3. The Hillbilly Shakespeare, Country Music

At his next recording session, Tubb brought in a musician to play an electrified lead guitar for a song he had written, “Walking the Floor Over You.” The new song became such a hit—as did the ones that followed—that the Grand Ole Opry brought him to Nashville and offered him a place in their cast in 1943. Once he started appearing regularly, he quickly became one of the show’s most recognizable stars, and his record sales doubled from the exposure. By 1946, one trade magazine reported, Tubb was “the most imitated singer in radio today.”

In 1947, Tubb and the comedienne Minnie Pearl headlined an Opry cast that played for two nights at New York City’s Carnegie Hall, the palatial and prestigious venue for classical and popular music. “Boy,” Tubb said at the start of the concert, “this place sure could hold a lot of hay.”

Staid Carnegie Hall has been be-bopped by Lionel Hampton and jived by Woody Herman, but Thursday and Friday…it was conquered by hillbilly music and the place will never be the same again.

These weren’t just curious onlookers out for a night of novelty. These were serious devoted fans, almost rabid in their wild enthusiasm. Such screaming and wild applause after each number hasn’t been heard in town since Frank Sinatra brought out the bobbysoxers at the Paramount.

New York is sold on hillbilly music.

Billboard magazine

That same year, Tubb opened a business in downtown Nashville, not far from the Ryman. The Ernest Tubb Record Shop was originally meant to be a mail-order operation, a way to offer country music fans an easier way to find the latest records of the artists they liked, although in the early years Tubb steadily lost money on it when 50 to 60 percent of the records came back broken and had to be replaced for free.

To publicize the store, Tubb started Midnite Jamboree, broadcast by WSM on location every Saturday night, immediately after the Grand Ole Opry signed off. Tubb served as the genial host, but preferred highlighting other artists and their songs rather than his own. He did it remembering Carrie Rodgers’s generosity in helping launch him into the music business. “What can I do to repay you?” he had asked her. “Just do the same for others,” she answered.

MOVE IT ON OVER

My mother used to sing me songs at night to make me go to sleep. And she was a pretty darn good singer. And later on in life I learned that those songs that I loved that she was singing me were songs by Hank Williams. So I was a huge Hank Williams fan before I even knew who Hank was.

BRENDA LEE

Hank Williams had the guts to put into words what we were all thinking and feeling but were too embarrassed to say. He cut right to the bone.

FRED FOSTER

In the late summer of 1946, Hank Williams was just a few days short of his twenty-third birthday. They had been a hard twenty-three years.

He was born on September 17, 1923, in a dirt-floor log house his parents rented in Mount Olive, Alabama, and was christened Hiram, after one of the kings in the Old Testament (though it was misspelled on his birth certificate as “Hiriam”). There was a raised spot on his spine, probably an early sign of spina bifida, though his parents didn’t understand its significance.

His father, Lon, who had returned from World War One suffering from shell shock, worked a variety of jobs—farming a strawberry patch until a bad freeze ruined the crop, then in logging camps, until his condition required him to enter a veterans’ hospital in Louisiana, in effect departing from his son’s life.

But Lillie Williams, Hiram’s mother, was a strong and ambitious woman. She moved her daughter and son to a succession of towns in southern Alabama: Garland, then Greenville, and finally Montgomery, where she opened up a boardinghouse in 1937, which some people in town believed doubled as a place for call girls to conduct their business.

Her son was frail and spindly, but a fun-loving teenager who preferred that people call him Hank, not Hiram. Lillie, who played the organ in church, encouraged his interest in music, sending him to a gospel, shape-note singing school and getting him his first guitar when he was eight. In Greenville he met a black street musician, Rufus Payne, known to everyone as “Tee Tot,” who had spent his childhood in New Orleans, learning to play blues and early jazz. Payne took Hank under his wing, teaching him chords on the guitar and letting the boy follow along as he and his street band roamed through town, playing for handouts. “All the music training I ever had,” Williams said later, “was from him.”

In Montgomery, Williams shined shoes and sang on street corners while he hawked peanuts his mother had roasted. He had developed a taste for alcohol at the age of eleven, and when he won a local talent contest, singing a song he had written, “WPA Blues,” he immediately spent his $15 prize partying with his friends. “He never stopped doing that,” his mother would recall. “When Hank was in his chips, so were his friends, as long as the money held out. Always.” At sixteen, Hank quit school.

His music caught the attention of radio station WSFA, which soon featured him on broadcasts as “the Singing Kid.” He formed a band called the Drifting Cowboys, which played small-time gigs at theaters and schoolhouses in Alabama, Georgia, and the Florida Panhandle. Lillie was the driving force behind it: putting up handbills, collecting the money at the door—and constantly scolding (and sometimes hitting) her son whenever he strayed, which was often. But she also sometimes came to his defense, when drunks in the audience picked a fight with him. “There ain’t nobody in this here world that I’d rather have standin’ next to me in a beer joint brawl,” Hank said, “than my maw with a broken bottle in her hand.”

His repertoire was filled with songs of his musical heroes at the time, Roy Acuff and Ernest Tubb, mixed in with a few tunes of his own. One night, after listening to the Grand Ole Opry with a band member, he said, “Someday, I’m gonna be doing that.” To which his friend replied, “If you keep drinkin’, ain’t nobody in the business gonna pay us no attention.” In 1942, WSFA fired him for habitual drunkenness.

A year later, while working in a medicine show in Brundidge, Alabama, he met a pretty drugstore clerk who turned out to possess the same steely determination as his mother. Audrey Mae Sheppard had run off and gotten married at age seventeen, but was abandoned when she became pregnant. Though still technically married, and now with a young daughter, she was irresistibly drawn to Williams, and they forged an immediate bond. “I knew what I wanted and I went after it,” she recalled. “He was lucky with a God-given talent, and I was lucky with a few brains.”

With the outbreak of World War Two, Williams was classified as 4-F because of his back problems, which had been aggravated by a fall from a horse. For a while, he and Audrey worked at the Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company in Mobile, until she pushed him to go back to Montgomery and his music. In her own way, she was as influential as Tee Tot Payne, according to Hank Williams Jr.: “Rufus Payne, that’s where those licks came from, but you don’t want to forget Audrey Williams. She said, ‘Look, you’re good. Your music is good. Your songs are good.’ You take out Rufus Payne and you take out Mama, and then maybe the guy sits down there and welds ships.”

By the war’s end, they were married and he was back on WSFA, the most popular hillbilly act in the area, though he always referred to his music as “folk songs [that] express the dreams and prayers and hopes of the working people.” The station managers were concerned about his periodic drinking binges and couldn’t understand his popularity, but local stores selling radio sets reported that the first question customers often asked was, “Will it pick up Hank Williams?” So they kept him on the air.

Opening for a local performance by Ernest Tubb, he told his idol that he had tried imitating Tubb’s style and he had tried imitating Roy Acuff’s more emotional delivery, but had finally found his own voice somewhere in between. Impressed, Tubb tried to interest his booking agent in taking the young man on. The agent already knew of Williams’s unreliable reputation and declined.

In 1946, Hank and Audrey set off for Nashville anyway—“I just literally made him go,” she said. Hoping to make a name for himself, he met with Fred Rose, the noted songsmith in charge of Acuff-Rose Publishing, one of the first music publishers in town. Rose took a quick liking to Williams and signed him to write a few songs for one of the company’s stars, then helped him get a recording deal of his own, before Hank and Audrey returned home to Montgomery.

Among the songs Williams recorded was one that showed the influence that Tee Tot Payne had wielded. It was called “Move It on Over,” and after its release in June 1947 it became Williams’s first hit. “They say ‘Rock Around the Clock’ is the first rock song,” Hank Williams Jr. said. “I don’t agree with that. ‘Rock Around the Clock’ is a direct steal of ‘Move It on Over.’ Listen to them, compare them sometime.”

Royalties from the song permitted Williams to buy his first house and a fur coat for Audrey. But they were back in Montgomery, which now seemed even farther than 280 miles from Nashville and the big time.

WE SHIELD MILLIONS

The reason Nashville never goes away as a musical entity is it has its business act together. It is a very business-minded town. Guitar in this hand, briefcase in this hand. There’s a lot of other towns that may have more soulful music. But the reason that Nashville never, ever falters is it has a business model and its business act together.

MARTY STUART

By the end of World War Two, hundreds of radio stations across the nation were broadcasting weekly barn dance programs—from the Ozark Jubilee in Springfield, Missouri, to Philadelphia’s Hayloft Hoedown, from the Carolina Hayride in Charlotte to Dallas’s Big D Jamboree and California’s Hollywood Barn Dance. But the lineup of stars at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry was unequaled, and WSM’s powerful 50,000-watt signal beamed the show to both coasts from the Ryman Auditorium, “the Mother Church of Country Music.”

The owners of the station, the National Life and Accident Insurance Company, couldn’t have been happier. The show was doing exactly what Edwin Craig had hoped: selling insurance. The station’s call letters, WSM, stood for the company’s slogan, “We Shield Millions,” and the Opry had become its best calling card.

Bud Wendell was one of the company’s salesmen in Akron, Ohio, going door to door, offering policies for as little as ten cents a week. “I’d introduce myself,” he remembered. “I’d say, ‘I’m Bud Wendell and I’m with the National Life and Accident Insurance Company of Nashville. We own WSM, and the Grand Ole Opry. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Grand Ole Opry? And I have a little gift here I’d like to give you. May I step in?’ ” Once inside he would give the gift he promised—a sewing needle packet, or a calendar, ruler, flower seeds, emery board, or fly swatter, all emblazoned with National Life’s emblem and slogan. He also had a folder with a picture of Roy Acuff or Ernest Tubb or Minnie Pearl on it.

