11

            

“SYRUP SOPPER” OR “POPULIST POET”

Just after New Year’s 1948, Audrey had enough. She packed a bag and took Lycrecia in the dead of night to Banks, where they moved in with her parents. If she tried to tell Hank she was leaving, he may have been too drunk to hear. It wasn’t until he came to the next morning that he figured it out. Calls to the Sheppard home in Banks were intercepted by Shelton Sheppard, who said his daughter didn’t want to speak with him.

She spoke instead through her lawyer, who filed divorce papers in the Montgomery County Circuit Court, with Audrey alleging that Hank Williams had “a violent and ungovernable temper,” that he “drinks a great deal,” and that “my nervous system has been upset and I am afraid to live with him any longer. . . . Complainant avers that the respondent has committed actual violence on her person attended with danger to her life or health [and she] further avers [that] there is reasonable apprehension of such violence in the future.”¹ Hank at first passed the filing off as just another of Audrey’s overreactions and trusted that she would withdraw the complaint once she came to her senses.

Rather than be by himself in his own house, he went—where else?—to Lillie’s boardinghouse, his mother having made it clear that if he ever tired of “that whore” he needed to come home to her. Not that Lillie was eager for them to divorce, as that would entitle Audrey to an immediate split of Hank’s bank accounts, provided the marriage was upheld as legal. Still, she felt like she had won something here, the prize being the son who had strayed from her. Fred Rose, meanwhile, was not happy that his meal ticket had drunk and caroused himself into such a tenuous situation. Seeing the walls closing in on Hank, he wrote him a treacly letter, by turns sounding like a shrink, a preacher, a pedagogue, and a daddy. “We have nervous breakdowns,” he wrote, “because we think drowning our sorrows will make us forget our troubles. . . . You cannot hope to be successful while neglecting the Principle of health.”

That was pompous enough, but Rose knew he had to take sides in the matter of the marriage, sucking up to Hank by unctuously advising him to be the bigger person. He wrote:

Don’t let Audry [sic] pull the wool over your eyes making you jealous. . . . These women want to be scalp collectors. . . . If she doesn’t love [a man], he is a chump to want her. . . . The three hardest words in the English language to say are “I Was WRONG” but when we muster enough courage to say it, we feel a sense of victory. . . . THE GREATEST VICTORY YOU WILL EVER GAIN IS OVER YOURSELF. . . . If Audry wants you to wreck your life because of this misunderstanding, fool her, show her you can be a success in spite of her not because of her.2

It went on like that for two full single-spaced pages, fusing religious zeal, drugstore philosophy, and rank sexism. Noting that “both of you want to be the boss,” because “both of you have pride [which] is one of the most destructive lies on earth,” keeping them from “enjoying happiness and humility,” he opined that only Hank had the right to be boss. “Live by the rules the Creator set down for you and you will be healthy, successful and happy. I know because I live as close to these rules as I know how and am healthy, successful and happy.” He concluded: “I’m opening up 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,” although he seemed to preclude a call that might be requesting some cash:

Wesley tells me you called this morning for more money after me wiring you four hundred dollars just the day before yesterday. . . . We have gone as far as we can go at this time and cannot send you any more.

Hank I have tried to be a friend of yours but you refuse to let me be one. I feel that you are just using me for a good thing, and this is where I quit. You have been very unfair, calling the house in the middle of the night and I hope you will not let it happen again.

When you get ready to straighten out let me know and maybe we can pick up where we left off, but for the present I am fed up with your foolishness.3

Yet by the time Hank would have read this, Rose apparently had thought better of it. Could he afford to lose a talent like Hank over a few hundred bucks and late-night calls? Besides, he had been working on getting Hank a nice gig as a stepping-stone to the Opry. A better tack, Rose quickly realized, was to lock Hank into a more formal arrangement with Acuff-Rose, which would keep him there, with conditions that would protect Rose. He had sent the contracts to Hank in February, a bit of bad timing that explained why there was no response. Hank, trying to clear his head after Audrey walked out on him, had also fled, to spend some time with Pappy McCormick down in Pensacola, writing songs and deciding what to do to. He apparently even went so far as to go see Lon Williams in McWilliams.

