“NEVER PUT ME ON AFTER HANK WILLIAMS!”
An appreciable chunk of Hank’s cascading record sales came from Louisiana. Having come to the state barely knowing its tastes, or little expertise in Cajun music and the tastes of country being groomed in the Delta, Hank had become immersed in the idioms of the bayou. It helped a good deal that he could sing the blues, and had a cachet that allowed him artistic license. He also had his stage act, and radio act, down by rote, smooth as a butterbean, using many of the same lines that never seemed to get stale, such as leading into a song with “Ladies and gentlemen, to a country boy like me it makes you feel real good when people like a song you wrote . . . like this one I’m fixin’ to sing for ya right now.” Onstage, his rap was less mannered, sometimes suggestive. His comedy shtick, usually with whoever the bass player was, as he had with Lum York, would go like this:
HANK: Well, lemme ask ya, son, if they had to graft some skin when your face got tore up in a car wreck, where’d they graft it from?
FOIL: Let’s just say sometimes my face gets tired and wants to sit down.
Out on the hustings one time, for a show he did with Kitty Wells and Johnnie Wright, he “accidentally” let slip a word then verboten from radio, closing by saying he was going to go out and have a “helluva good time tonight,” with no care for what anyone in the management offices would think. He had that Peck’s Bad Boy charm, for sure, which cut him slack to get away with a no-no. Seeing him bask in the afterglow of “Lovesick Blues,” he was compelling, riveting, curiously down to earth for a rising star. Singing certainly was Hank Williams’s salvation. Never did he have a worry when on a stage or before a microphone. Tillman Franks once said he asked Hank how he put so much into a song.
“Well,” he replied, “I like to hear me sing. I don’t care whether they like me or not. I just like to sing, and I give it what I’ve got. If they like it, well and good, but I don’t worry none about it.”1
He could say that with the humility of a man who knew he had nothing to worry about, though in truth he always did regardless. It was all good; but not good enough for Hank, or Fred Rose. It was clear to them that Shreveport had already served its purpose for Hank. From the moment “Lovesick Blues” and its follow-ups piled up radio plays all across the country, Rose knew the Hayride was small time, too small to hold the raging fire that was Hank Williams.
• • •
As though his new upward mobility came with all sorts of rewards, on May 26, 1949—the one-year anniversary of their divorce—Audrey again had severe labor pains. This time, they were for real, and after getting her to the hospital, Hank began freaking out. As Audrey remembered: “It was really a bad scene for Hank; they couldn’t get him away from the door once he heard me screaming. When they tried to tell him he had a healthy son, he said, “No, I don’t want to see him, I just want to see my wife.”2 The son, born at 1:45 a.m., was a bruiser, ten pounds, three ounces, whose birth Audrey said “practically killed us both.”
They named him Randall Hank Williams, and, soon after, Hank nicknamed him “Bocephus,” since he thought the baby’s moonlike face was the spittin’ image of Opry comedian Rod Brasfield’s prop puppet of that name.3 (He had taken to calling Lyrecia “Jughead” for the way her ears jutted out.) Hank dashed off a telegram to Fred Rose reading: “10-pound boy borned this morning at 145. Both doeing fine.” Audrey, though, was already calling him by a different name, one that seemed to put a twinkle in Hank’s eye. On a radio broadcast from that period, after Audrey had gotten back into singing with him, he said, “Folks, in case you didn’t know it Audrey is my wife. And Audrey, I’d like you to come up and tell the folks about Randall.”
“You mean Hank Jr.?” she replied in the affected, high-pitched little-girl voice she saved for such moments in the public eye.4
His paternal feelings for the boy filled in at least a few of the gaps in his soul. He again laid off the booze and didn’t linger at the bars after his radio shows. As he would say in his new sign-off, after hoping the creek wouldn’t rise, “Don’t worry, Bocephus, Daddy’s comin’ home to see ya.” Yet when the child was born, he was by law a bastard, since Audrey’s divorce papers were never rescinded and she and Hank were legally not married.
When this occurred to them, the proper papers were finally filed. It took three months for Randall to be legitimate in the eyes of the law; on August 9, the circuit court in Montgomery that had approved the divorce annulled it as nunc pro tunc, with Hank ordered to pay all court costs. There was still the matter of whether the marriage was actually legal in the first place given Audrey’s marriage at the time, but no authority ever intervened in the issue, and as of the summer of ’49, the Williams clan was one happy, and legally conjoined, family. In fact, Hank now seemed light-years removed from the bounder who came from Alabama.
