Hank Williams

• 1. Introduction

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  Hank Williams was dead in the back seat of a car before anyone in the front realized it. On New Year's Day 1953, a college student named Charles Carr pulled into a gas station in Oak Hill, West Virginia, and discovered that rigor mortis had already set in. Williams was 29 years old, headed to a concert in Canton, Ohio, that he would never play. When his death was announced to the crowd that night, a few people laughed because they thought it was a joke.

  In his short life he recorded 55 singles that reached the top 10 of the Billboard Country & Western chart. Twelve of them hit number one, and five were released after he was already gone. He could not read music or write it down to any significant degree. How does a man who never learned to notate a melody become one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century? And how did a singer adored by tens of thousands of mourners also earn a reputation as one of the least likable figures in modern music? The answers run through an Alabama boarding house, a street performer named Tee-Tot, and a leather briefcase full of unfinished songs.

• 2. The Alabama Boy

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  Hiram Williams was born on the 17th of September 1923 in the rural community of Mount Olive in Butler County, Alabama. His name was misspelled as "Hiriam" on his birth certificate, a document prepared and signed when he was already 10 years old. He was the third child of Lillie and Elonzo "Lon" Williams. An earlier son, Ernest, had died two days after his birth in 1921.

  Williams was born with spina bifida occulta, a defect of the spinal column that caused him lifelong pain. The source names it a major factor in his later alcohol and drug abuse. At the age of three, he sat beside his mother while she played the organ at the Mount Olive Baptist Church, and the hymns she sang would shape his later compositions. He got his first instrument, a harmonica, at the age of six. Family called him "Harm"; friends called him "Herky" or "Skeets".

  Elonzo Williams was largely absent from his son's childhood. In 1930, when Hank was seven, his father began experiencing facial paralysis, and doctors determined he had a brain aneurysm. Sent to a VA medical center in Alexandria, Louisiana, Elonzo remained hospitalized for eight years. From that point, Lillie ran the family alone. She opened boarding houses, worked in a cannery, and served as a night-shift nurse in the local hospital through the bleak years of the Great Depression. When the family's first house in Georgiana burned down, they lost everything and moved across town to Rose Street.

• 3. Tee-Tot's Lessons

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  Rufus "Tee-Tot" Payne was an old Black street performer in Georgiana, and the gawky, shy Williams attached himself to the man and followed him around town. Payne gave the boy guitar lessons in exchange for money or meals that Lillie prepared. His basic style was the blues, and he hammered on the importance of good rhythm and time. He also taught showmanship: stoops, bows, laughs, and cries woven into a performance.

  Williams told music columnist Ralph Gleason of the San Francisco Chronicle a story about his beginnings. "When I was about eight years old, I got my first git-tar. A second-hand $3.50 git-tar my mother bought me," he said. Years later he recorded "My Bucket's Got a Hole in It", one of the songs Payne had taught him. He was shaped too by country acts such as Roy Acuff.

  The two lost touch after a falling-out at school in 1937 sent the family to Montgomery, Alabama. Williams had fought with his physical education teacher over exercises the coach demanded, and his mother insisted the school board fire the man. When they refused, the family left town. Payne eventually moved to Montgomery as well, where he died in poverty in 1939. Williams later credited him as the source of the only musical training he ever had.

• 4. A Voice And A Band

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  At a talent show at the Empire Theater in 1937, the teenager won first prize of US$15 singing his first original song, "WPA Blues". He had borrowed the tune from Riley Puckett's "Dissatisfied" and written his own lyrics. Around this time he changed his name informally from Hiram to Hank. After school he played his Silvertone guitar on the sidewalk in front of the WSFA radio studio, and producers there began inviting him on the air.

  The Drifting Cowboys grew out of those radio appearances. The original members were guitarist Braxton Schuffert, fiddler Freddie Beach, and bass player and comedian Smith "Hezzy" Adair. Lillie Williams became the band's manager, booking dates, negotiating prices, and driving them to shows. Williams dropped out of school in October 1939 so the band could work full-time, touring as far as western Georgia and the Florida Panhandle.

  Alcohol became a problem during these early tours. Williams sometimes spent a large share of the show revenue on drink. In August 1942, after his band members were drafted and replacements quit, the radio station WSFA fired him for "habitual drunkenness". Backstage at a concert, Roy Acuff offered a warning that would follow Williams the rest of his life. "You've got a million-dollar voice, son, but a ten-cent brain."

• 5. Fred Rose And MGM

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  On the 14th of September 1946, Williams auditioned for Nashville's Grand Ole Opry at the recommendation of Ernest Tubb, and was rejected. He and his wife Audrey then turned to the new music publishing firm Acuff-Rose Music. They approached its president, Fred Rose, during one of his daily ping-pong games at the WSM radio studios, and Audrey asked whether her husband could sing for him on the spot. Rose agreed and saw real promise in Williams as a songwriter.