Now he had their attention: “A lot of their questions had to do with the artists. You know, ‘Do you know Roy Acuff?’ or ‘Do you know Minnie Pearl?’ Or ‘We listened to the Opry last Saturday night and we sure loved the song that Acuff did.’ But I’d try to get them onto the subject of life insurance. That’s why I’m there; I’m not there to tell him the life story of any of the Opry stars. But the connection with the Opry was a tremendous door opener.”

WSM was also accepting other sponsors for its shows, including the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, which underwrote a segment of the Opry over the national NBC radio network. By the end of the decade, the Opry was generating $600,000 a year in advertising revenue, plus another $600,000 from its Artist Service Bureau, which booked tours for its stars in exchange for 15 percent of the gate receipts.

For the stars themselves, performing every Saturday night on the radio show for $30 a performance and then giving the Service Bureau a cut from their more lucrative personal appearances during the week represented a financial sacrifice. But being on the nation’s top country music show provided them with the best exposure they could get to promote their records, as did being billed as official Opry artists on their upcoming tours. “For a country musician to be asked to join the Opry, that’s kind of like saying do you want to go to heaven when you die,” said country star Bill Anderson. “It’s the top of the ladder; it’s the ultimate. Do you want to play first base for the New York Yankees? Do you want to pitch for the Boston Red Sox? Do you want to be a member of the Grand Ole Opry? That’s just about as good a question as anybody could ever ask. And there’s only one answer: ‘Yeah!’ ”

I’LL HOLD YOU IN MY HEART

He spread the word. He was our first pop crossover. People bought Eddy Arnold records who wouldn’t buy country records because, as Eddy said, he was “smooth.” People who liked pop music also entertained the idea of an Eddy Arnold record.

RALPH EMERY

My grandfather was a romantic, so he really always focused in on love songs. They weren’t about drinking or cheating, or anything like that, necessarily. They were about love.

SHANNON POLLARD

In October 1947, not long after Ernest Tubb had performed at Carnegie Hall, another star of the Grand Ole Opry appeared in another unlikely venue for a hillbilly singer. Eddy Arnold filled Washington, D.C.’s Constitution Hall for two straight nights. His music, prominently featuring a steel guitar, was unmistakably country. But he was just as unmistakably not another Ernest Tubb or Hank Williams.

Richard Edward Arnold was born on a farm near Henderson, Tennessee, on May 15, 1918, the youngest of sixteen children. He spent his life never forgetting his humble beginnings—and being just as determined never to return to those circumstances.

On his eleventh birthday, his father died, so deeply in debt the family farm and implements had to be auctioned off, and the Arnolds found themselves as tenants working on what had been their own land. “A boy that works on a farm and does labor,” Arnold remembered, “he does a lot of daydreaming.” Arnold’s dream was doing anything other than chopping corn and wearing shirts his mother made from feed bags. He had been playing guitar since he was seven, and people seemed to enjoy listening to him sing. He decided music might be his way out.

Arnold left school after ninth grade and got a job in nearby Jackson, Tennessee, driving the hearse for a funeral home that allowed him to sleep there at night. He learned to read music and began performing on local radio stations. In 1938, he and a friend, Speedy McNatt, took the bus to St. Louis and landed a job performing on the early-morning show at KWK as the Tennessee Harmony Lads. At night they played in taverns, returning to the station to nap in the lobby before their 6 a.m. sign-on. Arnold took a second job to pay for voice lessons, practiced incessantly, and dreamed of bigger things. “I knew where I wanted to go because I couldn’t go back,” he said. “There wasn’t anything to go back to.”

His big break came in 1940, after Pee Wee King invited him to join the Golden West Cowboys for a guarantee of $15 a week. Billed as “Smilin’ Eddy Arnold,” he would sing ballads, sell Pee Wee’s songbooks at intermission, and for extra money sweep out the auditorium after each performance. In 1943, after touring Army bases with King and Minnie Pearl on the Camel Caravan, he went out on his own, singing on the Opry as “the Tennessee Plowboy” and doing a morning show on WSM right after Ernest Tubb’s.

People responded to his clean-cut image: neatly pressed slacks, a crisp white shirt, a handsome, square-jawed face, sometimes with a dapper rancher’s hat on his head. They loved his music even more: a mellow voice that could not only croon love ballads, but also break into a smooth yodel on a favorite upbeat song, “Cattle Call.”

On tour, unlike most musicians, he usually declined to carouse and drink the night away. One night in Fort Worth, Bob Wills invited him out to cruise the beer joints. Arnold turned him down. “I had a show to do the next day,” he recalled, “and I wanted to get plenty of rest for it and be in good condition.” In the morning, he preferred prune juice with his breakfast.

He was managed now by Thomas A. Parker, a former carnival promoter with a flair for publicity who insisted on being called Colonel Parker. On the road with Arnold, to attract attention to his star, Parker often demanded a police escort into town—or even when they went out for a hamburger. By 1947, with a long string of hit recordings to his name, two segments on the Opry, and a five-day-a-week national show of his own on the Mutual network sponsored by Ralston Purina, Arnold was a big enough star to tour without using the Opry’s name, saving himself the 15 percent they took from concert receipts.

At the end of the year, his song “I’ll Hold You in My Heart” reached number one on Billboard’s ranking of hillbilly music. It would stay there for an unprecedented twenty-one weeks, and be followed by four others. Of the six number-one country songs in 1948, Eddy Arnold had five of them. The entire music industry sold 177 million records that year; Arnold sold 6.5 million, nearly 4 percent of the national total.

By September 1948, Colonel Parker had convinced Arnold he could make more money on Saturday nights doing personal appearances than being in Nashville for the Grand Ole Opry. Roy Acuff had tried the same thing in 1946, but without the weekly exposure on the Opry, fewer people came to his shows, and he finally begged to resume his place at the Ryman. Most people thought the same thing would happen to Arnold.

On his final night, Arnold and his old friend Minnie Pearl hugged each other backstage one last time. Fans listening on the radio cried to think he was leaving the show. On his way out of the Ryman, someone scolded him about his departure, saying “The Opry made you.” “If it made me,” he answered, “why hasn’t it made the Fruit Jar Drinkers?”

BLUEGRASS BREAKDOWN

In music history, Bill Monroe, to me, is as important as Duke Ellington; he’s as important as Charlie Parker, any of those guys. I mean you think about it, how many people have a genre of music that they started, that they can say, “This man right here started a whole new genre of music.” Bill Monroe did that: bluegrass.

RICKY SKAGGS

I think there are archangels and I think there are cosmic forces by way of human beings that hit the planet. Bill Monroe was one. There’s just one Bill Monroe. There’s just one Mark Twain. There’s just one Einstein, one Hemingway.

TOM T. HALL

Since his first appearance on the Grand Ole Opry in 1939, Bill Monroe had been one of the show’s biggest attractions, the leader of the best-known acoustic string band in the nation, the Blue Grass Boys, named in honor of his home state of Kentucky. But Monroe was a perfectionist, never entirely satisfied with the music he and his band were playing. “When Bill put his band together and came to Nashville, in 1939, and got to be a member of the Grand Ole Opry, his music started changing,” said Ricky Skaggs. “And he started looking for different sounds. I think in his brain he was hearing something that was unique, but he didn’t know exactly what it was.”

In late 1945, Monroe began reconfiguring the band’s cast, bringing in Chubby Wise, who had popularized “Orange Blossom Special” on the fiddle; Cedric Rainwater on bass; Lester Flatt, from Duncan’s Chapel, Tennessee, recently a member of Charlie Monroe’s band, singing lead and playing guitar.

And to replace Dave “Stringbean” Akeman on banjo, during a series of auditions in Nashville’s Tulane Hotel, Monroe discovered a quiet twenty-one-year-old from Flint Hill, North Carolina, named Earl Scruggs, and hired him on the spot.

Scruggs had been playing banjo since the age of four, and as a boy started experimenting with a three-fingered technique popular in western North Carolina’s Piedmont. After working in a textile mill to support his widowed mother during the war, he had joined a band in Knoxville and further refined his propulsive, rolling style, so different from the “frailing” or “clawhammer” technique used by Stringbean and the Opry’s Uncle Dave Macon, both of them as much comedians as banjo players. Scruggs was definitely not a comedian. Almost painfully shy, he overcame his stage fright by concentrating on making his lightning-like finger work appear effortless.

“Prior to Earl Scruggs, a lot of the banjo playing wasn’t clearly defined,” said John McEuen, the banjo player for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. “There was a lot of the frailing style and it wasn’t a definite lead style. When Earl walked up anywhere near that mic, he was picking so hard and definite that his excitement would penetrate the audience. It would just make them nuts. He brought to it the same thing that Eddie Van Halen brought to rock and roll [with his] shredding guitar. It was so fast. It was what excited people.” Eddie Stubbs, a WSM announcer, agreed: “He wasn’t the first person to play with a three-finger roll. But he was the first person who came to Nashville with it.” He added, “Earl Scruggs is one of the single most important musicians, not just in the history of country music, but he’s one of the single most important instrumentalists in the history of the music of the world.”

When Monroe heard Scruggs’s fiery three-fingered roll, it was the “last cog that he needed for the machine to make the engine go,” said Ricky Skaggs. “Earl is pretty good on the banjo,” Uncle Dave Macon admitted after Scruggs debuted with Monroe on the Opry, “but he ain’t a damn bit funny.” The crowds, on the other hand, loved what he did with his instrument. Judge Hay, the Opry host, started introducing the group as Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys, with Earl Scruggs, “the boy that makes the banjo talk.”

Monroe liked the Blue Grass Boys’ new sound, which now featured individual solo breaks in each song—Wise’s furious fiddle, Monroe’s extraordinary mandolin, and Scruggs’s syncopated banjo, with Flatt keeping pace on his guitar and providing a strong lead voice while Monroe added his own high tenor harmony. “It was improvisational, the same as jazz music, but the fire was there,” said Marty Stuart. “It gave country music a whole new sound. It was as powerful as when Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five finally found the magic. America had a new music then.”

