PETTIN’ PARTIES, CIGARETTES, AND GIN
Fred Rose had forwarded Hank enough advance money on royalties for him to begin looking for an appropriately living-large home in Nashville. He put a down payment on a three-bedroom, $21,000 ranch house on a rural tract of land just south of Nashville at 4916 Franklin Avenue, and down the road from the new office of Acuff-Rose, paid for in large part by Hank’s sales. With three rolling acres, a man could really kick back and breathe. There were no railroad tracks in sight, only leafy woods and those whippoorwills he sang about. When the sale closed in early September of 1949, Hank had already made it palatial, the wet dream of an Alabama country boy who had grown up in shotgun shacks and rooming houses. He had hired contractors to enlarge the place, where something would always be under construction.
Hank and Audrey would spend any money that came in, Audrey mostly on the house. There would be a new master bedroom, a two-car garage off the kitchen, expensive Oriental furnishings, shiny crystal chandeliers. Four new bedrooms were added, a two-story ballroom, a fully equipped bar, a wrought-iron fence carved with musical notes from “Lovesick Blues,” awnings on the windows inscribed with a W. The master bedroom had white velvet walls, a white shag carpet, a white bed with a heart-shaped headboard. There would be six and a half bathrooms, all with marble sinks. The entire house was painted gold. A nurse named Audrey Ragland was hired to tend to Audrey, Lycrecia, and Randall. Hank bought several horses—he named his, a magnificent strawberry roan Tennessee Walking Horse, Hi Life—and he and Lyrecia rode around on brushy trails. The horses would require the building of a stable and the hiring of grooms. It was, in every way, a portent of decadence soon taken to a slightly higher level in Memphis by one of his lineal descendants in American culture—Elvis Presley and his Graceland—but unlike the fellow with the spit-curl, Hank had no inclination to luxuriate on a velvet throne in his bathroom. All of this culture stuff was the doing of Audrey, and it would nearly bust him.
Seeing it happening before his eyes, Hank seemed only to see her profligacy as a problem. A confidant of Hank who shared that opinion once said that “when he made 75,000 dollars, she was at home spending 110,000 dollars—widening their big driveway. . . . He’d say something like, ‘What d’ya think of a woman who’d take a mink coat and just throw it in the front yard?’ I don’t think Hank did anything about it. But a guy with an income like me would just had to’ve backhanded her.”1 As it was, Hank was loath to even set his fanny down on one of the delicately cushioned chairs, instead preferring to plop down on the floor. Audrey would go tsk-tsk at his unbreakable boorishness. She was, in her mind, a lady, no longer a hick. While he would spend hours down at the fishin’ crick with a buddy, she would be holding court at the country club in the neighborhood that he avoided like the plague. Moreover, after having driven Hank as if with a bullwhip to get to the Opry, she rarely went to the Ryman herself, not just because the bosses wouldn’t put her on that stage with him but because she despised the cattle-pen nature and stench of the scene there.
She was gung-ho to get on tour with him and loved when he called her up onstage in some honky-tonk in the sticks. But the Opry crowd? If Hank thought they were high-falutin’ phonies save for Roy Acuff and Minnie Pearl, Audrey despised them for the opposite reason; they were churls, manipulated by avaricious businessmen. She would rather sit home in her immaculate living room than deal with those pigs. The irony was that, in her figments, she didn’t notice that the upscale matrons she longed to fall in with still regarded her as a churl herself. Hank, on the other hand, fully accepted that he would always carry the dirt and scent of the Alabama he never really left behind. And all of it, including the fact that Hank professed love for her while clearly hating to be anywhere near her, was becoming too much for Audrey to hide even with a pricey Oriental rug. Fame and success notwithstanding, they were once more on borrowed time.
• • •
Hank’s skyrocketing stardom was played to the hilt by the Nashville overlords. Even when he went out on his own, with the Drifting Cowboys, he carried an Opry sanction. His frequent opening act, Big Bill Lister, given him and paid for by the Opry, was in tow. Lister, however, once said that “a naked lady coulda rode an African elephant behind him and wouldn’t nobody have noticed. . . . I often wondered why they hired me to warm the crowd up—they didn’t need no warming.”2
Hank would begin his radio duties at WSM in the late summer of ’49, squeezed in between legs of seemingly endless Opry tours. When the Midwest jaunt ended, he had only a few weeks to enjoy the new house before he was off again, to the Pacific Northwest, southern Canada, and California. Hank had surely gotten into the swing of Nashville etiquette, and his star was on the rise so fast that he could help set a sartorial trend.
