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Every couple of months, at a venue somewhere in Michigan – the Old Town Playhouse in Traverse City, say, or the State Theater in Bay City, the singer Judy Harrison will head backstage to her dressing room, and begin her transformation.

She fixes her make-up. She puts on a black fringed top, a black skirt, big belt and cowboy boots. Over her own long, light hair, she places the short, black wig she bought from a professional wig store in town, and runs her fingers through its faint waves.

“The wig is truly the thing that takes you there,” Harrison says via video call. “The very first time I did this, I walked out with the wig on, and I don’t know if the band knew who I was. I was so different to them, it was like they weren’t even looking at Judy.”

For four years now, Harrison...

Exclusive: Kyle Schmid (Six) and Joe Tippett (Rise) are set as the male leads opposite Megan Hilty and Jessie Mueller in Lifetime’s Patsy & Loretta, an original movie about the friendship between country music stars Patsy Cline, played by Smash alum Hilty and Loretta Lynn, played by Broadway’s Waitress star Mueller.

Schmid will play Charlie Dick, Patsy’’s second husband. Tippett will portray Doolittle “Mooney” Lynn, Loretta’s husband and father of their four children.

Set to film this month on location in Nashville, Patsy & Loretta will be executive produced by Neil Meron, in his first solo project since the death of longtime producing partner Craig Zadan. Oscar-winning Thelma & Louise writer Callie Khouri is directing, and Mark Nicolson is co-ep.

When the singers first met, Cline already was one of the biggest stars in country music and Lynn was starting out with little to her name but a $17 guitar.

What would Patsy Cline think about getting her own Nashville museum more than six decades after her death?

“You know, no pun intended – and not to use a word lightly – but I think she’d say, ‘This is crazy,’” says her 58-year-old daughter, Julie Fudge.

And no wonder: Despite Cline’s mythic stature as one of the 20th century’s greatest voices, few fans today know that the “Crazy” singer was simply an equal among a bevy of country notables at the time she was killed, at age 30, in a private plane crash in 1963. Since then, the sheer power of...