is closer to the full-throttle glottal attack of Brenda Lee, a precocious stylist of the Cline years, than to Patsy herself. That's O.K., though--Rimes, who turns 14 later this month, is still a work in progress. Her voice already works handsomely.

When Barnett was 13, she cut some unreleased sides for veteran producer Jimmy Bowen, yet another relic of the rockabilly years. Five years later, she was starring in Always, and transcending the kitsch format (a fan recalling her brushes with Patsy's greatness) by interpreting 18 Cline songs faithfully and imaginatively; she'd slow down the tempo, tease out the vowel sounds even further, add an Ozark twang that you won't hear on Patsy's records. Now an ancient 20, Barnett has her own, self-titled CD (Asylum). It stands as both a votive offering to her idol and a discreet declaration of independence.

Most of the album's songs, written in the '90s, have a time-warp directness that locates them firmly in Clineland. Barnett climbs inside them all, the jingles and the ballads, with equal agility. But the standouts are the torch songs. The opening cut, Planet of Love, has a blue-eyed bluesy aggressiveness that Barnett builds nicely from a throaty murmur into a dominatrix growl; it's an invitation to a dangerous liaison, delivered deadpan. A Simple I Love You has the same let's-fall-in-love message, this time sung not as a come-on but as a last chance for human contact. Barnett brings to this lovely plaint a maturity as amazing as Rimes' vocal virtuosity; she's the woman with a past, hoping for a future. It all promises well for her own future--we can imagine, say, a half-century from now, a Nashville tribute show called Simply...Mandy Barnett.