With the birth of Randall, Hank did the family-man thing, bouncing the little fella on his knee, feeding and changing him, sleeping next to his crib. Lillie, W. W. Stone, and Irene came down from Montgomery, and the Williams family seemed closer than they had ever been. Perhaps this was one reason why Audrey felt a little distant from her new son. Whether it was the swarming of the Williams clan, postpartum depression, or her eagerness to get back in those tight cowgirl outfits and up onstage again, she seemed to be less fixated on maternal matters.
“Mother was not what you call a doting parent,” Lycrecia Williams said. “Daddy did a lot more coddling . . . but she wasn’t the type to be tied to the house because of the children. Whenever Daddy needed to go, she wanted to be able to go with him. Mother was always trying to figure out ways to make Daddy bigger or to get bigger bookings for him. She was just a business-minded woman.”5
Thus it must have eaten at her that Hank was out on the road so much alone during her difficult pregnancy. He and his latest edition of the Drifting Cowboys, who agreed to migrate from Montgomery, were constantly on the go. He and his “boys” were earning up to $1,000 per concert—actually, they were still locked in at $60 a week, a pittance beside what Hank took home—while selling out shows across the region and across the country, blessedly free of having their ears bleed when Audrey sang.
Fred Rose during this period was also busy, working behind the scenes to bring him to Nashville and the Grand Ole Opry. So was Hank, who figured his days of waiting it out were over. He figured he could barter himself getting in with a heavyweight like Oscar Davis, who managed Ernest Tubb. The last time Davis had heard from Hank, Oscar had told him his version of “Lovesick Blues” was an earsore. Now, having proven the Opry seer wrong, Hank had a proposition: he would give Davis 25 percent of his booking fees for life if Oscar convinced the Opry bigwigs to let him onto their stage. Rose had already begun negotiating with the Opry to bring that about. As a kind of trial, not so much of his talent but of his ability to stay out of trouble, the Opry included Hank on a very big six-week tour of major cities in Hank’s wheelhouse—Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana—starting in April 1949, a month before Audrey gave birth.
Unlike on past Opry tours, he wasn’t just a guest performer but a headliner, billed with Tubb, Minnie Pearl, Red Foley, and Cowboy Copas, none of whom would earn much; Rose could not barter his way to anything but scale for Hank, around a hundred dollars a show. But he was so big in these parts that he superseded even Tubb and Minnie, whose goofy homespun monologues filled with fictitious hillbilly characters and wild stage moves made her a huge fan favorite. Yet being arguably the Opry’s biggest name meant little down in bayou country once it was clear the fans down there came out just as much to see the guy she had last seen as a dirty-booted, bedraggled young singer hanging out at a Montgomery radio station. As she sized him up now, “He had a wonderful wardrobe and a clean hat, and shiny boots. He looked great.” Watching him perform for the first time, she recalled, “An excitement seemed to spread through the crowd. . . . By the time he got to his last number the excitement had grown to a fever pitch. The crowd would not let him leave the stage. . . . After umpteen encores they finally got Hank off and me on. It was not one of my better shows. They still wanted more of Hank! And I didn’t blame them. The man had something indefinable, something that made an audience crave more. I told Oscar after the show—and every other promoter after that—‘Never put me on after Hank Williams!’ And I never followed him again.”6
With his earnings, Hank had bought another car, a seven-seat Packard touring car limousine with a chrome grille and a matching hood ornament that seemed more like a battering ram. He took over the loan payments from a guitar player in Ernie Tubb’s Texas Troubadours, and just like it had done for Ernie and his boys, this vehicle would provide first-class transportation for Hank . . . to the Ryman Auditorium.
Other legal maneuvers also worked to Hank’s benefit. Through the rise of “Lovesick Blues,” which would spawn still another cover version in July, by Mervin Shiner, Hank had no conception of what it all meant financially. Shortly after Hank became a dad, in a deal brokered by Fred Rose, Frank Walker tore up Hank’s original contract with the company and gave him a new one, for two years, at a higher royalty rate—from three to five cents per every record sold, both as artist on every song and writer of those that went on the market. It was a 66 percent bump, translating into thousands of dollars for each successful record. The icing was a sure sign that Hank was no longer a small-time talent—a $1,000 bonus. Little wonder that MGM, wanting its generosity known in the industry, bought a half-page ad that would run in the July 30 Billboard showing a stick figure of Hank shaking hands with one of a tuxedo-clad MGM lion holding a contract, CONGRATULATIONS! HANK! ON YOUR NEW M-G-M RECORDS CONTRACT! above and blurbs for his records below, and copy reading: “Week After Week, Hank Williams Leads ’Em All!”
