Free to follow every thread. No paywall, no dead ends.
Hank Williams: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Hank Williams
Hiram Williams arrived in the rural community of Mount Olive, Alabama, on the 17th of September 1923. He was the third child born to Jessie Lillybelle Skipper and Elonzo Huble Williams. His family carried English and Welsh ancestry that stretched back through generations of southern farmers and railroad workers. Elonzo had fought in the American Civil War before serving as a lumber company engineer during World War I. The older man suffered severe injuries falling from a truck while working for the W.T. Smith lumber company. These injuries left him with chronic pain and eventually led to his hospitalization at the VA Medical Center in Alexandria, Louisiana. He remained absent from home for eight years starting in 1930 when doctors diagnosed a brain aneurysm.
Lillie assumed full responsibility for raising her children after her husband's departure. Young Hiram sat beside his mother playing hymns on the organ at the Mount Olive Baptist Church by age three. He received his first musical instrument, a harmonica, when he turned six. Family members called him Harm or Herky during those early childhood years. The boy grew up watching his sister Irene sell garden crops around Georgiana while their house burned down and they lost everything to fire. They moved to Rose Street where Lillie opened another boarding house to support the struggling family.
Williams learned basic guitar chords from his aunt Opal McNeil who lived nearby in Fountain, Alabama. A second-hand guitar costing $3.50 arrived in his hands when he was about eight years old. His mother purchased this instrument and arranged for his first lessons. Gawky and shy, Williams attached himself to Rufus Tee-Tot Payne, an African-American street performer who taught him guitar skills. Payne gave lessons in exchange for money or meals prepared by Lillie. The blues musician stressed maintaining good rhythm and time while adding showmanship through stoops, bows, laughs, and cries. Williams later recorded My Bucket's Got a Hole in It, one of the songs Payne had taught him.
The Road To Montgomery
Williams changed his name informally from Hiram to Hank during 1937 when the family opened a boarding house on South Perry Street in downtown Montgomery. He participated in a talent show at the Empire Theater that same year and won fifteen dollars singing WPA Blues, his first original song. The lyrics came from Riley Puckett's Dissatisfied tune while Williams wrote new words over it. After school and on weekends, he sang and played his Silvertone guitar on the sidewalk outside the WSFA radio studio.
WSFA producers invited him to perform on air with Dad Crysel's band after noticing his recent win at the Empire Theater. Williams started his own band called the Drifting Cowboys featuring guitarist Braxton Schuffert, fiddler Freddie Beach, and bass player Smith Hezzy Adair. Originally billed as Hank and Hezzy and the Drifting Cowboys, they frequently appeared as fill-ins at Thigpen's Log Cabin dancehall just out of Georgiana. Lillie became the band's manager and began booking show dates while negotiating prices and driving them to performances.
Williams dropped out of school in October 1939 so that he and the Drifting Cowboys could work full-time. The band traveled throughout central and southern Alabama performing in clubs and private gatherings. They started playing in theaters before film screenings and later moved into honky-tonks. Alcohol use became problematic during tours when he occasionally spent large parts of show revenues on drinks. Between tour schedules, Williams returned to Montgomery to host his radio show. His alcoholism made him unreliable enough that WSFA fired and rehired him several times.
Hiram Williams arrived in the rural community of Mount Olive, Alabama, on the 17th of September 1923. He was the third child born to Jessie Lillybelle Skipper and Elonzo Huble Williams.
How did Hank Williams die and when did his death occur?
Williams died on the 1st of January 1953 after being found dead at a gas station in Oak Hill, West Virginia. The autopsy by Dr. Ivan Malinin revealed hemorrhages in the heart and neck with acute right ventricular dilation as the cause of death.
Who inherited the estate of Hank Williams after his death?
In 1967, Hank Williams Jr. was declared the only heir to the estate by a second judge. A federal judge later ruled on the 22nd of October 1975 that Billie Jean Horton was Williams's common-law wife and part of copyright renewals belonged to her.
What happened to the unpublished songs written by Hank Williams?
After his death, sixty-six unpublished songs stored in four notebooks went into a fireproof vault at Nashville offices of Acuff-Rose Publications. Bob Dylan received first opportunity to perform twelve songs for a CD compilation before the album named The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams released the 4th of October 2011.
When were the Mother's Best Flour radio recordings by Hank Williams commercially released?
Time-Life released Unreleased Recordings in 2008 containing numbers pertaining to Mother's Best Flour shows. Company released fifteen-CD box-set entitled The Complete Mothers' Best Recordings Plus! in 2010 featuring all recordings remastered by sound engineer Joe Palmaccio.
Williams married Audrey Sheppard on the 15th of December 1944, at a Texaco gas station in Andalusia, Alabama. Their marriage was technically invalid since Sheppard's divorce from her previous husband did not comply with the legally required sixty-day reconciliation period. The couple had a son named Randall Hank Williams born the 26th of May 1949 who would become known as Hank Williams Jr. The marriage remained turbulent and rapidly disintegrated while Williams developed serious problems with alcohol, morphine, and other painkillers prescribed for severe back pain caused by spina bifida occulta.
Audrey divorced him on the 29th of May 1952 after years of conflict. Williams moved into a house on the corner of Natchez Trace and Westwood Avenue in Nashville during June 1952, sharing it temporarily with singer Ray Price. Price left soon after due to Williams's worsening alcoholism. Following an unsuccessful tour of California and several stints in sanatoriums, Williams moved to his mother's boardinghouse by September. A relationship with Bobbie Jett resulted in a daughter born five days after Williams died. His mother adopted this child who became a ward of the state after her grandmother's death.