Meanwhile, Hank had no idea that there were any contracts waiting for him back home. Indeed, after days passed, Rose sent a set of the papers to the address he was given for Hank in Pensacola, which were returned to the post office there. Rose, in a bit of a panic, sent another set to Lillie, with some stern and insulting language about her son, writing to her that the contracts were “for his own protection, so that he won’t get too full of firewater and sign a bad contract with someone else. . . . I hope Hank has come to his senses by now and realizes that drinking never gets people out of trouble, it only gets them in deeper.”4

When Hank did return to Montgomery in early April, just as “Honky Tonkin’” was being played on the radio, he saw the contracts and another condescending, alarmingly sexist letter from Rose, again aimed to appeal to Hank’s parochial feelings about women. “I hear you have been doing a pretty good job of straightening yourself out and nobody is more glad to hear that than me,” he began. “Hank, anything I’ve written you or said is for your own good as I know what a fool a man can make of himself with drinking. . . . In the future, forget the firewater and let me take care of your business and you’ll be a big man in this business.” He felt compelled to add: “Remember that women are revengeful and do all in their power to wreck a man when they are separate from him and the only way to win is for the man to become successful.”⁵

This may have revealed more about Rose than it did of Hank, displaying the publisher’s own hang-ups and need to put women in their place. Even Hank may have been repelled, since he made Rose wait a few more days, until on April 12 he signed the darned contracts. He did so, in part, to help win back Audrey, as a sign that big things were in store for him—for both of them. The contract put him on the Acuff-Rose payroll for three years to start—at the princely sum of fifty dollars a month, against royalties, and an obligation to publish six songs of his per year. There were also protections for the company, mainly that it could “accept as liquidated assets all future royalties” due Hank, meaning that if Hank went legally broke, the royalties would be collateral against any loans Rose had made to him. And, not pulling back on his threats about Hank’s drinking, there was a clause that ordered Hank to “conduct himself in a manner not detrimental to Acuff-Rose Publications.” However, when it was signed, Rose had crossed that line out. Not that he didn’t intend to hold him to it. He may simply have come to his own senses and realized Hank could only be pushed so much before he stopped listening altogether.

•   •   •

Hank would soon return to the business of making Rose money. But as 1948 lengthened, he had other things to do. Calling Audrey in Banks endlessly until Shelton put her on the line, he all but begged her to come back to him, even as they got word on May 26 that the divorce was official, ending a marriage that arguably was illegal in the first place. Judge Eugene W. Carter decreed that Audrey was “forever divorced” from Hank.6 But “forever” in this case turned out to be a few weeks. By the time of the decree, they were vacationing in Norfolk, Virginia, and had just sent Fred Rose a postcard that they thought was hilarious; it had a cartoon of a woman riding a mule and read: “I’m not the first jackass to support a woman.” On the back they wrote, in their own parlance for success, “Having Big Time, Hank and Audrey.”⁷

They were still Mr. and Mrs., even if they were technically not, and the hell with anyone or any paper that said otherwise. Even though Hank had sold the house on Stuart, he and Audrey would live there until the sale closed, and the cold war and staredowns between Lillie and Audrey resumed. And now, so did his career. In the spring of ’48, Rose turned from offering lovelorn advice to pulling some industry strings for a guy who at twenty-five still had only limited success. But the timing was right. The country was entering an era of unprecedented economic boom and materialism. It was paid for in blood—a half million US casualties in the war, more than 6,000 from Alabama, as were 469 Medal of Honor recipients⁸—but now the ball was teed up for men like Hank who were symbolic of change and fresh ideas

All around him, meanwhile, country music was broadening. And he was in demand. If his soul perhaps needed saving, his ego did not. The year before, in August of ’47, he was interviewed by Montgomery Examiner writer William E. Cleghorn, and the article ran with a photo of a very cool-looking Hank not in cowboy gear but in a sophisticated snap-brim hat and casual shirt and jacket. Headlined HANK WILLIAMS RIDES ON DOWN TRAIL OF NATIONAL POPULARITY ON AIR RECORDS, the story called him “Montgomery’s happy, roving cowboy” and “the spur-jangling Sinatra of the Western ballad.” At the time, “Move It On Over” was sitting at No. 4 on the country chart. Cleghorn quoted a humble Hank explaining its genesis this way:

“Where the inspiration for that song came from, I couldn’t say,” Hank admitted. It wasn’t his own married life. Mr. and Mrs. Williams lead a model domestic life.