Not by coincidence, that new deal was inked on June 15, four days after Hank Williams had elevated himself into a very big-time talent. Not that he wasn’t already, but the reception he got on the Opry tour underlined his marketability and the need for the Opry bosses to welcome him into the country glitterati. There was, of course, some gravely serious talk in the boardroom about Hank’s drinking—the same kind of concerned hogwash that filled the room when many other, maybe most other Opry stars were discussed. The compact with the Opry was that they had to at least keep their boozing in abeyance and pretend to be on the straight and narrow. The contract Oscar Davis procured from the Opry/WSM brass was based on a promise Davis personally made that Hank would stay sober for a year.7 As well, Roy Acuff and Ernest Tubb renewed their own recommendations to sign him.
Rose was playing every card he could. He gave Harry Stone and Jack Stapp counterfeit writing credits on a new Rose song, “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy,” working off “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” providing an enormous bonanza to come. All his pimping paid off, too. The terms of the agreement also included giving Hank his own early-morning program on WSM. Only a darned fool could blow such a sweet deal. Not even waiting for his Opry debut, Hank arranged his farewell from Shreveport. He informed Henry Clay of his impending move to Nashville, recommending his early-morning show at KWKH be given to country singer Red Sovine, whom Hank had befriended on the Hayride and had helped land a contract with MGM; soon, Sovine, too, would join the Grand Ole Opry.
The only thing left to do was bid adieu to the Hayride. Hank’s final show there on June 3 was billed as such and sold out in minutes. His reception that night was overwhelming. He came on at 10:30, read some telegrams, many requesting songs, then broke into “Lovesick Blues” and, amid the hysteria, was called out for seven encores. Horace Logan would later say he never allowed anyone more than seven encores, to preserve Hank’s record. Now, with an eye trained on Nashville, Hank could tell the audience: “I want to thank y’all from the bottom of my heart, and I’m making you a promise right now. One of these days I’m gonna come back.”
He had given Logan the same promise, but considered his work done in Shreveport. The guy who had given northern Louisiana its musical identity—and as Logan said, “the first real star we had” on the Hayride—was ready to blow out of town. Mere months after moving in, he made plans to sell his home in Bossier City, though Audrey, Randall, and Lycrecia would remain there until he secured a place in Nashville. As for his current band of Drifting Cowboys, they were free to fend for themselves. On the eve of the Opry tour he basically dismissed them all, as Bob McNett would recall, as coldly as a man could.
“I’m going to Texas tomorrow,” he told them. “If I call you, you have a job. If I don’t, you don’t.”8
• • •
On Friday, June 10, he got in his Packard and made his way to Nashville. To Hank, it must have felt like he was a king in a gilded carriage. He checked into the posh Hermitage Hotel, where the Opry had booked him a room.
There was no time for any real rehearsal for the Opry. Nor did he believe he needed one. He was slotted, still with a degree of caution, not on the portion of the show broadcast nationally on the NBC network at 10, but rather on the first of the half-hour “pregame” segments that started at 9 p.m., carried only on WSM. Fred Rose had sent over sheet music for the house band, two songs; as on the Hayride, if he was received well he’d be brought back later in the show on another nonnetwork segment—at 11, sponsored by Allen Manufacturing—for one more.
The band was made up of some old pros and fresh-faced kids. Hank could be comforted that Zeb Turner from Red Foley’s band was its core, Red being the emcee of the Opry. Others included Billy Robinson, a nineteen-year-old steel guitar player, Grady Martin and Jimmy Selph on electric guitars, Ernie Newton on bass, and Jimmy Riddle on accordion. Robinson in particular became a highly sought-after session man for decades, a testament to the power of the Opry, something Hank learned quickly.
If Hank was a man of means and distinction in Shreveport, now he felt what real power was, even if it emanated from within the walls of a building that country performers thought of as a sinkhole. The turbid brown brick facade of the place gave it a somewhat ominous look, and the hall was cramped and dirty, smelling of urine leaking from stuffed-up bathrooms and of sweat. Regularly, patrons would faint and need to be carried out into the lobby just to breathe. Performers’ dressing rooms were basically hooks on the wall in a cluttered backstage area, leading Roy Acuff in future years to buy a building down Broadway just so he and the other acts could dress in privacy before coming back to Ryman to sweat through their fancy clothing as they sang. They’d then split, taking relief in Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge across the alley.
