“Cold, Cold Heart,” for all its harrowing genesis, developed in the usual manner. A demo made in November 1950 was given to Fred Rose to make grammatical and literary refinements. Hank, of course, kept secret the ugly origin of the scalding lyrics. When he was interviewed for a 1951 Wall Street Journal article about the growth of country, a quite important signpost, he went with his half-chuckled, one-size-fit-all tripe about sitting down and waiting until God wrote it for him.1 As if the good Lord could have crafted lines that dripped with venom such as
I tried so hard, my dear, to show that you’re my every dream
Yet you’re afraid each thing I do is just some evil scheme
Other daggers of blame followed. Unlike in previous indictments of her, there was no obligatory mea culpa to dilute blame, no begging for a second chance; his only hedge was to ask himself what was holding him back from cutting the cord—which of course was in reality a lifeline. As harsh as these lyrics were, they bore no resemblance to anything he would ever tell her to her face. He still needed her, which was the answer to his question, and singing these words must have been quite comforting to the other Hank, the whipped one. So comforting that when Rose’s old bugaboo—the mismatched meters—arose again, Hank stood firm. The problem was that when Hank came in to record it on December 21, he held the vocal two beats too long to be in meter, or cut it off two beats too quick.
“Hank, it’s not in meter. There’s a two-four bar here on ‘heart.’ If you’re dancing, your foot’s in the air. On ‘apart,’ I suggest you hold it two more beats.”
“Mr. Rose,” he said with exasperation, “I don’t know nothin’ about no meter,” repeating the same thing he had told him before, about how he fancied holding notes that he liked. Then, “You’ll just have to watch me.”2
Rose once more stood down. He had no choice now. But Fred’s ear was again vital to the song’s success. He heard it as the most honest of Hank’s blues numbers, and the lyrics were so acrid that it might also have been a fine choice for the Luke the Drifter catalog had the melody Hank set it to not been so bluesy itself, a nice easy tempo with wonderfully smooth chord changes.
A new addition to the crew of sidemen, if only for this one session, would one day be regarded as arguably the greatest electric guitar player country has ever known, Chester Burton “Chet” Atkins. Born in Luttrell, Tennessee, in 1924, he would in his life win fourteen Grammy Awards and be inducted into the Rock and Roll, Country, and Musicians Hall of Fame, and as an executive he would open country to the mainstream. Atkins arrived in Nashville after stints with swing instrumental groups and after passing an audition for Red Foley when Red had his radio show on WLS. He joined Foley’s band, then the Grand Ole Opry in 1946. He’d had a record out, “Guitar Blues,” one of the overlooked gemstones of country, taking the idiom into jazz-band territory with the inclusion of a clarinet solo. In fact, in an example of Opry provincialism and utter stupidity, he was fired from the show, and then from his next gig, on a Springfield, Missouri, radio station—for not being “country enough.”3
Atkins’s style derived from Merle Travis’s bluegrass method of picking with thumb and two, sometimes three, fingers. It was a gift to country, in that Atkins could blend in with any type of arrangement or meter, adding depth and color without one note out of place or even heard—in other words, the ideal studio sideman. True to form, one cannot distinguish Atkins’s guitar in the tightly fused instrumentation, and it was mainly Helms’s pedal steel intro that let Hank come out of the gate with a real edge, perhaps the most strident he ever sounded, the teary throb and clipped yodels not sad and sentimental as much as weary, even defeated.
Hank was angry when he sang it that day, and he didn’t care if it was obvious. Maybe a little too obvious for Rose. When the time came to pick an A-side for Hank’s next release, Fred went with another song of retribution recorded that day, “Dear John,” written in 1949 by Texas songwriter Aubrey Glass. Tex Ritter bartered for a writer’s credit on it by promising Glass he would get the song recorded, cashing in when it was cut that year by the Texas swing band Jim Boyd and His Men of the West. While it didn’t get anywhere, Rose had wanted Hank to cover it for a year, its infectious grooves right up Hank’s alley.
