Hank Williams’s granddaddy was in the Union Army during the Civil War. You read that right. To be fair, there is a catch, and a long story to it, proving how resourceful Williams men could be, at least sometimes, in keeping themselves alive. Irvin Polk Williams, a South Alabama farmer—who, like the rest of the Williams clan, could only imagine owning a plantation and slaves—joined the Confederate 18th Infantry, Company F in 1861 and fought in the Battle of Shiloh. Not long after, however, he was captured by the Union Army during the Battle of Richmond. Because he knew a great deal about Confederate troop movements around Mobile Bay, Alabama, he was not your common prisoner and thus was offered a deal—he could avoid imprisonment, or worse, if he revealed some of those movements. In a bind, he did just that, and was promptly inducted into the Army of Abe Lincoln.
After Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Irvin was given an honorable discharge and allowed to return home, keeping his turncoat activities quiet.1 Irvin, who had some Indian blood on his father’s side, that of Muskogee Creek and Tsalagi Cherokee, gave up farming and worked a more in-demand job, chopping down trees used for building railroad tracks. He married a woman named Martha Ann Autry, and in time they settled in McWilliams, Alabama, and had a son, Elonzo Huble Williams, known as “Lon,” in 1891. His life was stamped by tragedy and misery early on. Martha Ann committed suicide when he was six, and Irvin died in a virus outbreak when he was seventeen, sending him off on his own. He found work, like his father, cutting down trees, as well as driving railroad trains full of logs to lumberyards around the Southeast. This work took him to Georgiana, Alabama, and in 1914, he met a sixteen-year-old girl there named Jessie Lillybelle Skipper, called “Lillie.”
To their friends, Lon was considered to be from the wrong side of those tracks; his family history was in Lowndes County, which was regarded as where the white trash came from, and folks, never mind their own dirty laundry, tended to look down on him, shaking their heads about his mother and all. Lillie was from the right side of the tracks, hailing from Butler, just below Lowndes, where the betters were said to live. (The irony is that today, Butler ranks just ahead of Lowndes in per capita income).2 She was a pistol and, though seven years younger than he, seemed to be the one in charge. Neither was a prize, to be sure; he was the shorter, already going bald, and she was a plain-looking, hatchet-faced woman, around two hundred pounds and getting bigger.
No one would have confused Lon with one of those handsome young men in the military schools, or Lillie with the belle of the ball. But they had each other, and in 1916, after he sneaked Lillie out of her parents’ house in Georgiana, they eloped and were married in a church in the now-ghost town of Starlington. Lon then moved in with her and her presumably shocked parents. Before they could start a family however, the United States was called into World War I, and his orders stationed him with the 113th Regiment of Engineers in France, where he sustained a non-war-related head injury of some sort and was discharged in 1919. The country doughboy came home and resumed work on the railroad, for the Ray Lumber and W. T. Smith Lumber companies, which kept him moving from one job to another on the nexus of railroads around the Southeast. He found one promising job in Mount Olive, which today is one of Alabama’s most affluent towns but back then was a dirt-poor logging community. Here, streets like theirs, called Kendrick Place, were mainly unpaved muddy clearings in the underbrush.
Sadly, their first child, a son named Ernest Huble Williams, died two days after being born in July 1921 and was buried behind the Mount Olive West Baptist Church, where Hank would sing in the choir as a boy. Lillie soon became pregnant again and gave birth in August 1922 to a daughter named Irene.
Soon after starting work in the town, on September 17, 1923, their next child, an undersized boy, was delivered by a doctor Lon paid thirty-five dollars to come and make a house call, assisted by either a black housekeeper, according to Lon’s later recollection, or a neighbor named Ada Grace, according to Lillie’s. By one account, both mother and child were sick for the next few days, and Ada Grace stayed at the Williams place tending to Irene and Lon.3
At the time, most of America was enjoying the Roaring Twenties, though in Alabama the economy and quality of life never seemed to roar. Still, the second child of Lon and Lillie Williams arrived with high hopes. They named him after the Hebrew King Hiram I, who reigned in the Phoenician city of Tyre from 980 to 947 BC and built the first Temple of the Israelites. They picked the name because they were members of the secretive Masonic fraternal/pseudo-religious society—or cult—tracing back to the 1800s, steeped in ancient freemasonry guilds and castes, in which King Hiram’s stonemasonry feats were legend. As Lon Williams helpfully recalled many years later, “I chose [Hiram’s] name from the Scripture, I Kings, 7th Chapter, 13th verse.”4
However, Hiram was, in effect, a nonperson. In the poorer quarters of the South, the births of most children not born in hospitals were recorded only if parents registered a birth certificate with the local Bureau of Vital Statistics office, and Lillie and Lon wouldn’t get around to the paperwork until 1934, when Hiram was already eleven and they were living in Garland. His name was misspelled on the birth certificate as “Hiriam.” This anomaly would be almost eerily repeated when Elvis Presley’s middle name was spelled “Aron” instead of “Aaron” on his tombstone. Not that it mattered a whit to Hiram King; he had by then already discarded that for something more chummy. He was, unofficially but eternally, “Hank.” “King” would also be dropped, high irony indeed when people took to calling him the king of country music.