After decades of suffering there, Acuff wanted nothing to do with the effort to preserve the Ryman as a landmark. “I never want another note of music played in that building,” he said in 1971 after the Opry moved to decent digs. “Most of my memories of the Ryman auditorium are of misery, sweating out here on this stage, the audience suffering too. . . . We’ve been shackled all of my career.”
But none of these hardships conflicted with the growing majesty of the Opry, even if there had been no heightened anticipation before Hank made his debut on June 11, 1949. While “Lovesick Blues” was known broadly, it was the song that was so familiar, not the singer. Many, even in the Opry crowd, would only realize who he was when he broke into the first bars of his song. What’s more, on this night, Ernest Tubb would also be on the earlier portion of the show before taking his regular place on the Prince Albert–sponsored main event, though the official name of the entire show was the “Prince Albert Grand Ole Opry.” Now, much like Minnie Pearl back in Shreveport, it would be Hank who would have to follow the biggest nova of the troupe.
Undaunted as always, Hank put on his grin, adjusted his string tie, and stepped up when Red Foley called him out, rhapsodizing, “Well, sir, tonight’s big-name guest is making his first appearance on Prince Albert’s Grand Ole Opry. He’s a Montgomery, Alabama, boy, been pickin’ and singin’ about twelve years, but it’s been about the last year he’s really come into his own. We’re proud to give a rousing Prince Albert welcome to the ‘Lovesick Blues’ boy, Hank Williams!” At that, the 3,574 people in the hall applauded rather sedately. When Foley told him he’d be around the place for a good long time, Hank, all aw-shucks, said, “Well, Red, it looks like I’ll be doing just that, and I’ll be looking forward to it.”
By the time he cranked up, the house was roaring. Many aped his yodeling; others took pictures, the flashbulbs popping in the dark. Done, he took a half-bow, waved, and left the stage, in triumph. Chet Flippo, extrapolating and then some, wrote that at this pinnacle moment of his career, all Hank could think of was the cynical advice old Rufus Payne had dispensed him as a child in Greenville. Backstage, as Hank was being glad-handed by other performers and Opry bosses, wrote Flippo,
Harry Stone and Jim Denny just looked at each other. There was no need to talk. They knew who was the new star of the Grand Ole Opry. [Hank] had a tight grin on his face; he knew he had just shown the tight-ass Opry clique what a real star was. . . . He found his guitar and stomped down the concrete steps and across the alleyway to a honkytonk next door [Tootsie’s, where the Opry big shots gathered]. He was ready for them if they liked him and he was equally ready for them if they didn’t like him. Fuck them. Who were they, anyway. [They] demanded that you bust your nuts for them. Like you were a trained nigger. Tee-Tot had told him that once in Greenville.9
In truth, while there surely was a wide gulf between Hank and the Nashville in-crowd, nothing suggests he harbored anything like this sort of enmity against them, and he was more than willing to accommodate the other musicians. Indeed, though Flippo maintained that Hank detested county singer George Morgan, for unknown reasons, a photo exists in which Hank’s arm is draped around Morgan’s shoulder.10 Perhaps the only singer he had a beef with was Slim Whitman, who in the early ’50s rode his own, almost comical yodeling trill to fame. Hank was once quoted as saying: “He ain’t no damn hillbilly.”11 Neither, it seems, did Hank have any feeling of rebellion after conquering the Opry. For once, the high of a show was enough for him, and maybe he intended to keep his promise to stay sober. When a deejay named Bob McKinnon offered him a drink that night, Hank held off.
“No, I quit,” he said. “I can’t handle it. I don’t ever expect to take another drop.”12
• • •
Biographers have written of his debut at the Opry with hyperbolic flair, most notably the fable that he gave six encores that night. Actually, there were exactly no encores. The applause went on for a good minute, and Hank took several curtain calls, but even that was pushing it. Such extended encores were kept out of the Opry protocol, the priority being to keep the show running according to a strict timeline; getting all the commercials in was paramount. Even so, it was no exaggeration that Hank had killed that night. Another electrifying reaction came when he returned for his second song later that night on the 11 p.m. postbroadcast segment. He sang “Wedding Bells” to a similar reaction, all the proof the Opry needed to commit to a regular spot for him, booking him to appear the following Saturday on the prime-time broadcast. Rather than head back to Shreveport, he hunkered down at the Hermitage that week, during which he signed with the Opry and WSM, where he would begin an early morning show by midsummer. On that Saturday, the eighteenth, he appeared for the first time on the main Prince Albert show, again doing “Lovesick Blues” and bringing down the house.
