Loretta Lynn remembers her bestie Patsy Cline

One is a coal miner’s daughter. The other was the daughter of a blacksmith. One was a newcomer to Nashville. The other was already a country-music star. Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline. After first meeting — in somewhat unusual circumstances — in July of 1961, they became best friends. More really. Lynn recounts their relationship …

One is a coal miner’s daughter. The other was the daughter of a blacksmith. One was a newcomer to Nashville. The other was already a country-music star.

Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline. After first meeting — in somewhat unusual circumstances — in July of 1961, they became best friends. More really. Lynn recounts their relationship in her new book, “Me & Patsy Kickin’ Up Dust: My Friendship With Patsy Cline” (Grand Central Publishing), out April 7.

“I met her, and it was just like she was my sister,” Lynn, 87, tells The Post in her sweet, country voice. “It was like we’d been together forever.”

In the summer of 1961, Lynn was an up-and-comer from Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, trying to make her way in Nashville. Cline had already hit the big time, with hits such as “Walkin’ After Midnight” and “I Fall to Pieces.” Ever since Lynn had seen Cline sing on TV’s “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” show in 1957, she was a fan.

On June 14, 1961, Cline was in a horrific car accident. Her brother, Sam, was at the wheel. A driver going the other way tried to pass another car and hit Cline’s car head-on. Her head smashed into the windshield. Two people in the other car were killed.

One month later, Lynn found herself in Cline’s Nashville hospital room — at Cline’s request, and to Lynn’s surprise.

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

She’d caught Cline’s attention on the radio. Ernest Tubb had invited her to play at his record shop in town, where he broadcast live performances. Lynn chose “I Fall to Pieces,” and, she says, “I dedicated it to Patsy Cline.”

Cline heard it from her hospital bed and sent her husband, Charlie Dick, to fetch Lynn from the record store that night “so she could meet me.”

“We stuck together ever since,” says Lynn.

Of that hospital visit, Lynn says, “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.”

But something clicked between the two women. Lynn was older by just five months. But Cline was more worldly than her new friend, who had never even shaved her legs at age 29.

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

Another lesson was about the men in the music business. In a chapter called “Dirty Old Men,” Lynn writes, “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. And like Patsy used to say, ‘You know what birds do to anything on a pedestal.’ ”

After an incident when Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass, pinched Lynn on the butt, Cline told Lynn not to stand for that kind of thing. “‘If that happens again, you kick the fire out of them.’”

Lynn followed her pal’s advice. One night, singer Faron Young, “the Hillbilly Heartthrob,” held the door as Cline and Lynn entered the Grand Ole Opry’s Ryman Auditorium. As they went in, Lynn says, “he spanked her on the bottom.” Remembering what Cline told her, Lynn kicked him in the shin — and Cline started laughing.

Another lesson for Lynn: how to keep her husband Doolittle Lynn’s eyes from wandering. In 1962, “the sexual revolution sure hadn’t hit Nashville,” Lynn writes. The mother of four at the time “had never in [her] life had a climax.”

Cline suggested she “spice things up,” and gave her some skimpy things from a drawer. One stood out: “A pretty little red sexy outfit; it don’t cover a lot up too much, but she said it would turn any man’s head. I thought, ‘Oh my, you mean women wear stuff like this?’ ”

She tried it on at home, and Lynn says now, with ample enthusiasm, “It works.” Today, the outfit is on display at her museum in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee.

“I kept it, in case I need it,” she quips.

On a rainy March 5, 1963, as suddenly as Lynn and Cline became inseparable friends, each other’s cheerleader and support system, tragedy struck. Cline’s plane crashed just shy of Nashville on her return home from a benefit show in Kansas City, Kansas. Cline, her pilot, singers Hankshaw Hawkins and Cowboy Copas all died.

In August 1964, Lynn gave birth to twins — in the same Madison, Tennessee, hospital where she and Cline first met. One of the babies was named Patsy. And Patsy Lynn Russell is her mom’s co-author.

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