Thanks to their Grand Ole Opry broadcasts every Saturday night, and Monroe’s relentless schedule of touring throughout the South, the band’s style began influencing other string bands. In the mountainous southwestern corner of Virginia, the Stanley brothers—Carter and Ralph—were paying particular attention.

They had been raised in the Primitive Baptist Church, where entire congregations sang hymns a capella, led by a church elder like their father. But their mother loved playing the banjo, using the clawhammer style, and when young Ralph expressed an interest in it, she told him that for an upcoming present from her, he had a choice to make: he could have a pig to raise or he could have a banjo. Both were worth five dollars. “I was interested in hogs at the time,” Ralph remembered, “but I picked the banjo.” His brother Carter took up the guitar, and the Stanley Brothers soon began performing locally. “Ralph’s voice sounded like it had coal dust in it, in a really cool way,” according to Vince Gill. “And I love that brother harmony; I’ve always been a nut for that brother harmony that Ralph and Carter had together.”

After serving in the war, they came home and formed the Clinch Mountain Boys, became regulars on WCYB in Bristol, and went to see the musician they admired the most, Bill Monroe, at a nearby performance. Ralph watched Earl Scruggs intently. “Well,” Ralph recalled thinking, “I will have to try to get that style myself. So I started working on it.”

Stanley soon became as proficient with Scruggs’s three-fingered style as with the more traditional clawhammer technique his mother had taught him. For new material, the Clinch Mountain Boys sometimes memorized what they heard the Blue Grass Boys playing on the Opry and performed it on their own show in Bristol a few days later.

Monroe was temperamental, proud, and sometimes prickly. To him, being copied was an insult rather than a tribute. When the Stanleys released a song of his, “Molly and Tenbrook,” on a regional label in 1948, Monroe was even more angry. He had recorded it a year earlier, but his label, Columbia, had not yet released it. Then Columbia signed the Stanley Brothers; Monroe retaliated by switching to Decca Records.

There were more aggravations. In 1948, two of Monroe’s stars, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, tired of making $60 a week as sidemen in a band that seemed always to be on the road, decided to strike out on their own. They eventually formed their own band, the Foggy Mountain Boys, named for a Carter Family song they often performed.

Once again, Monroe was incensed. He demanded that the Opry not allow Flatt and Scruggs to perform there for a few years—and refused to even speak to them for much longer than that. He got some additional measure of revenge by stealing guitarist and singer Mac Wiseman away from the Foggy Mountain Boys, which infuriated Lester Flatt.

A little later, Flatt and Scruggs came out with an instrumental song Earl had written, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” named for the new band. Except for a few changes, it closely resembled a tune Scruggs had worked on with Monroe, called “Bluegrass Breakdown.” That only added fuel to the fire. “They’d work around each other and exist in the same industry, but nobody spoke for like twenty-five years,” Marty Stuart explained. “Nobody can hold a grudge like hillbillies; I can attest to that.”

This newest style of country music that Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt, and Earl Scruggs had created still had no name. In the midst of all the feuding, audience members at Flatt and Scruggs concerts would want to request a Bill Monroe tune dating from the time they were still a part of Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys. But, as Everett Lilly, a member of the Foggy Mountain Boys, recalled, the fans were afraid even to mention Bill Monroe: “The public began to say, ‘Boys, would you please do one of them old Blue Grass tunes like you used to do?’ They knew me and Lester could sing them duets like him and Bill. They’d say, ‘Would you please do an old bluegrass tune?’ The public named Blue Grass music…through the fear to speak Bill’s name to ’em.”

STEP IT UP AND GO

Sometimes, you go someplace and you wonder if you’re at the right place or not. But when you went to see the Maddox Brothers and Rose, you knew you’d come to the right show. You could not be at one of their shows and not be happy.

MERLE HAGGARD

In 1948, an old Jimmie Rodgers song got a new lease on life. Rodgers, country music’s first superstar, originally recorded his “Blue Yodel Number 8”—“Mule Skinner Blues”—in the 1920s with just his guitar. In 1939, Bill Monroe had made his Grand Ole Opry debut with a stunningly energetic reinterpretation of it. Now an electrified band out in California’s Central Valley gave it a honky tonk bounce. It was the Maddox Brothers and Rose.

They had arrived in California in the depth of the Great Depression, riding freight trains from Alabama and barely surviving as migrant farmworkers before taking up instruments and putting their young sister, Rose, in front of a microphone. They worked the bars and dance halls playing hillbilly music for others like them, economic refugees denigrated as “Okies.”

When her brothers went off to war, Rose had approached the king of Western swing, Bob Wills, for a job. “And he said they already had a girl singer, so he wasn’t interested in using Rose in his band,” according to her brother Don Maddox. “And the way I heard it, Rose said, ‘Well, if you don’t use me, you’re going to be sorry because when my brothers get home, we’re going to put you out of business.’ Later on, I heard that Bob Wills was telling that story to somebody and he said, ‘You know, they almost did put us out of business.’ ”

Lula Maddox, the family matriarch and driving force behind the band, outfitted her children in flamboyant western clothes made by Nathan Turk, a Polish-born tailor in Hollywood, who had designed costumes for movie cowboys. As they made more money on the West Coast honky-tonk circuit, their mother decided they should travel in equally flashy automobiles; she went to a dealership and astonished the salesman when she pulled enough cash out of a cigar box to buy them a fleet of Cadillacs.

No one had ever seen—or heard—anything quite like it before: shows that included slapstick humor, shouts and hollers, songs that mixed honky tonk and boogie-woogie and blues, an electrified hillbilly sound in overdrive. Don came up with a nickname, “the Most Colorful Hillbilly Band in the Valley,” then “the Most Colorful Hillbilly Band in the State,” then “the Most Colorful Hillbilly Band in the United States”—and finally “the Most Colorful Hillbilly Band in the World.”

One of their biggest songs, “Step It Up and Go,” was a “prelude to rock and roll,” according to Marty Stuart. “They put the boogie in country music, which went on to be ‘Baby, Let’s Play House,’ ‘That’s All Right, Mama,’ ‘Rock Around the Clock.’ You could see the embers starting, the seed had been planted.”

By the late 1940s, the Maddox Brothers and Rose were the hottest country band in California. Fifteen years earlier, as destitute arrivals, they had lived in a concrete culvert in Oakland. Now they moved into a lavish house in Hollywood.

In 1949, twelve-year-old Merle Haggard went to see them in Bakersfield, intrigued not only by the Maddoxes’ showmanship but also by their guitar player, Roy Nichols, who at age sixteen was already on his way to becoming a renowned musician. “And I paid some attention to the Maddox Brothers and Rose, but mostly to Roy,” Haggard said. “And I remember my brother made the remark, he said, ‘He don’t have to pick cotton or go to school, either one.’ I said, ‘I want his job.’ ”

COUNTRY BOY

Jimmy Dickens didn’t go out onstage to go over; he came out onstage to take over. And he did every time. He would say, “You know, they may not know who I am now, but when I get done with them, they will.” He was fearless.

EDDIE STUBBS

In 1948, the Grand Ole Opry welcomed a new singer to the stage at Ryman Auditorium. From the coal-mining region of southern West Virginia, the oldest of thirteen children, James Cecil Dickens was twenty-eight years old and had been moving from one local radio station to another, learning how to entertain audiences and keep a show’s sponsors happy by persuading listeners to buy whatever was being advertised. They were called “per inquiry” deals: for every order that came in, the artist would get a small percentage of the sale.

No one was better at it than Dickens. Only four feet ten inches tall, he turned his short stature into part of his act. His first hit, “Take an Old Cold Tater (and Wait),” told the story of a boy who was always last to be served at the dinner table. “That’s why I look so bad and have these puny ways,” he sang, “because I always had to take an old cold tater and wait.” Working at radio stations in Dayton, Ohio, and Indianapolis—and promoting everything from fruit trees to kitchen utensils to patent medicine—he would stand on a chair to share the microphone with T. Texas Tyler, a six-foot-three-inch singer, and gladly adopted the nickname Tyler gave him: “Little Jimmy Dickens.”

Impressed by his stage presence, Roy Acuff invited Dickens to Nashville, where he quickly won over the Opry audiences and honed the comic antics that would become his trademark by listening to advice from Minnie Pearl, who, he said, patiently taught him how to tell a joke better and not step on the crowd’s laughter.

To further distinguish himself onstage, Dickens went to Hollywood for flashier clothes. He found them at the main competitor of Nathan Turk, who was outfitting the Maddox Brothers and Rose. Nuta Kotlyrenko had been born in Kiev, in the Ukraine, but changed his last name to Cohn when he came to America. Childhood friends in Brooklyn, having trouble with his first name, called him Nudie. Now he ran Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors in Hollywood, steadily attracting Western movie stars like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers and Rex Allen. To expand his business, Cohn also started seeking clients in country music, sometimes designing new, ostentatious outfits for them for free, simply for the exposure.

Little Jimmy Dickens was the first star from the Grand Ole Opry to appear in what became known as “Nudie suits.” “I tried it both ways,” Dickens said. “I tried it in a neat little businessman suit. Didn’t work. But when I put one of these on and come on the stage it’s, ‘Wow.’ I just seen the difference that it made in my appearance. I’ve been wearin’ ’em ever since. And everybody started wearing Nudie suits. That’s the main thing in country music, is to sell yourself to the audience, other than just singin’ to them. ’Cause if I had to depend on my singin’ I’d be up the creek.”

Always looking for new material, Dickens soon found another hit song, “Country Boy,” a bouncy tune with lyrics that celebrated a simple rural life in which he proclaimed, “I raise Cain on Saturday but I go to church on Sunday…[and] I’ll be lookin’ over that old gray mule when the sun comes up on Monday.” It proved so popular when Dickens performed it on the Opry, fourteen extra verses were added for him to sing during all the encores the audience demanded.