When they pulled into LA in September, Hank’s first time in La-La Land, he happened into a clothing store, Nudie’s of Hollywood, which sold Hollywood-style cowboy wear. This was mainly spangled, fringed, jewel-embroidered jackets with the brand name of Nudie, after the store’s owner, Nuta “Nudie” Kotlyarenko, a Ukrainian-born tailor who as a young man ran with gangster Pretty Boy Floyd. He then opened a New York City clothing shop with his brother, Julius, unveiling Nudie’s for the Ladies underwear. They relocated to California in the early 1940s, designing and making the glittery garb in his garage. In 1947, as Nudie Cohn, he opened Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors and convinced Tex Williams to buy him a sewing machine and wear the clothes. Williams became the prototype of the “Rhinestone Cowboy” and Nudie the prime clothier of country singers. For Hank, those flashy sequined cloth, leather, and lamé suits in every imaginable color was the image he was looking for. He purchased a few suits, then would keep up a steady supply of orders from Nashville, his favorite the jackets with bedazzled musical notes and scales embroidered on them.
Having put his stamp on Nudie’s, Hank did the same with WSM, though as with the Opry, he had to pass an audition, in this case a trial period by recording eight fifteen-minute shows that the management would determine whether they wanted to put on the air. The show came with a sponsor, an over-the-counter palliative called Hadacol, invented in 1945 by a self-promoting Louisiana state senator, Dudley LeBlanc (after a previous “medicine” of his had been banned by the FDA). LeBlanc’s new snake oil proved quite popular, no doubt because of its alcohol content—20 percent. At $1.25 a bottle, it was about the cheapest booze one could buy. WSM called Hank’s 6:30 a.m. program The Health and Happiness Show; the station wanted to syndicate it nationally and thus Hank would not mention the sponsor or sing jingles about it, so that local stations could plug in their own sponsors’ ads. Still, because of the enormous popularity of the flagship Nashville show, Hank would become synonymous with Hadacol—often doing tours it sponsored that drew Roy Acuff and other major stars. Several country songs even used its name in the title, such as Bill Nettles and His Dixie Blue Boys’ “Hadacol Boogie,” covered later by Jerry Lee Lewis. Based on “Rum Boogie,” it went:
A-standing on the corner with a bottle in my hand,
And up stepped a woman, said, “My Hadacol Man”
She done the Hadacol Boogie, Hadacol Boogie, Hadacol Boogie
Hadacol Boogie, Boogie-woogie all the time3
Hank, his option at the station eagerly picked up, helped sell quite a few of those boogie-woogie bottles for two years, propping up the company’s profits, which grew by leaps and bounds. When LeBlanc, who liked to be called “Coozan,” bayou-speak for “cousin,” appeared on Groucho Marx’s radio show You Bet Your Life, the rapier-witted comedian, another LeBlanc client, asked what Hadacol was good for; LeBlanc happily replied, “It was good for five and a half million for me last year.” However, he was playing a little too fast and loose, spending way too much on advertising and living the high life. After just one year, he owed $300,000 in back taxes. He would need a quick way to make money to save the company, or at least keep it propped up for enough time for him to sell it to a sucker. How he did this would soon be evident, and very much involve Hank Williams.
• • •
Playing off the rough hillbilly edges, Hank was a perfect morning host. At the beginning of his WSM tenure, the show was a folksy “Mr. and Mrs.” morning coffee klatch, Hank placating Audrey by having her as a co-host, singing and making light-hearted banter. That, however, lasted only four shows, the station’s directors perceiving her off-key warbling and ditzy Gracie Allen–type persona as undercutting the “high-class hillbilly” image they wanted for the star. He did the last four trial-run shows alone, to the delight of the station and no doubt Hank himself, and after they had run, he began working solo on a permanent basis, though he would periodically bring Audrey on, at her urging.4
Hank never would make much dough directly from the radio. Harry Stone later said he’d be surprised if Hank pulled in even a hundred bucks a week, though indirectly he did, as each play on the air earned a royalty—but just like his regular appearances on the Opry, this was really a base of operations for a much wider net. The latter, with its ten million listeners every Saturday night, was the beau ideal of his profession, its Talent Bureau booking agency now as powerful as any such agency in the business; combined with the radio show’s intimate setting that allowed him to attract local gigs that could put thousands of dollars into his pocket—he could also command hundreds in advances on the gate—he was virtually a turnkey operation, grinding away in almost ruthless fashion. That was the good part. The not-so-good was the almost athletic-level endurance he needed to have to be able to accommodate it all and still write and record quality songs. By late 1949, it had gotten to the point where Fred Rose stopped waiting for him to send demos or even get an idea for a song and simply wrote down titles of songs, nothing more, on scraps of paper, from which Hank was to erect entire melodies and lyrics, just like that.