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The house where Hank was born looked rickety, built as it was with logs not unlike those Lon cut down and transported, sitting four blocks from the Louisville and Nashville Railroad tracks—which, ironically, Lon did not traverse, W. T. Smith running its own trains on other lines. The house was fairly typical, a South Alabama town of farmers, cotton-pickers, migrant workers, and fellow loggers, the kind of town Harper Lee—born and raised in nearby Monroeville, smack on that ramblin’ man’s Highway 41—wrote in To Kill a Mockingbird were distinguished for their “grubbiness.”5 Called a “double-pen,” the place looked like two homes slapped together, which in fact they were, connected by a walkway. Lon agreed to pay the rent, eighty bucks for the year; as he once said with pride, “I was makin’ one hundred fifty, one hundred sixty dollars a month, which was good pay.” Indeed, he was offended to no end when, he said, “somebody once put out a book showing a picture of a house I wouldn’t keep hogs in and saying the boy was born in it.”6 Even so, Lillie hardly considered herself livin’ high. “A two-mule nigger farmer,” she supposedly once said, “is better off than this family.”7
They were well-mannered, good churchgoing Christians, taking pride and solace in that in equal measure. Their Masonic temple activities did not conflict with their devout Baptist exercises, in which Lillie played piano for the congregation at the Mount Olive church and sang songs of God’s love and mercy with her baby boy usually crying in the first pew, held by Lon. Lon Williams was the kind of man who took fatherhood in stride, sometimes too much so, turning cold and distant—in speaking of Hiram to neighbors he would simply call him “the boy,” not by his name. Lillie, on the other hand, doted on the little fellow. One previous Williams biographer, Chet Flippo, applying undocumented, scripted history using the literary device called “extrapolation,” wrote that “although she was big and full-bosomed, [Lillie] did not breast-feed Hiram as she had Irene. She fed him on Eagle brand canned milk, warmed up a little bit on the stove.” Meanwhile, Little Hiram, who was usually called “Harm”—“Hiram” in a Southern drawl—“Herky,” or “Poots” by family and friends, was said to sleep with a Bible under his pillow.8
In a male-dominated society in which women were generally relegated to childbearers and drudges serving husbands who spent more time down at the barroom than with their families, it was noteworthy that the pants in this family were worn by the wife. Her resolve and air of knowing it all matched her physical size, and she came to almost completely disregard Lon as the head of the household. Lillie made the decisions on practical matters such as the kids’ schooling and churchgoing. She also grew vegetables and strawberries in her backyard garden and sold what she could to neighbors and passersby. Lon was away from home anyway for long periods, doing seasonal work in the lumberyards, his regular absences and tales of railroad adventure carving both a sense of isolation and picaresque idealism in his son, who would one day fashion a song from those feelings. He’d call it “The Old Log Train,” and the lyrics, transposed from his youth, went:
Every morning at the break of day
He’d grab his lunch bucket and be on his way
In winter or summer, sunshine or rain
Every mornin’ he’d run that old log train
But even when Lon was home, he was a cipher. A hard-staring, lantern-jawed man of middling stature who wore glasses and a hunted sort of look, he was regularly so weak that he couldn’t get out of his bed. This was in part from his work and in part a carryover from that mysterious head injury he sustained during World War I. Lon would explain it many different ways, the one constant being that he took a tumble off a truck, his head slamming into the ground; he did like to go on, though, and sometimes said it was the result of a fight with another soldier over a French mademoiselle. He seemed to recover and was sent back into combat, but was left feeling occasionally disoriented, something he also liked to claim was the result of being gassed on the battlefield, to which he attributed his bouts of facial paralysis that crept up, rendering him unable to speak, then just as suddenly disappeared.