“Miss Audrey,” his wife, is the featured vocalist with the band. Hank taught her how to sing after their marriage.9

That, of course, was good for a few giggles among those who knew better. If the Williams marriage was a model for anything, it may have been domestic psychodramas like Gaslight or The Postman Always Rings Twice. And yet in a broad scope, he had almost missionary appeal. In fact, that same year, Reverend A. S. Turnipseed of the Dexter Avenue Methodist Church, who also wrote a column for the Examiner, saw him in concert at the Montgomery Municipal Auditorium and believed that Hank was stirring a “populist” fervor among an audience of “common people,” ascribing much social portent to what was nominally hillbilly music, even calling him a “Populist Poet.” Mixed in with “corny jokes and horse play,” he wrote, Hank, with “real charm,” brought the crowd to its feet with his up-tempo songs and religious hymns, “furnish[ing] a good means of escape from the hard reality of their lives [with themes like] love, sorrow, religion, work, etc.” The white, unabashedly liberal Turnipseed wanted to believe he was standing on the cusp of a grand working-class remodeling of the South: “Hank Williamses are moving into all of the towns of Alabama . . . being organized into labor unions. . . . The South is changing. The Poll Tax . . . cannot hold back this rising tide. As Hank Williams plays, Rome is burning.”10

Turnipseed was on to something about Hank’s populist appeal, but sadly overoptimistic about the South, and Alabama in particular. The worst of Jim Crow had not yet been felt, nor had the rejection of temporary liberal politicians like governor “Big Jim” Folsom in favor of George Wallace. But if Hank had little idea of any social implications of his singing, he could recognize he was back in the game, and again with good timing. The AFM strike ended in December 1948, meaning he would soon be back to recording. Another local newspaper reporter, Allen Rankin of the Advertiser, caught up with him at WSFA, where he not only was rehired but was now doing three programs a day, morning, afternoon, and night. Hank had a mouthful for him.

“I got the popularist [sic] daytime program on this station,” he crowed. “Fans? There’s a mob of ’em up here every mornin’ and every afternoon! Some come from 50 miles! A lady from Opelika wrote me just this mornin’—Here, read it. She says, ‘Say, Hank. How much do it cost me to come up and hear you sing? If it don’t cost too much, we may come up there.’”¹¹ “Love letters are nothing to Hank,” Rankin commented, and duly noted that there were “four very pretty young ladies” around him in the studio, none of them his wife. The article, which carried the first mention of Rufus Payne (“the only music lessons Hank ever had [were] from an old negro named Tee Tot”), was a PR man’s dream. The studio, wrote Rankin, “get[s] quiet and reverent when Hank looks like he might be even beginning to think of having another song idea. ‘Shhh,’ they say. ‘That’s Shakespeare. It used to be hillbilly. Now it’s Shakespeare.’”

The notion of populism had clearly gone to Hank’s head, even if he had no idea what the word meant. It was the public, he noted pointedly, that had built his success, not the men of the industry. “Just lately” he said, “somebody got the idea nobody didn’t listen to my kind of music. I told everybody on the radio that this was my last program. ‘If anybody’s enjoyed it,’ I said, ‘I’d like to hear from ’em.’ I got 400 cards and letters that afternoon and next mornin’. . . . They decided they wanted to keep my kind of music.” And: “If anybody in my business knew as much about their business as the public did, they’d be all right!”

Rankin estimated that Hank would earn $20,000 for the year, prompting Hank to playfully chide him in a future story by the writer for making such estimations public knowledge. “Let’s don’t quote no money figures,” he said. “Last time you wrote me up, a government man nailed me one week from the day. He had a copy of your story in his briefcase.” “What did you tell him?” Rankin asked. “I told him these story writers is like these hillbillies. They stretch the truth sometimes.”

But it was no stretch, and Fred Rose was working on making Hank as big as he saw himself. He still couldn’t get Hank on the Opry stage. Neither could Rose get him on a radio station in Nashville. However, there were other alternatives. And the best, with providential timing, was just taking shape down on the bayou, in Shreveport. The question was how much Hank’s head really was into upward climbing. If his ego seemed healthy, perhaps one new song he wrote that he dated June 1947 in his notebooks told of a weariness that already nagged at him. In the song “I’m So Tired of It All,” he wrote forlornly that “all my dreams have died. And, now, I’m so tired of it all.”