It would become a hellacious grind, both in Nashville and on the road, where he might play up to four shows a day, leaving him little time for sleep to recover from the night before. Minnie Pearl and her husband, Henry Rolfs Cannon, a World War II fighter pilot who began his own charter plane company in peacetime, became close to Hank over these years. They would charter a DC-11 and later a Beechcraft private plane to each stop in style, taking Hank with them. Still, he could have used some Hadacol, preferably with a bourbon chaser, for his aching body. The almost literally backbreaking burden was obvious to all around him. If Hank got through any given day without falling off the wagon, they all let out a sigh of relief. But what about tomorrow?
The Opry tour of Europe was another gauge of Hank’s and country’s rise, and the egos that came with it. USO tours were common, with the biggest stars entertaining the troops at Thanksgiving. Bob Hope, of course, made a cottage industry out of it. However, with so many Southern boys in uniform, by the late ’40s country music had become the most popular musical fare heard on Armed Forces Radio.
The tour was booked for theaters and air force bases in November 1949 over two weeks to run through Turkey Day. Wives and husbands came along, which for Audrey meant having to mingle with people she detested. They landed first in Paris, then went on to Wiesbaden, Germany, met by a German oom-pah-pah band playing a Bavarian version of “Dixie.” They visited wounded airmen on the hospital base, then took off for Berlin, playing shows in theaters and dance halls, then for Frankfurt, Munich, and Vienna. Some of the shows were recorded for broadcast back home on the Opry.
Hank, who had given his first homecoming concert in Montgomery on a show with Bill Monroe two days before, apparently was dry on the trip, not even sampling any German beer, taking no chances of sullying the Opry brand during a mission of high import. He was, as in the States, the clear favorite among the troupe, called out for encores of “Lovesick Blues” at each stop. This would be the one and only time he would stand on foreign soil other than Canada and Mexico and he and the others were speechless as they walked through bombed-out ruins one day and breathtaking mountains the next in the land where yodeling had begun.
Hank and Audrey were the unquestioned royal couple of the interlude, being mobbed in each city by Americans stationed on the bases and tourists who recognized them on the streets. In the glamour derby, no one else came close to them, Hank in his snazzy Nudie suits and lizard-skin boots, Audrey in her fur coats and long blond curls cutting a Greta Garbo–like image. They smiled and waved, seeming to revel in the attention, while top stars like Roy Acuff were all but unrecognized. Hank, however, was generally bummed out, unable to stomach the Bavarian food—he’d call out for someone to bring him some ketchup, which not even the best eateries had, sending him into fits of cursing—and like everyone else he was being worked to exhaustion.
The Opry announcer Grant Turner later spoke of the troupe being awakened in their hotel rooms early each morning for a round of publicity photos with local officials, then touring hospitals and bases all day before the hectic routine of the nightly shows. “We were going all the time. Finally the husbands and wives all got mad at each other”—something, of course, that was never very far from happening with Hank and Audrey but now became common as the entourage descended into a hornet’s nest of backbiting and petty jealousy, revealing the Opry crowd not as kin but as social-climbing vanity cases. “We had some really knockdowns and dragouts,” Turner said of the squabbles within the troupe.5 Naturally, none of this was public knowledge; the trip was spun as a real coup, which it was. Before they set out for home—another endless trek with stops in England, the Azores, and Bermuda—the troupe posed for group pictures, smiles frozen on their faces. And yet, though few could have seen it in this ironic light, in a broader prism the hard feelings and bad blood were the real signs of country’s arrival as a big-league franchise in entertainment.
For a few uneasy moments, though, it seemed the vital core of country music might all be lost. Flying home two days after Thanksgiving, the plane experienced violent turbulence over the Atlantic and plunged several thousand feet. The passengers gasped, cried, and began saying prayers before the plane leveled off. The venerable Opry announcer George Hay would later say on the air that Hank “swore that if he ever got back home, he would kiss the ground. When he got off the plane at Nashville airport, he did just that. He kneeled over slowly and kissed the ground.”6
Before the new decade arrived, the relief over Hank’s sobriety ended. Walking back his vow to Bob McKinnon, he apparently began tippling right after he got back home in one piece. On another long, winding Opry tour, important dates were set for the week of December 8, 1949, at the Hippodrome Theater in Baltimore, which booked them for four shows a day over a week. Then Hank and Cowboy Copas would branch off and do a two-man show at the Roosevelt Hotel in DC. But Oscar Davis had a problem on his hands. Winding through the Midwest, Davis found Hank in the bar of a hotel in Des Moines, pounding back bourbons. Not having seen Hank like this, Oscar didn’t realize that Hank could get cheeky. When he slurred that he wouldn’t play at that night’s show, Davis growled, “You’d better or you’ll never play any other place. I’m gonna tell Jim Denny, ‘I don’t ever want this sonofabitch to ever play the Opry again.’”