The song came from an unlikely source. Boudleaux and Felice Bryant were hardly country bumpkins. He was the son of a small-town Georgia lawyer and had been trained as a classical violinist. She was a Sicilian American from Milwaukee who loved writing romantic poetry.

Named for the French soldier who had saved his father’s life in World War One, Boudleaux Bryant had played in the Atlanta Philharmonic Orchestra symphony at age eighteen, but, hoping to make more money, he became an itinerant musician, playing Western swing and jazz, as well as hillbilly tunes, across the South and Midwest, making a name for himself as a hot fiddle player. He was part of a quartet working in the cocktail lounge of Milwaukee’s Schroeder Hotel when he met his future wife and writing partner.

Matilda Genevieve Scaduto was the hotel elevator operator. She saw Bryant walking across the lobby and got his attention by splashing him with water from the fountain next to the elevator. They struck up a conversation. “And she took him downstairs, bought him a drink, and then immediately told him that she had dreamt of him all of her life and that they should be married,” according to their son Del Bryant. “And they were hitched very quickly, or at least were doing what hitched people usually do very quickly.” Boudleaux decided to call his new wife Felice.

With the birth of two sons, the couple struggled to survive financially, moving from town to town in a trailer they pulled behind their car. Meanwhile, Boudleaux began setting some of Felice’s poems to music. When Fred Rose heard their song “Country Boy,” he passed it on to Jimmy Dickens and urged the Bryants to relocate to Nashville. They moved into a trailer court some people called “Hillbilly Heaven” and ignored advice that while Nashville had some stars who wrote their own songs, no one really made a living there solely as a professional songwriter. That happened, they were told, only in New York.

To peddle their songs, Boudleaux began hanging out backstage at the Grand Ole Opry. He was known well enough as a fiddle player by many of the artists, who let him jam with them in the dressing room; they indulged him when he pitched them some of his and Felice’s new tunes.

Little Jimmy Dickens would record a number of their songs: lighthearted, up-tempo tunes like “Out Behind the Barn,” “Bessie the Heifer,” and “I’m Little but I’m Loud,” but also soulful ballads like “Take Me as I Am” or a song Felice had written for Boudleaux as a birthday present, “We Could.”

Other artists soon followed suit—enough that a publisher from New York flew to Nashville to try to persuade the Bryants to move to the Big Apple, the nation’s songwriting capital, and write show tunes for him. They turned him down. Nashville, they decided, might just be able to support people who wrote songs for a living.

LOVESICK BLUES

If Hank would drink a little beer, he was alright. But you didn’t want to be around if he was really snookered.

When Hank got on the hard stuff, drinking, you didn’t want to be around him. He was belligerent when he was on the booze.

E. JIMMY KEY

Despite the success of “Move It on Over,” Hank Williams seemed stuck in Montgomery, Alabama. He was popular there, but yearned to move to Nashville and the Grand Ole Opry, where his music could find a wider audience.

His marriage to Audrey had been turbulent from the start. There were constant tensions about her insistence on being part of his act, troubles over money, angry fights during his recurrent bouts of heavy drinking. His Montgomery friend E. Jimmy Key saw it firsthand: “He and Audrey were constantly battling. I had an apartment. So when Hank and Audrey would have a fight, Hank would come move in with me. I came home for lunch from work, and he’s sitting in the hallway, with his feet against the wall, in just his hat, boots, and shorts. And he was wailing away on ‘Lovesick Blues.’ He was just completely snookered. And it ticked me off. It just hit me wrong, ’cause he was, in the middle of the day, in the juice too much. And he said, ‘What do you think about this song?’ And I said, ‘It ain’t worth a damn. It won’t sell ten records.’ ”

Williams’s publisher, Fred Rose, continued to have high hopes for him and took a fatherly interest in his welfare. A recovering alcoholic himself (he had brought himself out of drunken ruin by adopting the tenets of Christian Science), Rose wrote a series of letters hoping to guide his young protégé back from the brink, as relations between Hank and Audrey unraveled:

February 18, 1948. Dear Hank: Sometimes we humans act in a funny way when things are not going our way. We make plans, and when anyone interferes with our plans we have nervous breakdowns because we think that drowning our sorrows will make us forget our troubles, but this has never worked and never will work because when we wake up the next morning we still have our troubles plus a hangover that prevents us from thinking clear enough to think our way out of the problem we thought our way into….

I’m opening my heart to you because I love you like my own son and you can call on me anytime when you are in a problem and I’ll do anything within my power to help you help yourself.

March 18, 1948. Dear Hank,…I feel kinda let down today after receiving your call ’cause I knew you were drinking again and Hank that is something I refuse to go for because it only proves a man’s weakness.

I know YOU LOVE AUDREY more than you are willing to admit and you are taking the wrong way out, slopping up a lot of poison that makes you feel sorry for yourself and makes your friends disgusted with you. If you really want Audrey back, get a haircut and buy a new suit, wash your face and throw that damn whiskey bottle out the window and become a man that she would be proud of.

I am trying to be your friend ’cause I know you need a friend….

I know what I am talking about because I have gone through the same thing that you are going through now.

I am…Your friend.

April 3, 1948. Dear Hank,…You are destined for big things in the recording and songwriting field, and you are the only one who can ruin this opportunity. In the future, forget the firewater and let me take care of your business and you’ll be a big name in this business.

Kind personal regards, I am…Your friend, Fred Rose

But Williams was unable to stop. He showed up drunk when a touring group from the Opry played in town and was so disheveled for a performance a few nights later the bar owner told the band he would hire the rest of them to play again, but not Hank Williams. His dream of going back to Nashville and playing on the Grand Ole Opry seemed more and more out of reach.

In late April, Audrey filed for divorce. “He has a violent and ungovernable temper,” she stated in her complaint, “and during the last month has been drunk most of the time.” She added: “I am afraid to live with him any longer.”

He constantly, I think, was dealing with the battle of, I don’t want to say good and bad, but more light and dark. And I think part of him struggled with that. He believed in the real redemptive nature of Christ. You know, “I have struggles like everyone else does, and I’m a sinner. And I do this wrong, but I have faith in my salvation.”

HOLLY WILLIAMS

A year earlier, on the way back from a performance, Williams had been in the back seat of the band’s touring car, sleeping off another bender, when his mother, who was driving, saw the beacon light of Montgomery’s airport in the distance and tried to rouse him from his stupor. “Hank, wake up,” she shouted. “We’re nearly home. I just saw the light.”

By the time they arrived, he had turned it into a song, closely based on a gospel tune written by Albert E. Brumley called “He Set Me Free.” Hank’s version was “I Saw the Light.”

“ ‘I Saw the Light,’ whether you love Jesus or not, whether you’re religious or not, it’s a song that just sticks in your head like glue, and you can’t stop singing it,” said his granddaughter Holly Williams. “It’s happy. It’s up-tempo. At the same time, it’s a song of redemption and this broken man who has seen the light.”

“He addressed Saturday-night sinning and Sunday-morning redemption as well as anybody did,” said singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell:

You go howling at the moon on Saturday night. You wreck your car. You chase women. You come in drunk. But then, Sunday morning, you face the music ’cause somebody’s mama and somebody’s favorite aunt is going to grab you by the ear and drag you out of the bed and take you to church. And you’re going to have to sit there and pay for the fun you had all over again.

Hank Williams, to me, personifies it better than anyone. Everybody out there who’s had Saturday night and Sunday morning can say, “He’s telling us about our lives.” And when you get it right, when an artist gets it right for themselves, it’s right for everybody. “I Saw the Light,” well, I venture to say, you don’t see the light until you know the darkness.

By the time the Williams’ divorce was finalized in May 1948, they had already reconciled. Hank had sobered up, and Fred Rose soon found a new radio station for him, which had just started its own barn dance program.

Broadcast from Shreveport’s Municipal Auditorium on station KWKH’s powerful 50,000-watt signal, Louisiana Hayride had ambitions to rival WSM’s Grand Ole Opry and was searching for new talent to do it. Hank Williams quickly became the show’s top star. And his most popular song on its stage was the one he had tried out on Jimmy Key back in Montgomery, the old vaudeville song Emmett Miller had recorded in 1925, “Lovesick Blues.” In December 1948, he insisted on recording it, over the vehement objections of Rose, who called it “the worst damn thing I ever heard.”

“You might not like the song,” Hank had told Rose, “but when…I walk off the stage and throw my hat back on the stage and the hat encores, that’s pretty hot.” If “Lovesick Blues” didn’t make it, he told a friend, “I’m thinkin’ seriously of getting out of the business.”

Within a few months of its release in early 1949, it was the nation’s number one hillbilly song and would stay on the charts for nearly a year. “There’s just something about it,” said country star Dwight Yoakam. “There’s a sentimental heartache to that song, but yet, there’s still a raw-edged kind of raucous, mud-in-your-eye, flipping the finger at the world, because you feel this bad side of it. It’s an interesting combination.”

Royalty checks from “Lovesick Blues” and another hit, “Wedding Bells,” amounted to $10,000. Williams’s erratic career had turned around—and Audrey had given birth to a son, Hank Williams Jr., whose proud father lovingly nicknamed “Bocephus” (after the name of a puppet of Opry comedian Rod Brasfield). Hank and Audrey arranged to have their divorce annulled.

With his newfound success, Williams set his sights again on the Grand Ole Opry. They couldn’t ignore his new star power, but the management there still resisted because of his reputation for drinking and missing shows. Fred Rose interceded again, offering the Opry’s manager and program director the songwriting credit (and therefore the royalties) for a tune Rose had written, “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy,” that Red Foley recorded and took to number one.

On June 11, 1949, during Ernest Tubb’s segment, Williams made his Opry debut, singing “Lovesick Blues” to such thunderous applause he was quickly asked to become a member.

With their baby son and Audrey’s daughter, Lycrecia, the Williams family moved into a new house in Nashville. They filled it with furniture so expensive, Hank joked, he was afraid to sit on it. They added a bedroom, a den, and a two-car garage for their new automobiles, and bought horses to ride on the property’s three acres. On tour in California, Hank added a new outfit, designed and made by Nudie Cohn.