•   •   •

For all intents and purposes, Shreveport meant the Louisiana Hayride, a loosely affiliated branch of the Grand Ole Opry, much like the numerous other barn dance radio shows broadcast remotely from ballrooms and dance clubs. The Hayride booted up on April 3, 1948, carried on Shreveport radio station KWKH, broadcast live from the city’s 3,400-seat Municipal Memorial Auditorium. The name of the show was cribbed from the 1939 “Louisiana Hayride Scandal,” four years after the magnificently corrupt Huey Long was gunned down in the state capitol by a political foe and Long’s successor as governor was busted for forgery, embezzlement, mail fraud, and tax evasion. (The phrase also dated back to a 1932 pop song and a 1941 book by Harnett Thomas Kane.) KWKH producer Horace “Hoss” Logan and station manager Dean Upson made a deal to broadcast the show on the CBS network on Saturday nights to thirteen Southern cities, but not directly competing with the Opry on NBC. Logan hosted the Hayride as well, and its charter was as a kind of minor-league Opry, giving exposure to lesser lights on the way up—such as, in 1954, Elvis Presley.

Upson, who had cut his teeth at WSM, taking the ball from Rose, vouched for Hank to KWKH’s chief officer, Henry Clay. And, attesting to the reach of the Grand Ole Opry, the brass in Nashville, protecting any future investment in Hank, also pushed the Hayride to take him on, and even sent WSM executives Harry Stone and Jim Denny to Montgomery to pitch Hank on going to Shreveport. However, when they arrived no one could find him. While the honchos tarried at WSFA, they got an earful from staffers there. Stone later recalled the GM of the station warned him, “If I were in your place, I wouldn’t consider hiring Hank Williams a minute. You’re gonna be running after him all the time.”12 There were, too, the usual complications when it came to Hank. Lillie wanted him not to leave Montgomery at all, since she would have far less access to his money. Audrey, on the other hand, very much wanted him to, for the same reason. As Don Helms saw it, “They were both pushin’ him, but in opposite directions, and that’s when it started takin’ its toll on Hank.”¹³

But he sensed he had no choice but to head for Shreveport. And once there, he made a pest of himself. He called Logan several times insisting he was no problem. “It’s Hank—I’m sober!” he told Logan, who was convinced but only to a point. He called Fred Rose and said he would hire Hank, if he could prove he could stay off the sauce for six months.

Hank, for his part, seemed to believe getting away from Montgomery was all the therapy he needed. He would make a fresh start, with a clean slate, without Lillie, even without the Drifting Cowboys, who were left on their own back in Alabama. Hank had soured on them anyway, making the decision to cut them adrift an easy one.

The falling-out occurred on the eve of a two-night run in Birmingham after Little Joe Pennington had wondered if the AFM rates were higher there and inquired of the union if the Cowboys would get higher scale. He was informed they wouldn’t. “I thought that was the end of that,” he says. “But someone from the union called Hank and told him one of his band went behind his back to find out if he was screwing them, which was completely false. I just wanted to know the rules.” Later that afternoon Hank came into the boardinghouse, looking ornery. “I want to see all you boys out on the front porch,” he said. When they gathered, he asked, “Which one of you bright boys called the union to find out how much we were supposed to make at the Birmingham Theater?” “Well, I guess that’s going to be me,” said Pennington, who recalls:

Hank asked me what I was trying to make sure that we got. I told him, ‘What was comin’ to us.’ Then he said, ‘Listen, friend, you’re gonna get what’s comin’ to you, all right!” Then he turned and walked away. I didn’t know what he meant, but I could guess. He never said much more after that, but Hank always thought everyone was ridin’ on his back, looking to bleed him dry. That’s why he didn’t trust people and that was a shame ’cause we all looked up to him, we put up with a lot to play behind him. I wish I could’ve explained this to him, but I got the feeling he didn’t want to hear it.14

The last time the Montgomery version of the Drifting Cowboys played with him was on April 8. Hank was slated to play two gigs that night in Montgomery, the first at the Charles Theater, hosting a show of touring Opry stars Cowboy Copas and Johnny Bond. From there he was to go to Club 31 and do a set with the Cowboys. However, he was drunk and wobbled onto the stage, uttering incoherently. He tried playing his guitar but couldn’t. He began singing out of key, but was stopped by the audience hooting and booing and stumbled off the stage, collapsing in the Packard. Onstage, Bond scolded the crowd, telling them they didn’t know what they had in Hank, who, he said prophetically, “won’t be ’round here for very long.”

At Club 31, Hank was nowhere to be found. The Drifting Cowboys asked around, and someone with Bond said, “Last we saw him, him and Copas was backstage with a couple of women and a bottle.” According to Pennington, R. D. Norred concluded, “Well, you needn’t look for him for a while.” Indeed, Hank would miss the show he was to headline. Often when that happened, club owners had the Cowboys play and hope the audience wouldn’t ask for a refund. It happened again this night, but they were offered a more permanent arrangement: to play all of Hank’s remaining dates contracted for at the club.