“Aw, hell, I was just kidding,” Hank laughed, perhaps amused to tweak the Opry honcho. Later, after the show, Denny stationed a guard outside Hank’s door to make sure he didn’t return to the bar and no one would bring him booze. But Davis didn’t realize how industrious Hank could be. He apparently fashioned a makeshift transport system, tying a laundry bag to a rope and lowering it four floors to the ground, where a fellow hotel guest put two bottles of bourbon in it before giving the rope a tug. Davis and the hotel dick found Hank passed out drunk on his bed. The next night, in Moline, Illinois, hungover, he was sent onstage. A woman in the audience later related that “two men brought him out, one on each arm, his guitar around his neck, and stood him at the mike. He didn’t say a word, not even howdy. He was like a zombie. He sang great for an hour and then the two men came and got him and took him away.” She later saw him backstage, propped up in a chair and “smelling like a brewery . . . probably didn’t know his name or where he was. But you talk about a performance. He never missed a note.”7
Davis was fuming. Again that night, Hank slipped the knot and was plied with booze during a craps game. When the troupe got to Baltimore, he couldn’t be propped up or sing a note. For those who’d joined up with Hank recently, like Jerry Rivers, these demented scenes were the first time they’d seen him sloshed, confirming all that they’d heard from others.8 Soon enough, Davis didn’t even try to keep him clean. Though Hank’s vow to Oscar that he’d keep dry for a year was inoperable, his place secure because of his popularity, Oscar took him off the Hippodrome shows. Told to stay at the hotel, Hank bribed a bellhop to smuggle up booze in a water pitcher. He also was said to have gotten some of the girl square dancers on the show to smuggle him miniature bottles of booze in their hoop skirts. Davis had no recourse but to call the boss—Audrey Sheppard Williams. He told her to come to Baltimore and drive Hank home. Bob McNett and Don Helms picked her up at the airport and took her to the hotel. She was not happy.
Recalled McNett: “She said, “I am so upset and discouraged, I think I’ve lost all the love I had for Hank.’ I didn’t believe her then, and I still don’t. But right at that point you could see there was such a strain on that marriage. It was very important to her for him not to drink.”9
Audrey knew she would be the first one to feel the sting of Hank’s backslide. Even when he was dry, life with him was a trial. Being dismissed as co-host of his radio show didn’t help matters either, nor being stuck at home with a baby to feed and change while he was out all over the map playing star; she wasn’t particularly sympathetic to his complaints that he was overworked and underpaid, and that too many people wanted “a piece of him,” as he would put it. Not when she had to go to enormous lengths to keep him from missing shows and other Opry business. Once, when he had an Opry function scheduled, he decided to go fishing instead with Jerry Rivers on Kentucky Lake. Tracing him there, Audrey chartered a seaplane to land on the lake and gather him and help him into his good clothes on the trip back to Nashville for the dinner. Rivers, who, like Hank, could hardly believe his eyes, was finding out Audrey was the real boss. As Rivers recounted this incredible sight, Hank’s reaction was priceless.
Looking incredulously at the plane, Hank, he said, shook his head and, almost whining, pealed, “I can’t get away from this!” Added Rivers: “He said, ‘I’ll see ya later,’ and left me sitting in the boat out in the middle of Kentucky Lake.”10
Lycrecia Williams once candidly remarked that “Mother was a little too ambitious, maybe,” not only individually but about Hank’s career, while he “just wanted to let [things] kind of happen. If they happened, fine, but if they didn’t, that was all right, too. . . . Even though I think Daddy needed that direction, he would have wanted her to be a plain little housewife and stay home. But Mother couldn’t do that. She did that in her first marriage and her husband ran off and left her when she was pregnant.” At the same time, Audrey realized that if she stayed home, “Daddy wouldn’t have gone any further.
McNett never told Hank what Audrey had said, figuring it would kill him, and remove the only ballast he had—indeed, only five days after Davis called her to get him out of Baltimore, she had sobered him up enough for him to rejoin the tour in DC. And the crazy thing was that they often were the loving couple. At home, Hank would often sit beside her on the couch, put his arm tenderly around her shoulder, and hug her tight, though Audrey, being far less affectionate, would stiffen up like a board. A photo snapped of them on the long plane ride to Germany shows Hank sleeping cozily on her lap, a blanket pulled up under his chin.