In November, though still a relative newcomer to the Opry, he was asked to join other headliners on a two-week tour of American military bases in Europe. The cast included Red Foley, Roy Acuff, Minnie Pearl, and Little Jimmy Dickens. They performed in Wiesbaden, Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna, and Berlin, where Hank was issued a document written in Russian, in case he wandered by mistake into the Soviet-controlled zone. “They ain’t gonna win the next war,” he said when he saw it, “they can’t even spell.”

Back home, as 1949 ended, Hank Williams was the second-best-selling country singer of the year, with eight songs on the charts. Only Eddy Arnold, with thirteen, was ahead of him. And when Hank came to Montgomery as part of an Opry tour that packed the auditorium, Jimmy Key went to the dressing room to see his old friend. “I walked in and Hank didn’t say hello or anything,” Key recalled. “He just said, ‘What do you think of “Lovesick Blues” now?’ ”

COUNTRY AND WESTERN

The Western field, which has shot to such popularity since the war, is a strange mixture of simple singers, pseudo cowboys who never rode a horse, and Arkansas fiddlers from Arizona. It’s rife with jealousy; most of the stars being quite touchy about whether they are “folk singers” or “Western singers” and they themselves refer to other artists whom they dislike as “hillbillies.”

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

From the very first recordings of Fiddlin’ John Carson back in 1923, record labels had trouble naming the music that sprang from so many different roots. The growth of additional subgenres—cowboy songs, Western swing, honky tonk, bluegrass—made it that much more difficult to categorize it all and market it under a single word or phrase.

Most people referred to it as “hillbilly music,” and Billboard magazine used that term for a while. In 1944, Billboard’s first popularity charts lumped it under the broader title of “folk records.” Few artists seemed to mind. Hank Williams called his songs “folk music,” though he was equally comfortable referring to himself as a hillbilly, a term many other performers considered degrading. Ernest Tubb and Red Foley, in particular, pushed for something different.

On June 25, 1949, Billboard added the phrase “country and western” (and substituted the term “rhythm and blues” for “race music”). “My feeling is that people who bought records called ‘race’ records and people who bought ‘hillbilly’ records were offended by those terms,” said Douglas B. Green. “And the record companies finally got a clue and decided to change to more genial or politically correct, for the 1940s, terms: ‘rhythm and blues,’ and ‘country and western.’ ”

Slowly the term “folk music” began to describe a music performed by groups more likely to be based in New York City than in Nashville. Though the category contained mostly old standards, it also included songs of social protest that bothered some more conservative listeners, especially since the United States was locked in a Cold War against the Soviet Union and Americans were fighting a real war against communist China in Korea.

The Weavers—a folk quartet that included Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman, and Pete Seeger—had a smash hit in 1950 with “Goodnight, Irene,” and were touring the country when a newspaper named Seeger as a former member of the Communist Party. The group soon found itself blacklisted, and many of its records were removed from stores.

Caught up in the anti-communist backlash of the time was Woody Guthrie. “I ain’t a communist necessarily,” Guthrie had said, “but I’ve been in the red all my life.” His musical background—growing up in Oklahoma and being driven to California by the Dust Bowl—sprang from the same country tradition that had inspired the Maddox Brothers and Rose. The melody of Guthrie’s most famous tune, “This Land Is Your Land,” came directly from a Carter Family song. “I think, in every sense of the word, Woody was a country singer,” said music historian Bill C. Malone. “When you look at his style, his guitar playing, it was borrowed directly from Maybelle Carter. He admitted that. His songs were based on country melodies. He borrowed from the Carter Family and Gene Autry and Jimmie Rodgers and other people like that. But then he went to New York. He had begun associating with a different crowd, with these New York, urban people. He began to lose that country identification and began to be identified as a quote ‘folk singer’ unquote, and became the godfather of the whole urban folk music movement.”

Moving forward, though they both shared common roots and often drew on the same songs—and though the definitions were arbitrary, driven as much by marketing as anything else—folk music and what was now “country and western” music became separate categories. “Somebody had to claim Woody, and the folk music community absolutely claimed Woody,” said Marty Stuart, who believes Guthrie should be in the Country Music Hall of Fame:

Country music missed by not claiming him as one of their own, because, in my mind, when I listen to Woody Guthrie, he’s one of the purest country artists that God ever made. Woody Guthrie is American music. He is country music.

Take it to the music. Put it on the music. Shine the light on the music and what the man wrote. Mighty powerful. “Deportee,” “This Land Is Your Land,” just start there and keep going to the end of the line. There you have country music: Woody.

By 1950, Nashville’s position at the heart of the country and western music business was solidifying. Radio station WSM and its Grand Ole Opry hosted most of the music’s biggest stars. The Acuff-Rose company had spawned other song publishers who saw money to be made in holding the copyrights to the tunes people loved to hear, and songwriters like Boudleaux and Felice Bryant were happy to provide them.

Some enterprising WSM engineers had formed the Castle Recording Company to take advantage of the local pool of artists and produced their records for a variety of labels, moving to the former dining room on the second floor of Nashville’s Tulane Hotel for their studio. And early in 1950, as a WSM announcer introduced a popular morning show, which was carried nationally on NBC, he improvised a little—“for no good reason,” he admitted later. “From Music City USA, Nashville, Tennessee,” he proclaimed, “the National Broadcasting Company brings you The Red Foley Show.”

It was more an offhand comment than a statement of fact—most music was still written and recorded in other places, and Nashville’s leading citizens still preferred to call their city “the Athens of the South”—but for more and more country artists Nashville had become the Promised Land they all wanted to reach.

No one’s pilgrimage covered more miles than Hank Snow’s. Born Clarence Eugene Snow in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, in Canada’s Maritimes, he suffered an abusive childhood and ran away at age twelve to serve as a cabin boy on fishing boats before being inspired by Jimmie Rodgers to try his hand at music.

He became an accomplished guitar player, changed his first name to Hank because it sounded more Western, and started appearing on Halifax radio as “the Yodelling Ranger.” When his voice deepened and he could no longer yodel, he became “Hank the Singing Ranger.”

A star in Canada, Snow had less luck breaking through in the United States when he moved south in 1944. He appeared on radio stations in Philadelphia, West Virginia, California, and then on Dallas’s Big D Jamboree, where Ernest Tubb met him in 1949. Their shared obsession with Jimmie Rodgers formed an instant bond, and Tubb invited Snow to Nashville, highlighting him with slots on the Midnite Jamboree and eventually persuading the Grand Ole Opry to let him perform.

Snow’s first appearance was underwhelming, and he was considering giving it all up and returning to Canada when a train song he had written and recorded, “I’m Moving On,” suddenly hit the charts.

“It was like magic,” Snow remembered. The audiences “were completely indifferent one week, and the next week they were wildly enthusiastic.” The song would be the number one country song for twenty-one weeks, equaling Eddy Arnold’s record for duration at the top of the charts. Hank Snow’s place on the Opry was assured, and the former cabin boy from a Canadian province in the North Atlantic had become a certified American country and western star.

MOTHER MAYBELLE

I was asking Maybelle one night in Knoxville, she was doing a sound check, and she had the autoharp and she’s trying to get it louder and it’s starting to feedback, and I said, “Maybelle, what do you do when you have trouble with that mic?”

“Oh, I just do what I tell the girls to do when they have trouble with the mic: just smile real loud.” Good advice.

JOHN MCEUEN

That same year, another group of country artists found their way to Nashville, although their journey was much shorter—and much less unlikely—than Hank Snow’s. The Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle, from Maces Spring, Virginia, now represented “the First Family of Country Music,” since A.P. and Sara had gone their separate ways and left the original trio. Maybelle and her three daughters carried on the family business, at the urging of her husband, Eck.

Wearing dresses Maybelle had sewn from a wartime surplus silk parachute, the group performed on radio stations in Richmond, and throughout the week made personal appearances Eck would book for them. Anita, the youngest sister, had the best voice of the three. Helen, the oldest, was the most accomplished instrumentalist. June, the middle child, was high-spirited and outgoing, and though not as musically accomplished as the two other girls, often became the center of attention because of her natural sense of humor, which she deployed to create a comic character.

“My mom was born an entertainer,” said Carlene Carter, June’s eldest daughter. “Mom made herself out to be not as good a singer as she was, because her sisters teased her all the time that she couldn’t sing as good as them. So Mama kind of turned it into an act.” She would sometimes get the audience laughing by pretending to have difficulty finding her note to start a song, her daughter remembered, “but she knew exactly where it was.”

In 1948, they landed a job on the Midday Merry-Go-Round on Knoxville’s WNOX, where Eck asked a gifted young guitarist to join the ensemble, even if his playing style, much different from Maybelle’s distinctive “Carter scratch,” leaned more toward jazz than old-time country music.

Chester Atkins came from the remote hollows in the East Tennessee foothills of the Clinch Mountains, where he had made his own crystal set to hear music on local radio stations. Shy and sickly as a boy, he had taken up the fiddle and then the guitar, drawn to the stylings of the Belgian-French jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and the influential finger picking of Kentucky’s Merle Travis, who had established himself as a top session musician on the West Coast.

Despite his virtuosity, Atkins had been having trouble making a living, bouncing from one station to another, many of which thought his music wasn’t hillbilly enough for their audiences. “I got fired all over the country,” he remembered. “I never really blamed anybody for firing me,” he added. “I always felt they knew what they wanted and I wasn’t giving it to them.”

He was feeling defeated when the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle offered him an equal share of their receipts if he would become part of their act. The combination of his bluesy guitar playing, the Carters’ firm grounding in traditional Appalachian ballads, and June’s effervescent personality was an immediate success.