With his triumph in Nashville under his belt, he drove back down to Shreveport. And while Flippo claimed that Audrey’s reaction was not to share his excitement but rather to ask, icily, “What about me?” she had much to be happy about. This, after all, had been as much a victory for her as it was for Hank. And now that he had standing in Nashville, and as she would soon be able to fit into her stage costumes again, she was sure she would take every step forward with him. There would also be money on the way, which she considered her reward for pushing him to this success and surviving all the psychotic scenes.
The Drifting Cowboys also were rewarded. While Fred Rose held firm on his edict against using them in the studio, Hank could have them play backup at the Opry. “Meet me at the Hermitage,” he said to Don Helms. “I always told you when I started to work on the Grand Ole Opry I was gonna take your ass with me.”13 The ever-changing lineup now also included Nashville fiddler Jerry Rivers. He had been in a branch of Ernie Tubb’s Texas Troubadours called the Short Brothers, and was doing some work in a band led by Big Jeff Bess, who was married to Hattie Louise Bess, the owner of Toostie’s Orchid Lounge. Rivers, also just twenty-one, had played on some gigs in south Alabama that also included Hank, previously turned Hank down when he asked him to leave his bands and come to Shreveport. Now he jumped aboard, and brought with him a bass player, Hillous Buel Butrum, who had at age sixteen played in the Grand Ole Opry house band for a short time. The newest edition of the Drifting Cowboys came from all points to Music City on Monday, July 11, whereupon Hank met up with them at the Hermitage; then they all went to WSM, where they rehearsed a bit, and on Thursday, they were performing their first gig at a club downtown, as a warm-up for Hank’s next Opry appearance on Saturday.
Rivers, who had seen him onstage before, recalled feeling “awestruck” watching a more polished, cool and confident Hank sing “Lovesick Blues,” adding, “I gained a humility I had lost somewhere along the line.” He recalled all the times he had told skeptical people in the sticks that this Hank kid would be a star one day. Now, he thought,“By God, he is.”14 Hank was prepared to keep his new gaggle at his side. He catered to their egos, dubbing each with one of those Hank-like nicknames—Helms was “Shag” for his long hair, Rivers “Burrhead” for his lack of same, McNett “Rapid Robert” for his string-pluckin’ speed, Butrum “Bew” after his middle name. Hank paid them fifteen dollars for each show they performed with him, far less than the boys in Shreveport had gotten at their peak, but a good five bucks above union scale. He also allowed them to pad their pockets by selling Hank Williams songbooks and sheet music during intermissions, just as Hank had done in the early days.
Hank, for himself, knew he was stepping up even further on the earnings scale, though being under the banner of the Opry came with the understanding that the show was not, in itself, going to earn performers a living—rather, it was the exposure that would open up other avenues for them. But the giant shadow of the Opry loomed large; while Hank’s asking price for an outside gig was set cautiously at $250, or more, if he performed on an Opry-arranged tour, the Nashville overlords would exercise their 15 percent commission. By now, though, Hank had a steady income stream. The first really big gusher of royalties from his hit records would come early in 1950, and Fred Rose made that gusher even bigger. With “Lovesick Blues” and “Wedding Bells” still selling, MGM had released the “Move It On Over” clone “Mind Your Own Business” backed with “There’ll Be No Teardrops Tonight” in July, and it too caught fire, running to No. 5. Then, in September, came “You’re Gonna Change (Or I’m Gonna Leave)” backed with “Lost Highway,” and they went a notch higher, with “Lost” going off on its own to No. 12.
It had taken very little time for Hank to be cast into the Opry stratosphere with Acuff, Tubb, Foley, and Pearl. And everyone in the troupe would be happy because he made them outside money they never did at the Opry show, although for the veterans there might well have been a seed of jealousy growing that he was upstaging them. All that summer they were out tracing a wild checkerboard route that had them hitting venues in the Midwest, in Canada, and on the West Coast; whenever possible, they would backtrack and hurry back to Nashville for the Saturday Opry shows. Plans were also made for a very long trip, halfway around the world, in November, when the troupe would play for soldiers and fliers on military bases in Europe. One thing that was clear was that if the Opry could have made a buck out of it, they would have sent Hank to the moon.