The Final Journey
Williams was scheduled to perform at the Municipal Auditorium in Charleston, West Virginia, on New Year's Eve, the 31st of December 1952. Advance ticket sales totaled three thousand dollars that day. He could not fly because of a snowstorm in the Montgomery area so he hired college student Charles Carr to drive him to the concerts. On December 30, Williams and Carr stopped at the Redmont Hotel in Birmingham, Alabama before continuing to Fort Payne and then Knoxville, Tennessee.
Their plane returned to Knoxville due to bad weather when they tried to fly to Charleston. Back in Knoxville, two men arrived at the Andrew Johnson Hotel where Carr requested a doctor for Williams who suffered from chloral hydrate and alcohol consumption. Dr. P.H. Cardwell injected Williams with vitamin B12 shots containing a quarter-grain of morphine. The porters had to carry Williams to the car since he could not walk properly. Driver Don Surface left the restaurant with Carr and Williams around midnight on the 1st of January 1953.
They drove past the Tennessee state line into West Virginia and stopped at Oak Hill where they realized Williams had been dead for hours. Rigor mortis had already set in by the time they reached the gas station. Station owner called local police chief while Dr. Ivan Malinin performed an autopsy at Tyree Funeral House. The doctor found hemorrhages in the heart and neck and pronounced cause of death as acute right ventricular dilation. He also wrote that Williams had been severely beaten recently during a fight in a Montgomery bar.
The Saint And The Sinner
Williams died without leaving a will which created immediate legal chaos over his estate worth thirteen thousand three hundred twenty-nine dollars between cash, checks, and possessions. Audrey Williams filed a lawsuit in Nashville against MGM Records and Acuff-Rose demanding half of all royalties from Hank Williams's records. Her agreement gave her first wife half of the royalties but allegedly lacked clarification about validity after his death. Those involved included Williams's second wife Billie Jean Horton and his mother and sister who disputed control of the remaining fifty percent.
Lilly Williams considered the legality of Billie Jean's marriage doubtful and filed for control of the estate. Billie Jean's lawyer argued Louisiana law considered the union legal since she married in good faith despite marrying ten days before finalization of her divorce to Harrison Eshlimar. Lilly made several offers to settle out of court with Billie Jean reaching a final amount of thirty thousand dollars. On the 19th of August 1953, Billie Jean signed an agreement accepting the money while stopping appearances billing herself as Mrs. Hank Williams.
Cathy was then put up for adoption and granted money from the estate of Lilly Williams to be paid at age twenty-one. In 1967, Hank Williams Jr. was declared the only heir to the estate by a second judge. On the 22nd of October 1975, a federal judge ruled that Billie Jean Horton was Williams's common-law wife and part of copyright renewals belonged to her. At age twenty-one, Cathy learned Hank Williams was her biological father and changed her name to Jett Williams.
The Lost Notebooks
Williams carried a brown leather briefcase containing notebooks on road trips where he wrote musings, lines, and verses of song lyrics alongside jottings on whatever had been handy. After his death, sixty-six unpublished songs stored in four notebooks went into a fireproof vault at Nashville offices of Acuff-Rose Publications. The vault moved in 2002 to Sony ATV Music when it acquired Acuff-Rose. Bob Dylan received first opportunity to perform twelve songs for a CD compilation after Mary Martin consulted about drawing attention to material from the Williams archive.
Dylan approached Williams's granddaughter Holly Williams at a show where he gave her a sheaf of song lyrics he wanted her to read. She recognized them immediately as her grandfather's work even though he said nothing about them initially. He then mentioned possibly cutting an entire album or having other artists perform them. She heard nothing more about it for two years until Mary Martin revived the project with samples of available material.
Several musicians created music suited to the lyrics including Alan Jackson, Jack White, Norah Jones, Vince Gill, Rodney Crowell, Patty Loveless, Levon Helm, Sheryl Crow, and Merle Haggard. The completed album named The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams included contributions from Bob Dylan and Holly Williams who chose Blue Is My Heart containing only eight lines before writing two more and adding a bridge. The album released the 4th of October 2011.
The Radio Ghosts
Williams hosted a fifteen-minute show for Mother's Best Flour on WSM radio during 1951 due to his tour schedules requiring previously recorded shows played in his absence. During mid-1960s, WSM staff photographer Les Leverett rescued acetates thrown away by station workers. At later point recordings were duplicated while in 1980s he shared acetates with former band member Jerry Rivers. A decade later Leverett made deal with Hillous Brutum for commercial release of copies despite Brutum not appearing on recordings.
Legacy Entertainment Group based in Brentwood, Tennessee sued PolyGram and heirs of Williams to block release in 1997. Original acetates made way to possession of Jett Williams while lawyer claimed they belonged to label preventing heirs working on own release. Universal Music Group parent company of Polygram then claimed ownership of shows. In January 2006, Tennessee Court of Appeals upheld ruling stating Williams's heirs had sole rights to sell recordings.
Time-Life released Unreleased Recordings in 2008 containing numbers pertaining to Mother's Best Flour shows. Company released fifteen-CD box-set entitled The Complete Mothers' Best Recordings Plus! in 2010 featuring all recordings remastered by sound engineer Joe Palmaccio. These recordings included unreleased songs Fan It and Alexander's Ragtime Band recorded at age fifteen plus homemade recordings of Freight Train Blues, New San Antonio Rose, St. Louis Blues, and Greenback Dollar from age eighteen.