It caught the attention of a powerful station in Springfield, Missouri, whose call letters, KWTO, stood for “Keep Watching the Ozarks.” In 1949, they became the featured attraction on a show syndicated across the nation, sponsored by Red Star Flour. When the company’s sales increased, its main competitor, the Martha White Flour Company, which sponsored a segment on the Grand Ole Opry, pressured WSM to bring them to Nashville. This was an offer every country musician dreamed of. But there was a problem: they were told they couldn’t bring Chet Atkins with them.

“The reasoning behind this, according to my mother,” said June’s son, John Carter Cash, “was that the Grand Ole Opry was concerned that Chet would come to Nashville and basically take over.” “The Opry guys didn’t want Chet around because he was going to take some work away from them,” Carlene Carter said. “But Grandma had taken Chet kind of under her wing. And the girls, they adored Chet. Grandma stood up for him, and said, ‘No, Chester’s coming.’ ”

The Opry wouldn’t budge about Atkins, but sweetened its offer if the Carters would come without him. Still, Maybelle and the girls held out.

After six months, WSM finally gave in. The Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle, with Chet Atkins “and His Fancy Guitar,” debuted on the Opry in September 1950. “The roof,” June recalled, “came off that building.”

They were hired to play four shows a week: a Sunday-morning gospel program, a daytime show called Noontime Neighbors, a show at the local veterans’ hospital, and every Saturday night at the Opry, where June and Little Jimmy Dickens developed comic routines to entertain audiences between the singing acts.

Nashville would become the Carters’ home—and Chet Atkins’s home, too. He was soon sought after in the city’s young recording industry as a session player, just as the other musicians had predicted. He would live in Nashville the rest of his life, and always tell people, “I owe everything to the Carters.”

I’M SO LONESOME I COULD CRY

Songwriting is the most mysterious of all the trades. It cannot be explained. There’s a craft that goes along with it, but at the same time, it’s the divine gift; it’s that thing you can’t explain.

I guess he said it best, when somebody asked him, “Hank, how do you write them old sad songs?” He says, “Hoss, I don’t write ’em. I just hang on to the pen and God sends them through.”

The way I see it, if you’re collaborating with God, the Creator, who made the mountains and the stars, and the moon and the sky, a three-minute country song is not that big of a stretch. But those kind of songs, like “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Your Cheatin’ Heart”—unexplainable.

MARTY STUART

Like Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams could neither read nor write musical notations. But he was now cranking out hit after hit. Most of his compositions were honky tonk songs with upbeat tempos that his audiences and jukebox operators seemed to prefer. But he was also skilled at writing and performing slower “heart” songs, like “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” which Williams himself considered his personal favorite. Many other songwriters—from all genres—point to it as a masterpiece, and cite it as one reason people called him “the Hillbilly Shakespeare.”

“I think Hank Williams is a bit like Shakespeare,” said Elvis Costello, the British rock and pop musician. “He could animate these simple words to sound like, as if they were everything in the world. That’s an incredible talent.” “Very simple, straight-ahead lyrics; no sentimentality in it,” singer-songwriter Paul Simon said of the song. “It’s so direct and true, and a singable three-chord song. A great balance of melody and story. It doesn’t seem at all like he’s working at it. And it’s a gift. Hank Williams is just a freak-of-nature kind of thing—it wasn’t before; it didn’t come around again. Those songs, they last for lifetimes, if not forever.”

“He used to say, ‘I don’t know what you mean by country music; I just write songs the way I know how,’ ” added Holly Williams, Hank’s granddaughter and a singer-songwriter in her own right. “He was saying, ‘Hear that lonesome whippoorwill. He sounds too blue to fly. The midnight train is winding low, I’m so lonesome I could cry.’ It’s this stunning, beautiful, heartbreaking loneliness. It’s simple enough English, but it’s just put together in these perfect little mazes of words that cut right at your heart. That’s where the Shakespeare stuff comes in.”

Hank Williams had his own explanation. His secret, he said, “can be explained in just one word: sincerity.” “He made you think he was singing strictly to you,” said Bill C. Malone. “This guy understands me. He knows the pain I feel. He knows what I’ve done and what I’ve experienced. He knows it just as well as I do, and this song he’s singing, he’s singing directly to me.”

Headlining his own tours, Williams now drew adoring crowds wherever he went, holding them in the palm of his hand, one of the Drifting Cowboys remembered. “Once Hank walked out there…and curled up around that [microphone],” he said, “a naked lady coulda rode an African elephant behind him and wouldn’t nobody have seen her.”

During intermission, band members sometimes sold as many as a thousand Hank Williams songbooks a night. At the end of each tour, he would return with a suitcase bulging with cash that he emptied onto the cashier’s counter at his Nashville bank for deposit. In 1950, Williams earned $92,000 in personal appearances and another $40,000 in recording and songwriting royalties.

Then he and Audrey spent the money as fast as he made it. She bought jewelry and new furniture and got them “his and hers” Cadillacs. He left extravagant tips at restaurants; sent money to people who wrote him with hard-luck stories; bought five hundred acres of land south of town and stocked it with cattle. Together, they opened Hank and Audrey’s Corral, a clothing store in downtown Nashville, near Ernest Tubb’s record store.

As a songwriter, Williams was constantly working, writing new lyrics while he traveled—on scraps of paper he stuffed into his wallet, on hotel stationery, even on the cardboard that came with his pressed shirts.

To other stars, the Hillbilly Shakespeare seemed to have the golden touch. Touring with Bill Monroe, he co-wrote a tune, “I’m Blue, I’m Lonesome,” that became a bluegrass classic. Backstage at the Opry, where he was now the show’s biggest star, he would sometimes try out a new song for other artists and ask if they wanted it. If they really liked it, he would usually decide to record it himself.

Jimmy Dickens got the treatment when he was on tour with Williams and Minnie Pearl:

He said, “You need a hit.” I said, “Well, who doesn’t?” He said, “Let’s just write you one right now. You got any paper?” And Minnie Pearl reached in her glove compartment and gave him a little pad of paper and he gave me a pen and he said, “Now write this down.”

And he wrote me one line at a time, one line at a time. And in fifteen minutes he had written “Hey Good Lookin’.” And he said, “Now you record this and it’ll make you a hit.” I said, “As soon as I can get in the studio it’ll be put down.”

About a week later, we were up at [the Ryman] and he said, “I recorded your song today.” I said, “When it hits, you’ll know that it’s mine.” He said it with a smile.

“Hey Good Lookin’ ” would be another number-one hit—for Hank Williams. In 1951, when Montgomery, Alabama, staged a huge homecoming for their hometown celebrity, nine thousand people showed up at the city’s Agricultural Coliseum to hear a show that included Hank Snow and the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle with Chet Atkins. Backstage, a teenager showed up with a guitar and asked his idol if he could sing “Hey Good Lookin’ ” as part of the show. But “that’s my current song,” Williams answered. “Aw, Hank, let me sing it,” the boy pleaded. “Go ahead,” Williams finally said. “I’ll sing something else.” He had plenty of other crowd-pleasing hits to choose from.

That same year, Williams was recruited to headline the largest traveling medicine show ever, sponsored by Hadacol, a foul-tasting elixir its makers promised could cure everything from cancer and epilepsy to heart ailments and tuberculosis. It contained vitamins, minerals, honey, and 12 percent alcohol—“enough alcohol to make people feel good,” its promoter admitted privately, “and enough laxative for a good movement.”

The caravan was a lavish extravaganza, with parades in each city, dancing girls in fancy costumes, and free admission to the shows for anyone with Hadacol box tops. Hank and his Drifting Cowboys, along with Minnie Pearl, were the only country acts, joined at different locales by movie stars like Cesar Romero and Jack Benny, and the prizefighter Jack Dempsey. Bob Hope appeared in Cincinnati but had to wait to walk onstage because the raucous crowd demanded five encores from Williams. When it finally quieted down enough, the comedian sauntered out wearing a cowboy hat. “Just call me Hank Hope,” he said. After he was done, he told the show’s manager he would never follow Hank Williams again.

The makers of Mother’s Best Flour also saw Williams as a draw for their products, and he pre-recorded seventy fifteen-minute radio shows for them to distribute. Besides his hits—and always a hymn or gospel song—the broadcasts sometimes included recitations of poems he had written as his alter ego, Luke the Drifter, who dispensed moral advice Hank Williams himself never followed. And sometimes, over the objections of the band, the shows included vocals by Audrey, who, despite the limits of her vocal talents, seemed to crave the limelight that increasingly focused only on Hank.

Though the couple presented a public image of a happy marriage, their relationship was as explosive as ever, filled with fights and broken furniture. She suspected him of cheating on her; and when he was on the road, he suspected her of the same thing. “They loved each other. I think they truly did love each other,” his friend Jimmy Key remembered, “but for some reason, they fought a battle, I think, every day.”

After a few months of sobriety following their move to Nashville, Hank had resumed his bouts of heavy drinking, which escalated the tensions. Returning from a tour, a band member called Audrey to let her know Hank was in his cups again. She said she wouldn’t let him in the house, so he should be taken to a nearby hospital to dry out. Another time, when she had locked him from their home, Williams checked into the Tulane Hotel and fell asleep in his room with a lit cigarette, which started a fire that resulted in him being arrested.

Occasionally, he turned to Mother Maybelle Carter. “Maybelle brought Hank within her fold,” said John Carter Cash. “She reached out and took him into her heart and really was like a mother to him in many different ways. My mother would tell me that he would come to the house sometimes late at night and would just sit in the kitchen area and have coffee and talk to Maybelle.” “They worried about him a lot, and they’d try to steal his liquor, and pour it out,” Carlene Carter said. “It was always done with a lot of love. There was never any judgment there. There was some cornbread and some stew, and some pinto beans with a ham hock in it, no matter what. She’d feed you and lift you back up, and talk to you, and counsel you. She’d just love on you until you felt better.”