• • •
The summer Opry tour, a glorious roster also featuring Tubb, Acuff, Copas, Pearl, and Bill Monroe, ran through the Midwest, meaning Fred Rose could slide Hank into the Herzog studio in Cincinnati on August 30, with the same musicians who provided the backup the last time he was there. The Drifting Cowboys were still cut out of the studio sessions and could only stand and watch as Hank laid down four tracks—“I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “A House Without Love,” “I Just Don’t Like This Kind of Living,” and the curveball of the bunch, his old favorite “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It.” Rose was pleased the first three were written by Hank and owned by Acuff-Rose, the best of them “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”
The last had been intended as part of a collection of spoken-word gospel songs Hank wanted to record early in 1950, its lonely despair reaching as far into his soul as anything he had written or would ever write. He had taken it to Rose’s office in Nashville, showing the lyrics to Acuff-Rose staff songwriters. One of them, Jimmy Rule, recalled, “Hank handed me a piece of paper and said, ‘Do you think people will understand what I’m trying to say when I say this?’ The line was ‘Did you ever see a robin weep when leaves begin to die.’” Rule thought it was the lament of a man whose heart beat in pain. “Hank had this lonesome streak, and I think it was largely caused by his marital problems. I think he wrote it out of a feeling of loneliness that stayed very much with him. He would be the natural person to write ‘I’m so lonesome I could cry.’”15
It was unusually florid for a Hank song. With its pastiche of falling stars lighting up a purple sky, weeping robins, and midnight trains whining low, there is a very real possibility that Rose had as much to do with its writing as Hank did. As well, its tone was almost theatrically doleful and melodramatic, just barely staying on the Hank balance beam. Rose, however, always refrained from taking writing credits, even if he deserved them. Vic McAlpin, a fellow Acuff-Rose staff writer from Defeated Creak, Tennessee, who sometimes went on fishing/writing trips with Hank, once described Rose as “a hell of a touch-up man. When I saw a fancy word or phrase in one of the songs, I’d tell Hank, ‘Fred just about wrote that song, didn’t he?’”16 Hank, though, had long ago swallowed his pride on this matter. An Acuff-Rose executive, Bob McCluskey, once said, “Hank told me frankly that most of his songs couldn’t have been commercially successful without the aid of Fred Rose,” and yet Rose, remarkably unconcerned with seeing his name on the records, was more than comfortable knowing a windfall was ahead because of the work he did polishing up the raw gems Hank turned in to him.
Even in its rough form, the genius that birthed it made Hank proprietary about the song once its sheet music got around. Holding it for himself, he told Rose not to license it to anyone else, because “I think ol’ Hank needs to record this.” Rose molded its perfect verse-chorus-break-verse-chorus structure and set it to a tempo brighter than the mood of the piece. Hank worked in a quiet half-yodel around “I” and “cry,” wringing real heartbreak out of them, and the steel guitar and fiddle mewled along with him, toward a last echoing note of profound finality. It still echoes as a requiem to this day. Sadness, loneliness, isolation, these had always been a bedrock of hillbilly music, yet there’d never been something as personally grim and ominous expressed so poetically. Usually a song like that had a bit of uplift, a hint that all would be okay. Not this one. Was it too sad, too close to real pain?
Rose wanted it on the market but hedged just a bit—in a way that showed how far black-rooted blues had come, especially in country. Hank’s version of “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” had been one he’d waited over ten years to record, since Rufus Payne had introduced him to it. He sang it in the minstrel blues dialect, lowering his voice from its usual trill. There was plenty of twang in the song, but the bass notes were rounder and deeper than usual, and Hank handled the funky guitar solo on the break, the only one he ever played. Rose had taken his red pencil to the original down-and-dirty Clarence Williams lyrics, also striking Hank’s reference to a Ford—brand names were out, lest competing brands, in this case a different car company, wanted to sponsor his radio show. Fred left intact “I can’t buy no beer,” jive talk like “Doin’ the be-bop-bee,” and “I got a woman in the bossman’s yard.”
Per Rose’s directive, MGM released it as an A-side with “So Lonesome” on the flip the first week of November 1949, with “Lovesick Blues” and “Wedding Bells” still in the Top 5. It was quite visionary, as “Bucket” had fed the blues habit of many a singer, and when Hank’s song was on the country chart by month’s end, climbing to No. 2 by the new year, another version of it by country veteran T. Texas Tyler had beaten it into the Top 10. This helped open the door for one of the song’s variants to fly as an early rock and roll standard, Little Richard’s “Keep a-Knockin’” It also helped “So Lonesome,” which when the jockeys turned the record over went off on its own path to No. 2.
As Hank liked to say introing his songs on the radio, they surely would help to buy him “beans and biscuits.”