  Rose signed Williams to a six-song contract and used it to land him a deal with Sterling Records. In his first session, on the 11th of December 1946, Williams recorded four songs, including "Never Again (Will I Knock on Your Door)". One title, "When God Comes and Gathers His Jewels", was misprinted as "When God Comes and Fathers His Jewels". When the Sterling releases sold well, Rose moved him to the newly formed MGM Records, the recording division of the Loews Corporation.

  Williams signed with MGM in 1947 and released "Move It on Over", which became a country hit. In 1948 he moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, and joined the Louisiana Hayride, broadcast on KWKH into homes across the Southeast. Then in 1949 came his version of "Lovesick Blues", a 1922 Cliff Friend and Irving Mills song made popular by Rex Griffin. Williams's recording stayed at number one on the Billboard charts for four consecutive months.

• 6. Luke The Drifter

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  By 1950 Williams earned an estimated $1,000 per show, and that year he began recording under a second name: Luke the Drifter. The recordings were moral-themed pieces, many of them recitations rather than songs. Fred Rose worried about the jukebox operators who serviced the honky-tonks. If a customer punched a "Hank Williams" selection and heard a sermon instead of music, the effect could be jarring, so Rose asked him to use a pseudonym.

  The Luke the Drifter material wandered through stories of different characters, philosophizing about relationships gone awry, injustice in society, and death. The arrangements were spare: just Williams's voice, an organ, a bass fiddle, and Don Helms on steel guitar. Most of the writing was Williams's own, though Rose wrote at least one piece, and his son Wesley described others as collaborations. Although Luke's true identity was meant to be a secret, Williams often performed the material on stage anyway.

  The early 1950s brought a run of hits under his own name. "Cold, Cold Heart" arrived in 1951 as the B-side of "Dear John" and became one of his most recognized songs. A pop cover by Tony Bennett that same year stayed on the charts for 27 weeks and peaked at number one. In November 1951 he made his television debut with Perry Como on CBS, singing "Hey Good Lookin'". The next week Como opened his own show in a cowboy hat singing the very same song, with apologies to Williams.

• 7. The Body And The Doctors

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  On the 21st of May 1951, Williams was admitted to the North Louisiana Sanitarium in Shreveport for treatment of his alcoholism and his back, and released three days later. That November, on a squirrel hunting trip with his fiddler Jerry Rivers in Franklin, Tennessee, he fell trying to leap across a gully and aggravated his congenital spinal condition. On the 13th of December 1951 he underwent a spinal fusion at Vanderbilt University Hospital, then discharged himself against medical advice on Christmas Eve, wearing a back brace and taking more painkillers.

  His personal life unraveled alongside his health. Audrey Williams divorced him in 1952. He had a brief affair with a dancer named Bobbie Jett that produced a daughter, Jett Williams, born five days after his death. In October 1952 he married Billie Jean Jones in Minden, Louisiana, then held two public ceremonies at the New Orleans Civic Auditorium, where 14,000 seats were sold for each. That August the Grand Ole Opry had dismissed him for habitual drunkenness and missing shows.

  At the end of 1952, Williams's heart began to fail, and a man named Horace "Toby" Marshall made things worse. Marshall claimed to be a doctor. He had been paroled from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in 1951 after a forgery conviction, and had bought a "Doctor of Science" title for $25 from a mail-order outfit. Under the false name Dr. C. W. Lemon, he prescribed Williams amphetamines, Seconal, chloral hydrate, and morphine. His last recording session, on the 23rd of September 1952, produced "Kaw-Liga" and "Your Cheatin' Heart".

• 8. After Oak Hill

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  The autopsy was performed by Dr. Ivan Malinin at the Tyree Funeral House. He found hemorrhages in the heart and neck, and gave the cause of death as "acute rt. ventricular dilation". He also noted that Williams had recently been severely beaten and kicked in the groin, the result of a bar fight in Montgomery days earlier, and a local magistrate ordered an inquest over a welt visible on his head.

  The public response was immense. Williams's body was placed in a silver casket displayed at his mother's boarding house for two days. His funeral, on the 4th of January at the Montgomery Auditorium, drew an estimated 15,000 to 25,000 people outside, with 2,750 inside. Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, and Red Foley performed "I Saw the Light", "Beyond the Sunset", and "Peace in the Valley". Demand for his records was so heavy that MGM cut its planned monthly releases from 12 to 6 just to keep up.

  Acclaim and royalties became a battlefield, because Williams died without leaving a will. His estate was estimated at US$13,329.25 in cash, a cashier's check, and possessions. His mother Lillie questioned the legality of Billie Jean's marriage and settled out of court with her for US$30,000. The daughter he never raised, renamed Cathy and later restored to the name Jett Williams, did not learn Hank Williams was her father until the early 1980s, and was not recognized as an heir until a 1989 ruling by the Supreme Court of Alabama.

  The songs kept arriving long after the man was gone. After he died, a cache of sixty-six unpublished songs in four notebooks was stored in a fireproof vault at his publishing firm. Decades later those lyrics became The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams, with Bob Dylan choosing a song called "The Love That Faded" and granddaughter Holly Williams finishing one called "Blue Is My Heart" that had only eight lines.