There was, as well, the issue of how she felt about being assumed the dirtiest of his dirty laundry and target of the insults in his songs. Audrey was always guarded about that, saying after his death that “Hank wrote the songs himself—whether or not I was an inspiration, I will leave that up to other people. . . . I know within me and I know what Hank told me on a number of occasions . . . but I’ve been criticized on some songs—it’s so unjust, it’s unreal.”11 She also knew that, because of those songs, she would eternally be blamed by some for Hank’s drinking, the most unjust of assumptions. As Minnie Pearl said years later after both had died, “A number of people in country music were critical of her. They thought she aggravated Hank’s alcohol problem. But I think his sickness went way back to childhood, long before Audrey came into his life. I always liked her.”12
Still, probably not far from Audrey’s thoughts was that if she did stick it out, the value of her community property in a divorce—another divorce—might be potentially staggering. These kinds of considerations had been on her mind from the start. For example, she refused to allow Hank to adopt Lyrecia out of an abiding fear that he might somehow gain custody should the marriage collapse. And so even as she contemplated leaving him for good, getting all she could in the meantime overrode it for now, keeping her place in the Hank Williams brand.
• • •
Fred Rose, for his part, was no longer much interested in lecturing Hank about domestic life and drinking his way out of success. “Lovesick Blues” and “Wedding Bells” were followed by a conveyor belt of follow-up country hits—“Mind Your Own Business,” backed with “There’ll Be No More Tears” (No. 5), “You’re Gonna Change (Or I’m Gonna Leave)”/“Lost Highway” (No. 4), and the last song released in ’49, his twangy cover of “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” (No. 2), and the first release of the new decade, “I Just Don’t Like This Kind of Living” (No. 5), another of his marital confessionals, this one mocking Audrey’s presumptions of his ill-doing—“You ain’t never been known to be wrong, and I ain’t never been right.”
Rose didn’t need to worry about Hank relying on other folks’ songs anymore. Fatherhood and stardom seemed to put Hank enough at ease to unleash songs that, ironically, cried harder than ever. A cynic might have said Hank’s songs of lonely desperation and endlessly brittle and agonizing love, while real enough, also were a good gimmick, and that he excelled at channeling real pain into comfortably commercial ditties. This seemed especially so now that his writing was more of an assembly-line process itself than an undefined process without time limits. Almost diffidently, as if in meek compliance with Rose’s cold, impersonal methods, he told a news magazine called Pathfinder in 1952, “People don’t write music, it’s given to you, you sit there and wait and it comes to you. If it takes longer than thirty minutes or an hour, I usually throw it away.”13
This, of course, was nothing like the way he had written in the past, when he had filled notebooks with scribblings and kept songs in his head for months, years, building each one piece by piece as it emerged in concept. If he had washed that process away, he was also washing away much of what was real about him and turning into a human Hadacol.
Whatever he sang surely made people feel better, even if the songs were about feeling worse. Although the temperature in Nashville that fall of ’49 had hit a record low of 36 in September, Hank was hot. Every day it seemed somebody was covering one of his songs, as if buying a ticket onto the country charts. Roy Acuff did “Jesus Died for Me”; Milton Estes, “House of Gold”; Bill Monroe, “Alabama Waltz.”
After “Honky Tonkin’” was covered by Rose Maddox, it would become the first Hank Williams song ever to be recorded by a mainstream pop artist—eighteen-year-old Teresa Brewer, an erstwhile child singer. At around the same time, another budding thrush, nineteen-year-old Polly Burgin, a Tennessean, also covered it on the KEM label in a more authentic hillbilly diva style, yodeling and all, completely alien to her future soft pop songs as Polly Bergen. Brewer would also make a movie-theater short film singing the tune in ’51.
Then, too, in a blast from the past, Braxton Schuffert, who had found work in Montgomery as a driver for Hormel Meat while doing a radio show on WSFA that the company sponsored, ran into Hank on one of his periodic visits to pay off Lillie, and the two sat down and wrote some songs. Hank, again flexing his muscle, instructed Rose to pitch Frank Walker on recording Schuffert, who agreed—the angle being that Schuffert could be marketed as a Hank Williams protégé and part-time co-writer.
Walker, who detested Audrey and having to release those duets with Hank, no doubt figured an actual performer with a Hank connection wasn’t a bad bet. Hank then sent Schuffert train fare to Nashville, put him up at his home—Brax was flabbergasted by the place, playing with the automatic garage-door opener for hours—and got him backstage for an Opry show. Then, with Rose on the board, Brax went into Castle Studio on February 8, 1950, and, playing Hank’s guitar with the Drifting Cowboys, cut “Rockin’ Chair Daddy,” his high-pitched voice and vibrato a throwback to vintage country, along with standard weepy fare, “Teardrops on a Rose,” “Why Should I Cry,” which dated way back to 1941, and one from Rose’s Acuff-Rose drawer, written by Johnny Anglin, “If Tears Could Bring You Back.”