This meant Hank had been fired from the club, which naturally created a sticky situation; worse, someone would have to tell Hank. It fell to Little Joe, who half in jest says it was because “I was the only guy not from Alabama,” though it probably was because he was the only one not afraid of Hank.

Over the next two days, Joe couldn’t find him. Then Hank floated into Lillie’s boardinghouse as if nothing had happened, wearing the same clothes as two days before and a prickly beard. Livid, Audrey and Lillie packed his clothes and hustled him back to the sanitarium. A day later, Joe made his way there. Entering Hank’s room, he saw him in bed, propped up by some pillows, and Audrey sitting in a chair next to him. Unaware of what had happened behind his back, Hank asked, “What’s happening down at the club?”

Pennington swallowed hard. “Well, Hank, the owner’s fixing to get another band.” After another swallow, “He’s offered us the job, and we took it.”

Hank mulled it over a few moments, but while his pride was singed, he knew he was bound for Shreveport and would be leaving the band high and dry. Still, he told Joe nothing about that and started acting all offended. Soon he ignored Pennington altogether. Feeling the chill, Joe left. He and the other Cowboys moved out of the boardinghouse a few days later. “I was looking out the window and saw Hank sitting on the swing,” Pennington says. “He was dressed in his usual suit and hat, looked like a million bucks. To him, we didn’t even exist anymore.” Soon after, Pennington would flee Montgomery himself, heading back to Tampa. He and the others found new gigs. None, save for Don Helms and Lum York, were ever to be in his orbit again.

•   •   •

In July 1948, Hank quit WSFA—of his own volition, for a change—and he and Audrey left Montgomery, while Lycrecia was sent back to the farm in Banks until they found a place to live. Lum York, fiddler George Brown, and Clyde Chriswell came with him to Shreveport; Hank rented a small garage apartment at 4802 Mansfield Road for him and Audrey, while the others lived in a trailer out back. The conditions were primitive, but Hank swore it was temporary, that far bigger things were awaiting him.

Unlike more cosmopolitan port cities such as New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Shreveport developed in the northwest corner of the state as a refuge for uprooted migrants of French, Spanish, English, and West African descent, a melting pot that included Cajun ancestors in Hank’s own heritage. But these marsh lands and mountains developed a musical culture of its own, its vanguard being Lead Belly, who was born on an old slave plantation and played blues-rooted folk in the saloons, whorehouses, and dance halls—and jailhouses—along Fannin Street in the downtown red light district, St. Paul’s Bottoms.15 Firmly segregationist, Shreveport was in ascendance in the late ’40s, its population around 100,000, its legacy of overt racism still felt today in the fact that Caddo Parish in recent history has had more black men on death row than any other single district in the country, per capita.16

Hank settled in for his first radio show on KWKH, the 5:15–5:30 a.m. shift on Wednesday, August 4, in a studio on the second floor of the ten-story Commercial National Bank Building. Shreveport was just waking up, but those who tuned in heard a live wire crackling. Sitting in the studio with his guitar, making breezy, homespun conversation and singing country tunes, was a man with a swagger. Three days later, he was on the stage at the Municipal Auditorium. The Hayride protocol was that performers generally did two songs, and if the audience reacted well they’d be brought back later for two more songs, which for nonstars meant there was a load of pressure. Logan put him in an even tougher spot, coming out fifth in the opening 8–8:30 segment when the audience was at its most demanding. He went on after the Bailes Brothers, a bunch of real stompers. Merle Kilgore, the future singer and songwriter of country standards like “Ring of Fire” and vice president of the Country Music Association, was eighteen then and among those backstage that night. Kilgore said he commiserated with Hank that he had to follow some tough acts. Hank just grinned that crooked grin.

“I’ll eat ’em alive,” he said as he moved toward the stage.¹⁷

Dressed in a sharp-creased cowboy-style jacket and slacks, Stetson on his head, he was cool as an ocean breeze, and needed only one song—“Move It On Over”—to percolate the building, most of the crowd of 2,000 people never having heard of him. Brought back during the second half of the show, he came on with Audrey, who was dressed to kill in her matching cowboy outfit, her skirt displaying a pair of fine legs above her white cowboy boots, as they sang, or she tried to, “I Want to Live and Love.” Hank had been signed conditionally by a wary Logan, but that night Horace made him a regular on the Hayride, and Henry Clay proffered a one-year contract to permanently host the early-morning show at KWKH. His pay was twenty-five dollars a week plus another twenty-five for the Hayride, far more than the thirty dollars a week he’d earned at WSFA.