Whatever the cause of Lon’s woes, by 1930, Lillie thought of him as a millstone, and neighbors would stare at their feet when she would insult him to his face, in front of his own children at times, telling him what a good-for-nothin’ tramp he was. She was a demanding, volatile woman prone to gaining weight and arguing about the smallest things, and may have taken some pride in cutting her husband down to size. However Lillie dissed him, Lon was usually was too weary to defend his honor, or too busy worrying if he could keep the paychecks coming in. He would rise from his bed to take many jobs, quitting W. T. Smith, then returning, then quitting again for a short stay with another lumber company, bouncing around on the railroad—they didn’t own one of those new-fangled automobiles—to other encampments, in Chapman, Atwater, Garland, Bolling, Ruthven Mills, McWilliams. Sometimes Lon went on his own, for days or weeks, which to Lillie was a kind of relief, as she detested being a migrant instead of setting down roots somewhere, though it all seemed as if he were a running like hamster on a treadmill. He had also taken to the bottle to get him through the grind of life. And if Hiram emulated few of Lon’s traits, in this case the moonshine didn’t fall far from the tree. Of him, a magazine writer began an article in the ’50s:
“I’m nothing but a drunkard,” Hank Williams once cried out to an old, respected friend. “Why do people expect me to be anything else?” And then he laughed his dry, bitter laugh and said: “You think I’m a drunkard? Hell, you should of seen my old man!”9
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The notion of mobility, of going places on tracks or paved roads, was a welcome relief to many in the South who once felt trapped, mired in a backwoods log cabin with an outhouse. Now, there was the promise of worldliness, of breathing free. The talking motion picture offered a worldly look at which tastes the public was finding to its liking—and simple men of the earth with good hearts and pleasant singing voices were the most popular of Hollywood stars, led by singing cowboys who had replaced the nonsinging cowboys of the silents such as Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson.
Although rowdiness was a staple of the hillbilly side of the emerging idiom (as it still is of today’s version), once Hollywood found that such music was a new, profitable angle for movies in the late ’30s a trend began that still exists—“country” and “Southern” music and movies made not in the South but in Southern California. The first such cowboy multimedia star was an actual Southern boy, a mellow, guitar-strumming Texan named Orvon Grover “Gene” Autry. Gene was among the disciples of Bob Wills’s Texas swing band music and had followed Wills to KVOO in Tulsa, where he had his own show as “Oklahoma’s Yodeling Cowboy.”
Autry had his first hit in ’35, “That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine” for the bargain-bin Vocalion label. He also recorded his Christmas songs that still are the biggest-selling records of all time. Also in the early ’30s, a lanky, baby-faced Ohio native, Leonard Slye, formed the Pioneers Trio, who became the Sons of the Pioneers. After signing with the recently established Decca Records as its first “country” act, Slye and his band recorded “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” in 1935, and got a big break the next year when Autry sang the song into a hit in a movie of the same name. Slye even appeared as “Roy Rogers” in an Autry movie, then was given his own movie deal, the first Under Western Stars. Rogers, an immediate success, would vie with Autry for the top rung in the singing cowboy market. His records with the Pioneers all but eclipsed Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.
Still, the dim-witted redneck caricature was the overarching image non-Southerners had of Dixie. Even as Dizzy Dean was striking out bunches of big-league hitters, he clung to his own hillbilly lexicon, with stories of players who “slud” into third and “swang” a bat. Criticized for saying “ain’t” so much, he replied, “A lotta folks who ain’t sayin’ ‘ain’t,’ ain’t eatin’.” That certainly applied to the new country singers, who wrote the lyrics to their songs in their native vernacular. As Diz put his breeding as a Southern man, “The Good Lord was good to me. He gave me a strong right arm, a good body, and a weak mind.” For several generations of Americans, the last trait in particular would be synonymous with country singing.
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Lon did the best he could, trying his damnedest to make his boy look up to him, but life was just too hard. He even sent Hank to earn a few dollars for the family kitty, once recalling that his son was out on the street of a logging camp selling peanuts at age three, no doubt another of Lon’s little fibs. As he told it, “I bought the peanuts from a farmer, and the boy sold ’em. He even knew how much he was owed him, and on payday he’d collect.” But Lon’s pride stung when years later he’d read about his then-famous son growing up poor as dirt, a reflection of having a ne’er-do-well old man. “’Course he didn’t have to sell peanuts for a living. Anybody who tells you that is crazy,” he’d append.10 Lon would have given his right arm to make his son proud of him. And it was he, not Lillie, who was concerned when he began to notice his son had a small raised brown spot on his lower back. Lillie said it was nothing, and a doctor was never consulted about it. However, the little twinges of pain Hiram started to feel, and the more stooped posture he began to walk with, were proof that Lon was right to worry about it.11
As life dragged on in South ’Bama, it became evident that both men of the family were living in discomfort, not that real men ever complained about it. To be sure, hard work in the face of pain earned men like Lon Williams very little. To those outside the South, these hapless laborers, many levels down from the nineteenth-century image of Southern gentlemen who ran their plantations and hosted cotillion parties in their mansions at night, were looked down upon with scorn and little pity. For the first half of the twentieth century, in fact, the Southern culture was taken by Northern men of letters as no more than refuse. H. L. Mencken, in 1917, railed at the “white trash” that had “dislodged the better elements” and clung to bigotry as a way of personal elevation from the gutter, where the slave descendants were relegated.12
Hiram Williams, like his old man, was brought up believing he was white trash—and this sensibility was his means of finding success, not by pushing it away but by turning it into engaging commercial appeal. As he once said, “To sing like a hillbilly, you had to have lived like a hillbilly. You had to have smelt a lot of mule manure.”13 He also said, “You got to know a lot about hard work”—which only proved that the man was a good huckster, inasmuch as he actually never lived on a farm, never slopped hogs or plowed a lower forty, never did work with his hands and his back, the latter being a congenital problem, and was pretty much a pampered mama’s boy, even when his persona changed into a drinkin’, spittin’ drugstore cowboy. Hiram was plainly not anyone’s idea of manly. A photo, perhaps the earliest of him taken, when he was around ten, shows him to be a geek with thick specs and Dumbo ears, though, no doubt at Lillie’s command, wearing a natty dark suit and tie, his brown wavy hair slicked with goose grease. Not quite able to muster a smile, his expression is one of utter embarrassment. While he was a well-adjusted child whose troublesome moments were usually something like setting off firecrackers or hanging down by the tracks with his buddies until past dark, meaning Lon would have his belt in his hand when he got home, no one thought of him as impressive.