Williams continued to pour his troubles into his songs. When Audrey was hospitalized—she later claimed it was for a “little minor something,” other accounts say it was for an infection after an abortion he didn’t know about—she refused to let him kiss her. Back at home, he told the children’s babysitter that his wife had “a cold, cold heart.” Then he sat down, and in an hour wrote another classic: “Cold, Cold Heart.”

“I think there’s such beauty in the storytelling and in the lyrics,” said singer-songwriter Vince Gill. “If you hear the words, ‘Why can’t I free your doubtful mind and melt your cold, cold heart,’ if that doesn’t stir something up in you, then we’ll pass; we’ll just let you go on by. But to me, that’s as poetic as anything you could ever hear. And it’s real.”

As “Cold, Cold Heart” rose in the country charts, Mitch Miller, a big-label record producer in New York, urged pop star Tony Bennett to do his own cover version. Bennett was reluctant to sing what he considered a “cowboy song,” but Miller persuaded him by saying, “Listen to the words.” Miller persisted because, he said, Williams “had a way of reaching your guts and your head at the same time. Nobody I know could use basic English so effectively.” Bennett’s version would soon jump to the top of the pop charts, prompting other popular artists—Perry Como, Dinah Washington, and Louis Armstrong among them—to record it as well.

“It was said one time that his songs could go to places that he couldn’t because he was so pure as a country boy and as a country singer. His hillbilly fence might have stopped him,” said Marty Stuart, “but the songs could go beyond the fence and go everywhere.” Williams reportedly told people he didn’t like Tony Bennett’s version of his song; it was too “uptown.” But band members remembered that whenever they stopped for a meal, Williams would go to the jukebox, put in some money, and make sure everyone there heard Tony Bennett sing his song.

More troubles plagued him. He fell off a stage in Canada, further aggravating his chronic back problem and sending him to the hospital to be fitted for a stainless steel and leather brace that made life on the road excruciating. Near the end of the year, after reinjuring his back in a hunting accident, he entered another hospital for an operation, then ignored his doctors’ orders and left before it was fully healed to be home on Christmas Eve.

There, he and Audrey argued and fought for a week—he told a friend he had learned of her latest affair and it “busted my heart.” She later accused him of physically attacking her, even firing his gun four times. By New Year’s Eve of 1951, she had moved out with the children and called Hank to say she would never live with him again. Ten days later, she filed for divorce once more.

As the year ended, Billboard announced that Hank Williams’s “Cold, Cold Heart” had been the top country song of 1951, and Tony Bennett’s version had been number thirteen on the pop charts.

HONKY TONK ANGELS

By 1952, 1,200 radio stations, in every corner of the nation, were devoting at least two hours to country and western music every day. The Decca label reported that country records represented 50 percent of its sales; the giant Columbia label said its country and western catalog had nearly doubled in size and now represented 40 percent of its sales. And because of the lower costs to produce a country record, the company profits were that much higher.

“A jukebox loaded with hillbillies or westerns is as good as money in the bank,” Billboard proclaimed. Under the headline “Country Music Is Big Business and Nashville Is Its Detroit,” Newsweek reported, “Country music has become more than a regional manifestation, it has become a national desire.” The American Magazine put it differently: “This noteworthy nation,” it declared, “has been taken down bad with an epidemic called hillbillyitis.” With his smoother version of country music, Eddy Arnold had now sold eighteen million records for RCA Victor, nine million of them in the last three years alone.

Hank Williams was the brightest star in the honky tonk firmament, but he was not alone.

Webb Pierce, from West Monroe, Louisiana, had two number-one hits to his name when he heard Hank Williams on the radio, singing “Back Street Affair,” about an illicit love between a young woman and an older married man that ruins her reputation and makes them both the subject of small-town gossip. When he told Williams how much he liked it, he learned that Fred Rose had kept Williams from recording it, thinking it was too risqué. But, Hank said, “I think anyone who’s got guts enough to record it has got themselves a number one hit.” Pierce rushed to release it, and just as Williams had predicted, got his third top song in a row—bringing him an invitation to leave the Louisiana Hayride for the Opry. Faron Young, known as “the Hillbilly Heartthrob,” joined the Hayride as a protégé of Pierce, whom he hoped to follow to Nashville.

Carl Smith was already there. “My daddy had the ‘it’ quality,” said his daughter, Carlene Carter. “He had that clear voice and he was good looking and the women swooned over him.” Smith had arrived at WSM around the same time as the Carter Sisters. He and June soon became involved. “They called them ‘the Sweethearts of the Opry’ because they met on the Opry stage,” Carlene said. “And my mom would always make these jokes about, ‘Where’s that nice Carl Smith?’ Just with a little wink. So she had a crush. And he got a crush back. And so they got married, and I think they were happy for a good amount of time. But they had that career struggle, where Mama had that ambition eating her up, and it caused a problem.”

But of all the rising honky tonk stars, none was challenging Hank Williams for supremacy more than William Orville “Lefty” Frizzell from Corsicana, Texas, who had given up working oil rigs to sing and write songs. “A lot of people refer to that period as the period of Hank and Lefty,” Merle Haggard said. “The jukebox was just full of Lefty Frizzell and Hank Williams, and it was a toss-up to who was the hottest.”

Like Williams, who was five years older, Frizzell struggled with alcoholism and derived inspiration for his songs from his personal life. “I Love You a Thousand Ways” came from a number of poems written during a six-month jail term in New Mexico as an apology to his wife. “And the back side of it was called ‘If You’ve Got the Money I’ve Got the Time,’ ” Haggard said. “Both of them went on to be country music standards. And that was his first record. And the next five records were treated the same way; they were all number-one records. So he was really hot around 1950, ’51, ’52.”

Frizzell and Williams toured briefly together as “the Kings of Honky Tonk,” though Hank privately complained to friends that he thought Lefty’s voice was whiny. After their shows, the two would play their guitars in a hotel room and sing Jimmie Rodgers songs.

In early 1952, a song rocketed to the top of the country charts, sung by another honky tonk singer from Texas, Hank Thompson, who had made his name in Western swing with his Brazos River Boys. “The Wild Side of Life” was written by William Warren after his wife had asked him for a divorce, and then he saw her in a bar with another man and thought, “She quit me to go back to the wild side of life.” Its melody came from the Carter Family’s “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes,” which Roy Acuff had also used in his famous song “The Great Speckled Bird.” Its lyrics lamented, “I didn’t know God made honky tonk angels.”

“The Wild Side of Life” was still rising in the charts when a new song, with the same melody, “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” came out as a direct answer to it, sung by Kitty Wells. “It’s a shame that all the blame is on us women,” she sang. “Too many times married men think they’re still single, that has caused many a good girl to go wrong.”

Kitty Wells was no honky tonk angel. The happily married wife of Johnnie Wright, part of the popular duo Johnnie and Jack, and the mother of three, she preferred appearing in public in demure old-style gingham dresses. After several unsuccessful attempts at gospel recordings, she had agreed to do the new song simply to earn the session fee and had no expectations for it.

But her song struck a chord in women everywhere. “She didn’t even know the record was released,” according to Eddie Stubbs. “Audrey Williams had been to Alabama and was driving back into Nashville and she was scanning the radio dial and she heard ‘It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels’ repeatedly. And she got on the phone when she got back to Nashville and she called Kitty and she said, ‘Gal, you’ve got a hit on your hands.’ ”

It soon eclipsed “The Wild Side of Life” to become the first song by a woman to reach the top of Billboard’s country and western chart—and prompted Johnnie and Jack to rename their act. “Instead of being Johnny and Jack and the Tennessee Mountain Boys, and Kitty Wells, Kitty got top billing,” Stubbs said. “Roy Acuff told them, at the time, ‘You’re making a huge mistake. There’s always room for a girl singer on a show, but there’s no girl singer headliners.’ ”

For a while, Wells was kept from broadcasts of the Opry—where Acuff was hailed as “the King of Country Music”—because her song was considered too outspoken. But the show’s managers eventually relented, and Kitty Wells would go on to become one of the Opry’s most durable stars, an inspiration to future women artists known as “the Queen of Country Music.”

I’LL NEVER GET OUT OF THIS WORLD ALIVE

I think when Hank split with Audrey, I think that was the beginning of the end. He wasn’t good with her, and he wasn’t good without her. He had to have her, he had to have somebody strong like that to keep him focused.

E. JIMMY KEY

As Hank and Audrey Williams’s second divorce was finalized in 1952, he once more turned his personal sorrows into a song: “You Win Again.” “Yeah, that was an Audrey song, ‘You Win Again,’ ” Jimmy Key said. “It’s a sad song, but it really tells a lot about his life at that point.”

Williams moved in briefly with Ray Price, a rising country star, who remembered Hank calling Audrey every day, only to have her hang up. Then Williams tried to move on. He found a new girlfriend, Bobbie Jett, who soon became pregnant with his child. And when he appeared on national television, on The Kate Smith Evening Hour, it seemed clear that he was also infatuated with young Anita Carter, as they sang one of his new songs, “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love With You.” “There’s a huge crush going on there, big time,” Carlene Carter said. “I don’t know details, but you can see it. She certainly was in awe of him. You can see it in her eyes, a lot of love going on there in a shy girl. She was pretty young.”

In June, Williams met another woman, nineteen-year-old Billie Jean Jones, who had accompanied Faron Young for a guest appearance at the Opry, and he was so taken by her beauty that he told Young, “If you ain’t going to marry her, ol’ Hank’s gonna marry her.” Soon enough, Williams had wooed her away and the two were engaged.

But his physical condition was deteriorating. The operation on his spine had not eased his constant back pain, and now he added a steady mix of drugs to combat it: amphetamines to get himself going, sedatives to help him sleep, sometimes morphine to numb the pain. One bystander in California noticed that he seemed to have pills for breakfast. In Texas, a man hired to keep tabs on him for the Opry said, “He had pills in his hat band, his guitar, pills everyplace.” His friend Jimmy Key remembered the time vividly: “The drinking was bad enough, but he progressed to other things. I went on out to the house and he came out, still in his underwear, and he looked like Death eating a cracker. I mean he was really, really sad to see.”