His second appearance on the Hayride, and first as a full-time act, came on September 20. The show’s announcer, Red Bartlett, would station himself in the orchestra pit and punctuate Hank’s yodeling by doing somersaults, then dancing a tango with the curtains at the side of the stage, inciting the crowd further, not that Hank seemed to need the help. He was beyond doubt the nucleus of the show, its firecracker, and a perfect pitchman given his megaphone he had at KWKH.

Not wanting to let the flame of “Move It” flicker, Fred Rose had MGM follow “Honky Tonkin’” with “I’m a Long Gone Daddy,” backed with “The Blues Come Around,” still under the name Hank Williams and His Drifting Cowboys. The song had already been recorded and put on the market in April by Decca. But Hank’s original caught some real buzz, getting a shout-out in the June 19 Billboard as an “Advance Folk Record Release.” The record made it onto the Most Played Jukebox chart on September 4, at No. 6. “I Saw the Light,” released despite the overt gospel niche that both Rose and Frank Walker wanted to steer Hank clear of, not that they could have, didn’t sell much. But the final release of ’48, “A Mansion on the Hill,” climbed to No. 12.

Placing two records high on the country charts provided some much-needed financial relief for Hank and Audrey. There was another dividend from “Honky Tonkin’.” Rose had bought up the masters of the original version from Sterling Records to keep it off the market, and as compensation he shot $1,000 Hank’s way.

Even so, Hank fretted because he knew little of the honky-tonk scene around Shreveport. Neither did the Hayride care much about promoting itself as the Grand Ole Opry did; it had no in-house booking agency, and its brass was entirely focused on the show and keeping costs low. So Hank asked Tillman Franks, a musician and booking agent in Louisiana and Texas, about setting up some outside work, which would include Franks in a reconstituted Drifting Cowboys. As usual, though, turnover in the band was high, and replacements came in, like guitarists Clent Holmes and Bob McNett, on loan from Patsy Montana’s band, and pedal steel guitarist Felton Pruett. Hank took some of his cash and bought new wheels, a blue-black Packard limousine, to which was hitched the trailer carrying the instruments and outfits.

It was a rough go. Whatever money he made was spent on travel expenses and band outfits, and the dates were sporadic. A regular meal was a fond wish. Franks and his wife took the Williamses to dinner one night at the Bantam Grill across the street from the station, and Franks remembered that “we had a catfish supper and Hank and Audrey really put it away.” After dinner, Hank and Audrey got up and sang two gospel tunes, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” and “When the Roll Is Called up Yonder.” Tillman’s father, who was also there, wasn’t much impressed. “Son,” he said, “you ain’t thinking of making any money with him, are you, ’cause he just cain’t sing.”18

•   •   •

This was a distinctly minority opinion. There was something about his voice, in song or not, that made ears want to hear more. In person, his Everyman face and dimples were part of the charm. On the radio, his aw-shucks affect and homespun homilies resonated from the first word out of his mouth each morning, reassuring hordes of working people waking up for another day of drudgery. To them, he was kin, as if there were no radio in the kitchen, only Hank, as real as rain. Signing on with “Hi, folks, I’m Hank Williams and I’m gonna sing a few songs for ya today,” and signing off with “Well, friends, if the good Lord’s willin’ and the creek don’t rise, we’ll see y’all,” he would rush off to some gig or another like the Jasper High School auditorium or a honky-tonk. During the show, he’d make sure to drop a mention of where he’d be, and always tease his appearances on the Hayride.

His image, in his cowboy hat in front of a KWKH/CBS microphone, was used on fliers and billboards for the Hayride show, his name twice as large as any others. Group photos of the performers always had him dead center, the hub of the wheel, his outfits impeccably tailored, inlaid with sequins or butterfly designs. Hayride advertisers would insist on having Hank perform in front of their ads for later use, explaining why there are photos of him framed by looming signs such as BLEVINS FAMOUS POPCORN VILLAGE, POPS BEST, TASTES BEST. While Hank would not record any new songs until December 1948, after the strike ended, he was being heard in an endless stream on the radio, on record, and in live performances.