His sister Irene, a swarthy, pretty girl more popular than he, called him “pretty frail” and said that “he was no athlete. Every time he tried sports, it seemed he broke something.”14 Worse, some of those injuries, such as a ruptured disk, were to his already weak back, worsening his spinal structure, which did not bode well and kept him isolated from other kids, who more often than not mocked him in the yard for his awkwardness. And yet the thing about the Williams boy was that he’d suck up the mocking and the pain and the puniness of his frame and get right back into the huddle or batter’s box. He was game, that’s for sure. Lillie and Lon worried about him to no end, but they were more than a little impressed that he usually did what he was told. Doing so was what introduced him to the call of music. While he was hardly a progeny, it helped that Lillie had a musical ear. Her father, John Skipper, had written church hymns, and she could always rouse the congregation with her organ playing. And Lon could do a mean turn on the Jew’s harp when at home or at a wing-ding in town. It was Lillie, though, who put rhythm in her son’s head, usually along with the fear of God. She was the voice of God for him.
As he recalled toward the end of his life to music writer Ralph J. Gleason: “My mother was an organist at Mt. Olive, Alabama, and my earliest memory is sittin’ on that organ stool by her and hollerin.’ I must have been five, six years old, and louder than anybody else.”15 He meant the Mount Olive West Baptist Church, where his grandfather was buried. The church, built in 1894 adjacent to the one-room Grace Schoolhouse used for Sunday school lessons, still stands today, that very organ bench having been preserved there as part of a Hank Williams shrine before it was moved to the Hank Williams Museum in Georgiana. Back then, services were usually conducted by two rabid reverends, I. T. Taylor and J. H. Higdon. When Lillie had Hiram sing hymns, she expected conviction, emotion, so that God would hear him. And he would wail at the top of his lungs when the choir revved up. If he developed an inordinate fear that the good Lord would punish him plenty if—when—he became a sinner, the idea must have had some sort of seductive outlaw scent, because he would have no hesitation looking for and finding the sinner’s road.
Singing in the congregation wasn’t bad, but he wanted to be more like the singing cowboys in the early talkies. For that he needed a means of playing music, the first of which was a harmonica, which he found under the Christmas tree when he was six. His enthusiasm for making noise come out of it was such that Lon would recall years later, “He like to run me nuts with that thing, runnin’ it back and forth in his mouth.”16 This not being sufficient to Hiram’s image of a singing cowboy, he soon got it in his head that he needed one of those sleek-looking guitars. But for now, the choice would have been a three-dollar guitar or a three-dollar meal on the table. The guitar would have to wait.
Whatever the instruments of his choice, the message he heard from gospel was a strong one, for him and for most everyone in South, and was pivotal to his generation’s transition. Here, as young people of every generation will do, they sought music they could call their own, not merely take their cues from their parents’ notions and godly hymns. And their notion of the Lord’s music was tuned into a broader, more liberal beat, with a greater appreciation for its black roots. Indeed, though racial restraints remained mostly unbroken, the ’20s were a time when secular pursuits challenged the rock-ribbed social restraints of the church. Stories in the paper and newsreels in the theater showing loose women in revealing flapper outfits dancing the night away in speakeasys, of Babe Ruth painting New York City red, of men deliriously pouring bathtub gin, may have shocked the good Christians of the rural South, but their children were, well, curious.