The remaining two songs were recorded as Luke the Drifter entries, “Just Waiting” and “Men with Broken Hearts,” the former a cynical parable of various life losers waiting for the next day of routine despair. Hank once explained to the Montgomery newspaperman Allen Rankin, “Don’t know why I happened to of wrote that thing. Except somebody that’s fell, he’s the same man ain’t he? So how can he be such a nice guy when he’s got it and such a bad guy when he ain’t got nothin’?” Yet it was so lugubrious that even Hank confided to Rankin, “Isn’t that the awfullest, morbidest song you ever heard in your life?”4
This was the Hank that confounded people who knew him. The same guy who while drunk could so easily break a bottle over someone’s head, the same guy whose philandering was so brazen, and who could humiliate a band member for hitting a wrong note, would go to pieces in the studio reciting some of these admittedly morbid tearjerkers. At least he wasn’t lost in the muck of only recording “hit” material; if he had something to get off his chest, it went in a song, even if it had no shot at success.
Since he wrote almost all his songs now while sitting in the back of his car as it drove through the quiet night on some back road, he had little else but loneliness on his mind. And to those who saw him come apart as he performed the saddest songs, he was a sad sack indeed, someone who couldn’t be happy, someone who needed to be protected from his own depths. Roy Acuff used to observe Hank in the studio during such moments. In one session, Wesley Rose remembered, “Roy and Hank spent the whole time singing each other’s songs. Hank would cry when he sang one of Roy’s, and vice versa. When I drove Roy back to town he told me, ‘That’s a good boy, Wes, You watch out for him.’”5
• • •
“Dear John”/“Cold, Cold Heart” went out with an ad in the February 17 Billboard that featured Hank’s image and copy screaming MGM’S ALL-TIME CONSISTENT BEST SELLER! above blurbs for “Dear John,” “Moanin’ the Blues,” and “Lovesick Blues”—all three of which would be on the country chart once “John” moved into the Top 10 two weeks later. That the B-side was something more was obvious when “Dear John” became just one of a number of versions of the song, among them the original by Jim Boyd and His Men of the West and an R&B version by the marvelous Dinah Washington, which would go to No. 3 on that chart. Hank’s cover sat second among songs listed as “coming up,” and by March 24, when “Dear John” had peaked at No. 8, the jocks discovered “Cold, Cold Heart” and were turning it over so much that it replaced “John” as the A-side, soon by frequent request by listeners
Clearly, the buying public cared not a whit about its anger. Like “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Cold, Cold Heart” showed there was no boundary that Hank couldn’t step across in unburdening his sad, sad heart—or to profit his larcenous heart. The song shot up to No. 1 on May 12, ahead of Hank Snow’s “Rhumba Boogie” and Lefty Frizzell’s “I Want to Be with You Always.” That was when the writer of “You’ll Still Be in My Heart,” Ted West, who had been unilaterally removed as writer of record by two other tunesmiths when T. Texas Tyler recorded it, saw his song now connected to a Hank Williams chart-topper. He sued not Hank or Fred Rose but the other two guys. But while the suit was waiting to be settled, royalties would be frozen on it. Rose would pay Hank his royalties of $32,000 in mid-’51, but because of that lawsuit, something like $22,000 more would be held up in the meantime. As it happened, Hank would never see that chunk of cash because it took until 1955 for the case to be settled, not in West’s favor. Such were the repercussions of a whirlwind like Hank. People who normally would let things lie would fight like hell to get some of the spoils of jamming in on his success.
• • •
The chart rankings and money figures that accrued from his records were what kept the flickering flame between Hank and Audrey burning, not any lingering chemical attraction. Chet Flippo had it that Hank once cracked wise to a fishing buddy that Audrey was “just like this damn fishin’ boat. She’s got a flat bottom, she got no top, and she smells like fish.”6 Yet he had long grown to depend on her, and the formula of writing songs about her, and Audrey finding a modicum of stardom through him not only kept them on track, however uneasily, but created a gusher. According to Billboard, Hank had earned over $400,000 in an eight-month period ending April 8, 1950. Some of the box office highlights that year were eye-popping, even by today’s standards—10,500 in Kansas City, 16,750 in St Louis, 18,500 in Amarillo, 13,600 in Toledo, 16,500 on New Year’s Eve in Indianapolis. Then, too, as if he needed it, his sheet music sold in the thousands every year. Even more impressive was the stolidness of the road show.