And while his writing had slowed to a trickle, Fate was with him. He had begun singing a new song onstage, “Lovesick Blues,” which he had sung once or twice back in Montgomery. But apparently he didn’t know it dated back to 1922, popularized first by Elsie Clark in 1922 on the Okeh label, then recorded as “I’ve Got the Lovesick Blues” in 1923 by Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths Cliff Friend and Irving Mills for a Broadway musical called Oh, Ernest. Macon, Georgia, minstrel Emmitt Miller and his band the Georgia Crackers, which featured Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, revived the tune in 1925, recording it for the country market under the aegis of Ralph Peer. However, it was also covered by country singer Rex Griffin in 1939, and that version was what had stayed in Hank’s head, with its primal heartsickness about love lost and its tale of a fellow being dumped by the woman he loves—always Hank’s biggest fear. The lyrics indeed were perfect: it segues from a dreamy past to a lonely, lonely present:

Such a beautiful dream,

I hate to think it’s all over, I’ve lost my heart it seems

It also offered him a way to yodel his sadness with abandon. When he sang “I’m lonesome, I got the lovesick blues,” he synchronized the yodeling with perfect undulation. It was the kind of stuff that made the women who were the bulk of his audiences openly weep and hold their men a little closer. When he hit that yodel, Merle Kilgore said, “everybody stood up and the women threw their babies in the air.”19 And it really was Hank’s song. He liked that it wasn’t a dirge but an up-tempo, cheerful melody against which the theme of despair would be contrasted—something he turned into a country staple. He’d do it differently each time, the yodels extending ridiculously long or his vocal changing keys within lines, making it hard for the band to keep up. The first time he sang it on the Hayride, it wasn’t with his regular band save for Felton Pruett and Tillman Franks. The latter recalled that after rehearsing the song in F, Hank “went from F to B-minor or something.”

“Hank,” Franks shouted to him, “that one chord you got in there, I can’t figure it out.”

Hank shouted back, “Don’t worry ’bout it, hoss, just stomp your foot and grin!”²⁰

The reaction to the song was a lot of stompin’ out in the audience. As Bob McNett recalled, “They simply would not let him off the stage. It impressed me that without any warning of any kind, suddenly Hank gets up and sings a song most of them hadn’t heard before and gets a reaction that strong.”²¹ Hank would try to quell the hysteria by throwing his hat from the wings onto the stage, a hint that he’d had enough—and the damn hat would pull another ovation, forcing him out for yet another encore. Nobody had seen anything like it, and this sort of flat-out crazy adulation, which became typical for Hank on the Hayride, was real good for business.

Early in 1949, his quarter hour on KWKH picked up a sponsor, Johnnie Fair Syrup, the brand name of the Shreveport Syrup Company, which was persuaded to invest $5,000 in sponsoring the show. All Hank needed was one look at the ad script to launch right into an impromptu jingle, warbling in perfect pitch, “When I die, bury me deep, deep in a bucket of Johnnie Fair, from my head to my feet. Put a cold biscuit in each of my hands, and I’ll sop my way to the promised land.”²² It also necessitated a new closing line: “Get the biscuits ready, I’m coming home and I need somethin’ to put my Johnnie Fair syrup on.” It was as if his voice were the syrup he was selling, and he sold it well; Shreveport Syrup was close to going under when they made their ad buy on Hank’s show, but a year later they were thriving. People would tune in in massive numbers for the “Hank experience,” which would include cornball repartee Hank was so good at. The dialogue between him and Frank Page was always a highlight.

“Say, Frank,” he interjected during one show. “Did you know what Eve told Adam when he was kindly complaining to her a little about her cookin’?”

“No, Hank, sure don’t.”

“Well, sir, she up and said, ‘At least you cain’t compare my cookin’ to your mother’s!”

Page only had glowing public remarks about Hank, once saying, “He used to tantalize me with new songs. He’d say, in that crazy drawl, ‘Frank, come on in,’ and there he’d be, sprawled out in a corner, his bony legs sticking out, his arms wrapped around a guitar. One of his favorite games was to play a song he’d already written, one I knew, and then weave in a new thought and new lyrics. My eyes would light up when I heard the new stuff, and he’d grin with delight.”23 Given his rare trait of connecting with unseen audiences, and that he so identified with Johnnie Fair, Hank was soon sticking around the station to read commercials for the syrup on other shows, something no one had ever done.