“Rockin’ Chair Daddy” got the play as a release, under the name “Braxton Shooford,” but didn’t do much, selling around 3,500 records. Still, it was all part of the Hank whirlabout. And Rose, clearing the field of these diversions, had booked his meal ticket for studio time at Castle on January 9 and 10. This time he could not stand in the way when Hank came in with Rivers, Helms, and McNett, joining holdovers Jack Shook and Ernie Newton. That Hank also played seemed to make for a four-guitar setup, but Hank’s instrument by now was mainly for show onstage, not studio purposes. Rose did not put a microphone on the guitar, only one by his mouth. Shook carried the rhythm, McNett and Helms adding the high, twangy electric accents.
Hank came in with three new songs, “Long Gone Lonesome Blues,” “Why Don’t You Love Me,” and “Why Should We Try Anymore,” and would take another crack at “My Son Calls Another Man Daddy,” the song he’d written with Jewell House. The priority was “Long Gone Lonesome Blues,” a song that, like others, sparked a claim of a stiffed writer’s credit. This one came from Vic McAlpin, who had co-written Eddy Arnold’s 1947 No. 1 country hit “What Is Life Without Love” and wrote other hits into the 1980s. McAlpin maintained that “Long Gone” was one of those that “we’d start fooling around with . . . and when we got something, he’d give me five hundred dollars for my half, and I’d stick the money in my pocket and forget it. He wanted the credit for everything.” Out on the way to Kentucky Lake, McAlpin remembered,
[Hank] said, “I gotta have me another blues to record, somethin’ like ‘Homesick Blues.’” All of a sudden he started singing something like, “She’s gone along, gone along blues.” He hummed it over a couple of times, then he dropped it. Well, we got in the boat, and I threw my line out. He was fussin’ with his bait. You could tell his mind wasn’t on it. I said to him, “You come here to fish or watch the fish swim by?”
“Hey, that’s the first line,” he said.
“Huh?” I said.
He said, “Watch the fish swim by.” I got the idea and said, “Okay, but why not say the river was dry?”
“Yeah, okay,” he said, so we put the song together.14
Hank’s line became the first one of the first verse, McAlpin’s the third line.
But nowhere on the record would there be Vic’s name. If Hank slipped him five big bills, it seemed like a hell of a day’s pay for one line, even if in a few months it would seem paltry next to what a credit would have netted him. Indeed, for Hank it was worth five hundred because he heard a hit in his head.
Hank, like Jimmie Rodgers, had a way of making the familiar fresh, with the turn of a phrase and the inflection of his voice. The phrasing was the key, and for that he always needed a good, clever hook. He said it himself, in a thirty-five-page booklet written with Jimmy Rule, How to Write Folk and Western Music to Sell. While Hank could get away with telling people that “God writes the songs for me,” his thirty-minute time limit reflected a far more cold and calculating writer. In the booklet, issued in 1951 by a local publisher, he noted that the chorus—the hook—was the starting point, “the part of the song sung most,” and should be “simple and easy-flowing,” devoid of “a lot of trick phrases or impossible chords” and one that “people will naturally want to hum after they have heard it.”15
As with the later rock and rollers, until the Beatles, the assumption was that lyrics made a song, not the melody. Hank never had the need to play his guitar with a flair. When Frank Page was learning guitar, he remarked to Hank one day, “I’ve learned C, D, and G.” Hank, he said told him, “Shoot, that’s all there is.” He was also supposed to have said a lot of good guitar players had “educated themselves right out of a job,” and that composers who try to write like Shakespeare “will be buried in the same grave with him.”
Fortuitous indeed was that while magnetic recording tape was starting to be used in well-equipped studios such as at Castle, the process was still archaic, recorders carrying only one track of tape; whatever was on it was pressed right onto a lathe-cut black lacquer master disk. Even if Rose wanted to add something later on, some extended part or flourish, he couldn’t. It had to be right the first time. Simple, but right.
But then, Hank could freely violate his own rules. Another expressed in the booklet was that one should never offend “any religious groups or races” and should avoid lines that had “double meanings or could be interpreted in any indecent manner”—never mind the sly double entendres of “Move It On Over” and all that “Honky Tonkin’” beer chugging and night crawling. And with “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” he did live up to the moniker of the “Hillbilly Shakespeare,” though the melody was very familiar, all but indistinguishable from “Lovesick Blues.” Hank put a fresh face on it by shifting blame for his lonesomeness onto the woman who walked away from a relationship, sending him to the river to go down three times but only come up twice. There was a harder edge to the steel intro, but the medium tempo was the same and the yodeling so frenzied it was almost parody.