Even under insufferable duress and a killing schedule, the Drifting Cowboys kept on grinding it out, the cast the same save for the bass men. The trade-off was that they lived like stray dogs, hand to mouth, road sign to road sign. With no time to find motels or restaurants, they were almost entombed in Hank’s limo, the boss the most uncomfortable of them all. “With all of his back problems,” said Don Helms, “Hank rode the car in misery.”7 His diet was inferior to a stray dog’s. Big Bill Lister, touring at times with him, recalled that “Hank was the only person I ever saw could put ketchup on his oatmeal. Out on the road, none of us ate properly. We’d stop to get gas, and at the same time, we’d get a gallon of milk and a dozen doughnuts or cupcakes. We didn’t even have time to order hamburgers. There were many weeks that we’d maybe check into a hotel twice—the rest of the time you’re driving.”8
Looking for more ways to squander the constant stash of money, the Williamses could easily keep up with the Joneses—or, more accurately, the Tubbses. Ernie Tubb had opened a record shop near the Ryman in ’47, making good side money from it, and Hank and Audrey took that as a cue to open a western clothing store similar to Nudie Cohn’s, Hank & Audrey’s Corral, at 724 Commerce Street just down the block from Ernie’s store. It cost Hank $160 a month to rent, and he put over $7,000 into stocking and furnishing the joint. It was quite a sight, the windows bordered by logs that no doubt took Hank back to his childhood and Lon’s logging trains. A huge sign with the couple’s images flanking the name of the store in neon lights jutted from the building. A wagon wheel loomed over the front door. The shelves were stocked with boots, kerchiefs, hats, saddles, shirts, and suits designed by Hank and Audrey, as well as Hank’s records and sheet music. All that was missing were Daniel Boone–style coonskin caps.
On the day the store opened, Hank did his morning show there, singing with invited guests such as Roy Acuff backed by Lister, Sammy Pruett, and Howie Watts. Fans mobbed the place, causing security concerns, and soon he and Audrey did a Saturday night show from there on WSM before the Opry, just like Tubb did with his radio show at his music shop. Musicians mingled with patrons. Hank would send out for burgers for everyone and press twenty-dollar bills into the hands of anyone with a sob story. He had stationery printed with HANK & AUDREY’S CORRAL as the masthead, which he used when he replied to fan letters.
He sold leather holsters, but one accessory he didn’t sell off the rack, wisely, was guns. While they fit the motif, they made Audrey nervous, with cause, as she was living with a man who had enough guns to build an arsenal and flew into rages directed at her. Indeed, more and more, guns had become a frightening part of the mayhem always about to erupt in the Williams home. A couple who had been their neighbors in Shreveport, Zeke and Helen Clements, had seen them argue, fuss, and fight but never saw Hank with a gun. When they moved to Nashville, Hank seemed not to care who was around when he began menacing Audrey with one or another of his pistols. Audrey tried at first to pass it off as bravado. When Helen told her, “Audrey, I don’t like this,” Audrey tried to laugh it away. “He won’t hurt you,” she said, “he likes you.” However, when the Clementses stayed over that night, Helen again came across Hank toying with a gun. “Audrey,” she said, “I’m getting out of here. You can stay if you want, but he’s violent.” As she and Zeke were leaving, Hank crept right behind them, holding his gun, a crazed look on his face. This was the image of the man that was now becoming common. Helen had also not seen Hank put his hands on Audrey. That had changed, too. During an argument at the house, Audrey ran into the bathroom to get away from Hank, who followed her in and locked the door. Helen heard a thwack and called out, “Hank, open this door. What are you doing in there?”
Sounding calm, as if nothing were awry, he called back, “It’s all right, Helen, I just slapped her so she’d stop and listen to me. That’s all I done.”9
But Audrey could dish it out as good as she got. Helen was with them in Hank’s car driving home after an Opry show when they began spatting as usual. Audrey stopped the car and ordered Hank out, in the middle of nowhere. “Audrey,” Helen said, “you’re not going to leave him out there on the side of the road like that?”
“Well, I am, too,” she told her, starting up the motor again. “I’m not goin’ back.”