By early ’49, Hank was hosting three shows, at 5:15, 6:30, and 8 a.m. He would spend idle hours at the Bantam Grill, playing pinball and picking at waffles covered with ketchup—which he’d pour on everything. The owner of the place, Murell Stansell, once said, “I wanted to stop selling him waffles. I was only gettin’ twenty cents for ’em and he would use the whole bottle of ketchup that cost me eight or ten cents!”²⁴

Smooth as syrup, and a savvy pitchman, he had created a marketing-friendly persona for himself—he was “the Ol’ Syrup Sopper,” which in parts of the Deep South was how he was known. He would routinely weave it into his stage act the way future rock and rollers would a beer sponsor, drumming up more sales. And with no shame—a trait he had in very short supply—he pitched himself on the air for any outside gigs that “you nice folks” in the audience might want to invite “Ol’ Hank and his boys” to play. The resulting invitations would keep that Packard moving along the back roads leading to some roadhouse or dance hall. During these treks he would take short sabbaticals from the radio, and rather than have him off the air, the station bosses would rerun previous shows kept on rudimentary recording machines. He would always make it back for the Hayride, though.

Heretofore, the only radio personality who was given these concessions was Arthur Godfrey, the smarmily affable, hugely popular CBS network host, who in 1948 was being syndicated on KWKH. John D. Ewing, the powerful newspaper publisher who owned the station, wanted to have a stockpile of Godfrey shows to play at different times of the day and made a limited investment in acetate recorders that pressed “transcription disks” from live broadcasts.25

Hank’s eclat was undeniable, and transferable. Audrey, for example, could take pride that Fred Rose had bought a song with the writing credited to Hank and her, “The Evening Train,” which was recorded by Molly O’Day in 1949. However, in the euphoria of the Hayride, Hank had not felt the need to write much. He had enough originals, he believed, to fill out sets stuffed with old standbys like Jimmy Wakely’s “Someday You’ll Call My Name” and “I Wish I Had a Nickel,” Sons of the Pioneers tunes like “Cool Water,” and Bill Carlise’s ‘Rocking Chair Money.” It wasn’t that he was lazy; he was . . . comfortable. He felt no need to unburden, rendering himself fairly useless to Fred Rose’s plans for him, which was rooted in songs that told of his discontentments. What’s more, he became less discontent still when just weeks after the move to Shreveport, Audrey, who’d been feeling out of sorts, came home from the doctor and announced she was pregnant.

Hank was thrilled by the news. People around him never saw him as happy. Without even trying, he would become a father just as his name was spreading. He and Audrey fetched Lycrecia from Banks to live with them as a growing family, and they would enjoy fish fries in the backyard with Kitty Wells and Johnnie Wright, Zeke and Helen Clements, Curley and Georgia Williams. Domestic life seemed to agree with him. But it was a difficult pregnancy for Audrey, and she came close to losing the baby several times. Hank bought her a comfortable rocking chair, a hassock, and a record player so she could play the acetates of his songs and feel she was still a part of the act, even if Hank was pleased she wasn’t. Soon they moved to new digs, in Bossier City, a white-frame, two-story house on Lot 20 in the Modica Subdivision project at 912 Charles Street, Hank dropping a down payment of $2,000 on the overall price of $9,500.26 (The house is now abandoned and ramshackle, and the city has refused to spend any money to preserve or restore it.)²⁷ With his fatter bankroll, he began paying his Drifting Cowboys sixty dollars—each—a week, a spike from the old seven-dollar-a-show scale in effect since the early days in Montgomery.

Feeling mighty good about himself, he figured it was time to put the Nashville people on notice. His way in was Oscar Davis, the Opry’s promoter in the sticks. The diminutive, loquacious Davis, who cut his teeth booking vaudeville acts, had already enlisted Hank on Opry road shows with Ernest Tubb, whom Davis personally managed. Hank had to listen to Davis tell him over and over that he wasn’t yet ready for the Ryman stage. Now, with Davis aglow from his own breakthrough, booking country music’s first major show in New York at Carnegie Hall in ’47, Hank rang him up. He wanted Davis to know that when he played “Lovesick Blues” onstage, “Oscar, so help me God, I get fourteen, fifteen encores.” He then played an acetate demo for him. Davis wasn’t sure if it was a bad connection or a bad song, recalling years later that “in my mind I said, ‘This is the most horrible goddamn song I heard in my life.’” Davis was still impressed with Hank’s spunk, always had been, but as far as the Opry was concerned, his attitude was . . . well, maybe.

Hank had not the slightest doubt.

“Oscar,” he said, “I’m ready for you.”