If his voice, his timbre lower than usual, seems to be especially bell clear, it was purely intentional. Fred Rose had finally gotten the hang of what and who Hank was—a voice that begged to be heard. And so at a time when records were being smothered in strings and bathed in echoes, Rose took a minimalist approach. Going by how Hank had his band play in concerts—when he sang high notes they played low notes, and vice versa, to separate and accentuate the vocal—Rose instructed Don Helms to play his steel guitar at the highest range.
“Don’t ever go below this mark,” he said, putting his finger on the corresponding fret. “You want to make it cry, and to be heard on a jukebox.”16
Rose understood that the hub of Hank’s sales was not fans who went to record stores but rather jukebox operators, who sent out orders for the machines with records inside ready to play. There were around 400,000 “boxes” in existence in 1950, and the 5,500 or so operators would buy 150 records a week to play in juke joints. Getting repeat plays in there guaranteed a song almost perpetual life, spawning more record sales. Not for nothing was Hank the ideal match for a jukebox—the derivation of that word being the ancient Creole “juke” or “jouk” or joog,” for music, dancing, drinking, and generally disorderly behavior, and in a more modern frame, a roadhouse or brothel—or sexual intercourse.17 It was those mighty chrome-plated Wurlitzers that made “Lovesick Blues” an enduring hit, and how they belched out a song would be Rose’s focus in the studio.
Hank’s latest original songs were the latest examples of converting his bitching and moaning about Audrey into commercial gold. “Why Don’t You Love Me,” for example, was an up-tempo, fiddlin’, yodelin’ plaint about being treated “like a worn out shoe.” And “Why Should We Try Anymore” was a weepin’ ballad with a yearning, tremulous vocal in the mold of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” These, and the revamped “Daddy,” were all Rose could get out of him before Hank switched over into gospel mode for the vanity project he’d been bugging Fred to sign off on for months, recording not songs but semi-sung, mostly spoken recitations in the manner of a preacher man in the pulpit on Sunday morning.
The last thing Rose wanted was pastoral tunes or for Hank to counter his own puckish persona, but he knew that persona always had an undertone, sometimes flat out, of pleading to Jesus for redemption. But here, too, the jukebox operators entered into the equation. They bought records unheard, on the name of the artist alone, and if some of those would be a man speaking about God, they’d never be played and club owners would pitch a fit. The same applied to the disk jockeys. At the same time, other examples of “talking blues” had succeeded. Hank had made his recitations a regular part of his radio shows, going back to Montgomery, and never was he as emotionally invested as when he performed on them, often weeping as he went along.
Rose could hardly turn down a man who cried when he performed the songs he loved. But the only way he and Walker would sign off was if Hank recorded these monologues under a pseudonym. Rather than being turned off by the notion, Hank went for it, knowing that the name he chose—a hybrid of religious and secular, Luke the Drifter—would be a thin disguise. So he and Rose came back the next day, and Hank laid down four mordant poems with a stripped-down backup, with only Helms, Bew Butrum on bass, and a church-style organ played by Bradley.
Of the songs recorded during the session, only “Everything’s Okay” was an original. And Rose could not have been happy that Hank, who became weepy singing these songs of broken faith and fallen women, fell back on the colloquialisms Fred normally would not have let him get away with in a song. In “Beyond the Sunset,” a hymn from the 1910s, he said “soon I’ll foller you,” and in “The Funeral,” taken from a pre–Civil War poem, he told of looking through the winder as the mourning black couple at the funeral of their son sat in sorra while a “sad old colored preacher” eulogized a “little boy who has gone and run away.” Of less concern was what today are patently racist words in “The Funeral” describing a black boy with an “Ethiopian face,” “curly hair,” and “protruding lips,” who bore the “ignorance and wisdom of a crushed, undying race”—and conditioned sexism in the other song cut at the session, co-written by Tin Pan Alley titan Billy Rose, “Too Many Parties and Too Many Pals.”
Worse for Hank and Fred were that these records stiffed, but Hank would make them familiar, performing them regularly on the radio, mirthfully carrying out the con nobody bought for a second, that Luke was “a relative of mine” or a “half-brother.” Frank Walker had no problem releasing the first Luke the Drifter record, “Too Many Parties and Too Many Pals,” as sort of half-brother of “Long Gone Lonesome Blues,” which came out in early March of 1950, backed with the mushy “My Son Calls Another Man Daddy,” winning a typical rave in the March 25 Billboard—“One of Hank’s topnotch country blues efforts, side should hit fast and hard.”
