It’s been 57 years since Patsy Cline was tragically killed in a plane crash at the age of 30, but her best friend Loretta Lynn still remembers her just as much as she ever did. This week, Lynn spoke out to remember her late friend as she prepares to release her new book about their friendship, entitled “Me & Patsy Kickin’ Up Dust: My Friendship With Patsy Cline,” which will be released on April 7.

Lynn, 87, said that she met Cline in July of 1961, and that they were inseparable from the start.

“I met her, and it was just like she was my sister,” Lynn told the New York Post. “It was like we’d been together forever.”

Cline had been in a horrific car crash in June of 1961 that left her hospitalized for weeks, and Lynn was stunned when the country singer asked for her to visit her hospital room.

“I was a newcomer, I was a nothin’,” Lynn recalled.

Cline had heard Lynn on the radio performing the song “I Fall to Pieces,” which she dedicated to Cline after her accident. Upon hearing the song from her hospital bed, Cline immediately told her husband to fetch Lynn “so she could meet me.”

“We stuck together ever since,” Lynn said, adding of the initial hospital visit, “It broke my heart when I walked in. Her leg was wired to the ceiling, you know. She had broken every bone in her body, I think. It was a terrible wreck; she really got tore up.”

Though Cline was older than Lynn by five months, she was the more worldly of the two by far.

“She taught me how to shave my legs and how to wear makeup,” Lynn said. “Little things like that, that a girl needed to know. Really nice, you know? I never had a girlfriend to teach me anything.”

Cline would teach Lynn many lessons over the next two years, one of them being about how to deal with men in the music business.

“It seemed like all the men on the Grand Ole Opry were respectable . . . I’d built a few of them up in my mind. I had them on a pedestal,” Lynn wrote in her book. “And like Patsy used to say, ‘You know what birds do to anything on a pedestal.’”

After Lynn was pinched in the buttocks one day by Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass, Cline told her, “If that happens again, you kick the fire out of them.’”

Lynn followed this advice when she was smacked on the bottom one night by singer Faron Young, known as “the Hillbilly Heartthrob” as she entered the Grand Ole Opry with Cline. Lynn responded by kicking Young in the shin, causing Cline to burst out laughing.

All was going well for the pair until Cline was tragically killed in a plane crash on March 5, 1963. One year later, Lynn gave birth to twins at the same Tennessee hospital where she met Cline. She named one of the babies Patsy, who went on to cowrite this new book with her mother.

In the lead-up to the release of her book, Lynn has released a new cover of “I Fall To Pieces,” the song that brought her and Cline together in the first place. Give it a listen for yourself below!