In a recording session in Nashville, where Chet Atkins sat in on guitar, Williams was so weak, he would fall into a chair to rest between each take. As they finished the last song, “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive,” Atkins remembered thinking, “Hoss, you’re not just jivin’.”

Despite it all, he was still writing and recording hit after hit. His song “Jambalaya” topped the country charts, and like so many others, became a pop hit as well when Jo Stafford covered it. Acuff-Rose, his publisher, reported that eighty-nine of his copyrights were recorded in the first half of 1952.

On tour, Williams continued drawing huge crowds, though he often was drunk or surly onstage—or simply failed to appear, sometimes even for his spot on the Grand Ole Opry. In Richmond, Virginia, with Ray Price as the opening act, he had trouble remembering the lyrics and staying on key, and walked off after three songs, leaving Price and the Drifting Cowboys to try to appease the angry crowd. After another ragged performance, a disgusted Roy Acuff told him, “You’ve got a million-dollar voice and a ten-cent brain.”

At a concert in El Paso, he was in such bad shape that Minnie Pearl was asked to stay with him between performances to make sure he didn’t miss the second show. She tried to brighten his mood by singing “I Saw the Light.” He responded, “Minnie, there ain’t no light.”

On August 9, he missed another Opry appearance, despite being warned by Jim Denny, the show’s manager, that it was his last chance to redeem himself. Two days later, after hearing reports that Williams was drunk during a show at a Pennsylvania music park, Denny called him up and fired him—“the toughest thing I ever had to do in my life,” he said. Ernest Tubb, who was in the office at the time, said Denny had tears in his eyes. Informed of the decision, Edwin Craig, the president of National Life and Accident Insurance, the owner of WSM, told Tubb that it might force Williams to rehabilitate himself. “But it may work the other way,” Craig added. “It may kill him.”

Fred Rose set out to keep his protégé’s career intact. In Montgomery, he worked with Williams to polish two new songs Hank had written. One was “Kaw-Liga,” about a wooden Indian in an antique store who falls in love with the statue of an Indian maiden, but loses her because he was never able to express his feelings. The other song was pure emotion. When she heard her son and Fred Rose working on it, Lillie Williams called it “the prettiest song I ever heard…so pretty it made my hair stand on end.” It was titled “Your Cheatin’ Heart.”

As he made preparations to have the songs recorded, Rose also arranged for Williams to return to the Louisiana Hayride, which was happy to have such a national star back on its stage, regardless of reports about his unreliability. Jerry Kennedy, who would go on to be a renowned session guitarist and record producer in Nashville, was just a kid in Shreveport at the time, and went to the Hayride to see his idol:

I remember going down around five o’clock for an eight o’clock show. I got on the first row. Unfortunately, Hank had been overserved, or something. It was probably close to ten o’clock before they brought him out; we had all been waiting. And he did the chorus to “Jambalaya” three times and walked off. That was my seeing Hank Williams.

I was definitely a big fan. So when I saw him do three choruses of “Jambalaya,” it did not bother me in the least that that’s all I had seen. I had seen Hank Williams.

On October 19, Williams and Billie Jean got married in New Orleans in as public a manner as possible. For tickets ranging from $1 to $2.80, people could attend the afternoon rehearsal or the evening ceremony, complete with a musical performance. Fourteen thousand fans attended.

Then Williams went back on tour for the remainder of 1952. “Those last days must have been a physical challenge,” Marty Stuart said, “because the disease of alcoholism and drug addiction, on top of whatever physical ailments, and riding up and down the road in a back seat of a car to sing country music, was not a glamorous life. So it must have been just a physical nightmare—and a soul nightmare.”

His health worsened: chest pains that made it hard to catch his breath at times; a puffy appearance from his drinking and drug abuse; periodic incontinence often associated with spina bifida; his back pain now so acute that he sometimes lay on the floorboard of his touring car, crying because it hurt so much. “Every time I close my eyes,” he said, “I see Jesus comin’ down the road. He’s comin’ after ol’ Hank.”

“He had the taste of success and he had such a fear of losing it that I think that just kept pulling him and pulling him,” said Jimmy Key. “Everybody was grabbing at him. Everybody wanted money; everybody wanted this, they wanted that.”

He kept touring. In mid-December, he was in Houston, where James Walter Crowell took his two-year-old son Rodney to the concert. “My father’s dream in life, or the way he viewed himself and his place in the world, is that he should have been Hank Williams,” Rodney said:

And we went and he put me on his shoulders. I remember the odor of the Brylcreem [on his hair] and I really think it is my second memory in life.

But the memory was made more vivid and more real because my father would constantly remind me, “I took you to see Hank Williams. Don’t forget, I took you to see the Hillbilly Shakespeare.” It was his legacy for me: “I took you to see Hank Williams.”

For a retainer of $300 a week, Williams had brought on Horace “Toby” Marshall, who claimed to be a doctor, but in reality had a bogus degree he had purchased from a traveling salesman at a filling station. Before a performance, Marshall would let Williams have a few beers, inject him with something that made him vomit, then give him black coffee and Dexedrine and send him onstage. After the show, Williams was provided with some more beers, a few sedatives, and put to bed. More and more often the sedative was a new drug Marshall added to Hank’s bag of pills: chloral hydrate, powerful and particularly dangerous when combined with alcohol.

On December 30, Williams prepared to leave Montgomery for two shows in West Virginia and Ohio. A winter storm canceled his plans to fly, so he hired seventeen-year-old Charles Carr to drive him in Williams’s Cadillac, with his guitars, songbooks, and records packed in the trunk, along with a fresh supply of Marshall’s chloral hydrate. They started late and made several stops—for Williams to buy beer and find a doctor who would provide him with a shot of morphine—before stopping for the night in Birmingham.

On the 31st, New Year’s Eve, they set out early. Hank was in good spirits. After breakfast, he bought a bottle of bourbon and sang along with the radio at times. When they stopped in Chattanooga for lunch, he played Tony Bennett’s version of “Cold, Cold Heart” on the jukebox and left a $50 tip.

It was snowing when they reached Knoxville and learned that the first show, scheduled for that night in Charleston, West Virginia, had been canceled and they were to proceed directly to Canton, Ohio, where four thousand people had paid $2.50 each for the New Year’s Day show. Hank persuaded a doctor to give him two more shots of morphine before they departed at 10:45 p.m., with Williams lying down in the back seat, covered by his overcoat and a blanket, as they headed for Canton.

He never made it. Somewhere on the mountain roads between Bristol, Tennessee, and Oak Hill, West Virginia, in the early hours of January 1, 1953, Hank Williams, the Hillbilly Shakespeare, died in the back seat of his car. He was twenty-nine years old.

On Sunday, January 4, twenty thousand mourners gathered outside Montgomery’s Municipal Auditorium for the funeral of Hank Williams—the largest crowd in the city’s history since the day Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as president of the Confederacy in 1861.

Only 2,750 could fit inside, including two hundred African Americans who filled the segregated balcony, as Williams’s open casket was placed at the foot of the stage, flanked by floral arrangements in the shape of a guitar.

Though the Grand Ole Opry had fired him just four months earlier, many of its stars attended the service. Ernest Tubb comforted Lillie Williams in the audience, then sang a hymn with the Drifting Cowboys. Red Foley performed “Peace in the Valley,” and Roy Acuff joined him, Carl Smith, Webb Pierce, Jimmy Dickens, and Bill Monroe to sing “I Saw the Light,” while June Carter sat with the crowd. The Southwind Singers, an all-black gospel quartet, also performed.

Then Williams was laid to rest in Oakwood Cemetery. He was already becoming a legend. Released after his death, “Kaw-Liga” would become the top-selling country song of 1953. “Your Cheatin’ Heart” would become one of his best-known songs—and for many people would define country music.

“ ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ is probably my favorite,” said Darius Rucker, who has been both a rock and country singer. “I think everybody that wants to sing country music should have to sit in a room and listen to ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart,’ over and over, for an afternoon. The way his voice cries out for her. As a singer, it just makes you go, ‘Man, that’s what I want to do.’ ”

“The same way that Jimmie Rodgers spawned many musical children, I think the same could be said for Hank,” said Marty Stuart. “And the most incredible part of the whole story to me was the short span of time in which he wrote and how long those songs have lasted, and will keep on lasting.”

“I loved Hank Williams,” said Kris Kristofferson. “He had his heart and his soul into every word. Every song he sang, to me, would sound like he believed everything in it. I wish that he’d lived to be as old as I am, ’cause I know there was a lot of great songs in there that he wasn’t around long enough to write.”

“Everybody, nowadays, is, in a way, swimming in the wake of Hank Williams,” said rock musician Jack White. “All roads sort of lead back to him. Hank Williams feels like America to me. When you hear that, you really are hearing America.”

“What I loved about Hank Williams were those songs and the way he made you feel how much he must have hurt,” added Vince Gill. “I was always drawn to the melancholy ones, more than the fun ones. ‘Cold, Cold Heart,’ ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart,’ and ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.’ You can’t say it any more plain, or any more poetic, than ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.’ ”

“Just the sheer amount of music that he put out in a six-year period is unbelievable to all of us,” said his granddaughter, Holly Williams:

In six years, he had eleven number-one singles; thirty-five Top Ten singles. He recorded nearly two hundred songs, recorded and wrote. The body of work is what keeps people coming back, not only the amount of songs, but the fact that they were all truly amazing. I’ve never heard a song of my grandfather’s that I would consider as a throwaway.

If it’s a fun, kitschy song that doesn’t mean anything, it’s still a great melody that you keep singing over and over; or it’s a total heartbreak song. But this simple boy, born on a dirt floor, who can just rip your heart out—for generations to come we’ll always refer back to him.

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THE HILLBILLY SHAKESPEARE