Little Hank could do came up snake eyes. By April 22, “Long Gone” was second on the country chart to Red Foley’s recording of “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy.” On May 6, Hank’s original had leapfrogged over both Ernest Tubb’s “I Love You Because” and “Chattanoogie” to occupy the chart penthouse, where it would stay for eight weeks of a twenty-one-week run on the list, its sales estimated at 150,000, rivaling “Lovesick Blues.” And “Too Many Parties”—which had been beaten onto the market by another country version by a new western swing band from Chester, Pennsylvania, Bill Haley and the Saddlemen—tagged along, selling some 20,000 without benefit of the jukebox dynamic. So did “My Son Calls Another Man Daddy,” which broke out and went to No. 9. “The Funeral” sold a decent 6,600 records of its own. The memorable gems aside, it’s doubtful anyone else could have racked up so much with so little.
• • •
During the Opry years, he was by far the most popular artist on the franchise’s roster, his two or three songs on the Saturday night broadcast for many nonhardcore Opry buffs the only reason to tune in. Under these circumstances, the mystery is why the guiding powers there didn’t use him far more than on the show they did. Other than the week in 1950 when Red Foley took a vacation at Easter and Hank was given the job as fill-in emcee was he allowed that position, one he clearly deserved and likely would have done better with. He also was loyal to a fault. Despite his personal wariness of the Opry caste, he went along when Fred Rose, as an inducement for the Opry to take on Hank, in April of ’49 let Oscar Davis become his de facto manager, whereupon Davis had given over all his time to booking dates for him.
Although Hank had proven on the radio how personable and disciplined a host he was, and Davis was beginning to feel out the possibilities of him appearing on early TV shows, there was always a hedge about Hank, as too backwoods, too prone to speaking his mind. And, of course, there was the matter of the booze. The irony of that concern was that the Opry, for all its tony pretensions, was foisting on its audience crude, burlesque-style stereotypes of country that Hank might have winced at. A typical show from that period began with announcer “Cousin” Louie Buck barking, “Welcome to the capital of country music around the world—the Grand Ole Opry . . . Take it away, boys!” The band struck up, frenetic fiddles firing, and Red Foley, introduced as host, ambled on and sang “Shortnin’ Bread,” then did a comic bit with Rod Brasfield, delivering some wince-creating lines like “I ain’t got an enemy in the world—all my friends hate me.” Then Foley—who of course had a stake in Hank’s success, his band having been essential to his recent records—intoned, “It gives me a great feeling to say howdy to that great Montgomery, Alabama, singing personality—Hank Williams!”
Hank moved on out, did a quick bow, and lit into “You’re Gonna Change (Or I’m Gonna Leave),” the words tumbling out with precision and an especially long yodel—“You wore out a brand new trunk packin’ and unpackin’ your junk. / Your daddy’s mad, he’s done got peee-eee-eee-ved,” to hoots and hollers from the house. Next came Wally Fowler and the Oak Ridge Quartet for some “real spiritual singin’,” as Foley said, then Minnie Pearl, shouting “How-deee!” and then breaking into a tale about a fictitious boyfriend—“He said, when I try to kiss you I can’t figure out why you always yell stop. [I said] What I can’t figure out is why you do [stop]!’”
BRASFIELD: “Minnie, did I ever tell you I had a goat farm?”
MINNIE: “Yeah, I got wind of it. . . .You know something, Rodney, gals say they don’t like to kiss a feller with whiskers. When they make up their mind, they ain’t gonna beat around the bush.”
The format constrained Hank, as one of a troupe of players, and he would only be able to squeeze in one or two songs per show. But it quickly became evident that when the announcer opened each broadcast by shouting “It’s Grand Ole Opry time!,” for many it meant “It’s Hank Williams time!” Placards were drawn up for the lobby of the Ryman, and ads run in the trade papers, labeling him “Mr. Lovesick Blues” or the “Lovesick Blues Boy.”
Not blind to Hank’s star power, Jim Denny, the Opry general manager, tried to be not only a boss but someone Hank could trust. Denny had gone through a hard life himself—working himself up from the mail room at National Home Life Insurance and the aisles at the Opry, where he was an usher—and believed he could meld with Hank as a poor boy made good. “I never knew anybody I liked better than Hank,” Denny said in the late 1950s, “but I don’t think I ever really got close to him. Don’t know if anyone really could. He was so bitter. . . . He thought everybody, in the final analysis, had some sort of angle on him. I suppose that’s why everybody had misinterpreted him. Because despite it all, he was very kind and generous and very determined to be the top man in his profession.”18
Minnie Pearl, on the other hand, was able to gain that trust. He was, she said, “actually one of the funniest men I ever knew. He had a wry sense of humor . . . and he loved to tell stories on other people. He never played the star.”19 He didn’t need to play it. As far as he had come, he couldn’t avoid being swathed in more stardom than he could handle.