After driving about a mile, though, she did go back. Didn’t she always? Their entire life together was one sick scene after another, a perpetual war interrupted by brief lulls in the hostilities, as if to gear up for the next round. But the collateral damage was becoming more than she could handle. Helen Clements told of Audrey finding bottles he had strategically hidden around the house and pouring them down the sink. “One time she was cranky, and she said, ‘Let him drink all he wants,’ and she went and got him three fifths. He was already so drunk he couldn’t get off the couch, but he drank it all and we had to take him to the hospital.”10
Audrey could be so turned off to him that her crusade to keep him off the bottle was waning, so turned off that not even money could make things better. Before leaving for a gig one time, Hank put a stack of shriveled bills in Helen’s hand—$500 in all.
“Give these to her,” he instructed her, “but don’t do it until I’ve left.”
Helen did, but Audrey wasn’t having it. “I don’t want them,” she said.
“Well, what do you want me to do with them, Audrey?”
“I don’t care what you do with them. You can keep them, you can tear them up, but I just don’t care!”
That, granted, was rare for her. But it was a marker that she was reaching a breaking point. For now, though, he could still tug at her heart, whenever he would crumble into a pile of pity. As Audrey once looked back:
Everybody always said, “He’s gonna kill you one of these days.” He’d do these things and when he’d come to his senses, he’d put his head on my lap and cry just like a baby. He’d say, “Why do I do that to you? I know better ’n that. Why do I do it? Why do I do it?” I begged him to go to a psychiatrist. “We’ll just close up the house, and we’ll rent an apartment, and we’ll stay close to you.” He told me, “If you ever have me put anywhere, I’ll kill you.” He needed help so bad, and I just couldn’t do it.11
The more abuse and self-destruction he and Audrey could punish each other with, the more it seemed they could suck up in order to keep the business partnership intact. Symbolically, Hank neatly typed a song on a sheet of that stationery, dated October 9, 1951, titled “Heart Filled with Hate,” which was an all but rewritten version of “Cold, Cold Heart.” Under pictures of Hank and Audrey’s smiling faces, the lyrics, in capital letters, read in part, “my love came to [sic] late,” and “I’m wed to a heart filled with hate.”
Although Fred Rose never put in for a copyright, nor was it ever recorded, these thoughts were always swimming in his head, and laying them out on paper seemed to have a cathartic effect, as if just seeing them were a victory over her. For Audrey, the same effect could be had by smashing a piece of crockery or throwing a fur coat in his face. As they struggled to make it through 1951, it seemed like a triumph of love, or maybe just spite, that they were both still in one piece.
• • •
Hank was still affiliated with Hadacol but would freelance around the WSM schedule as well, on short-lived shows with other sponsors, including Duckhead work clothes and Aunt Jemima pancake mix (those shows were recorded but never aired). Then, in late 1950, the station changed the sponsorship of his 7:15–7:30 a.m. show, it never being hard to find one eager to ride him. This was Mother’s Best Flour, a perfect tie-in to the demographics of the audience, mainly housewives as they went about making breakfast and shoving baked goods into their ovens. Paid a hundred bucks a week now by WSM, he never missed a show, even if he was on no sleep when he came in. And these were some of the most enduring hours of his career, eighteen hours over seventy-two shows recorded on acetate for replay when he was out on the road. Striking, too, was that he would find a place for Audrey on many shows, singing duets with her or letting her perform solo with the Drifting Cowboys on songs like “Last Night I Heard You Crying in Your Sleep,” “Four Flusher,” and “Blue Love (In My Heart”).
These were far more polished broadcasts than the transcripts of the Johnnie Fair shows in Shreveport, Hank a master of easy banter and smooth segues from cornpone to his mournful hit songs, gospel hymns, and talking blues, closing each show with a solemn religious number. Most Luke the Drifter numbers he made sure to perform on the air, helping sell those oddball anomalies not heard on jukeboxes. After a tremulous rendition of the talking blues song “The Funeral” on his radio show, Hank, no longer perpetuating the thin joke of his alter ego, informed the audience, “We make quite a few records under the name of Luke the Drifter . . . just a flock of ’em, Luke the Drifter, MGM Records. Nine cents. I don’t care if you buy ’em or not ’cause I don’t need the money no more. But if you buy one of ’em and notify the folks I owe, they’ll send you a congratulations card, I guarantee ya.”
Unlike Hadacol, Mother’s Best contracted to sponsor the show if it was picked up by stations around the country on a network feed, and Hank and his band posed for publicity photos holding big bags of Mother’s Best flour. He also was called upon to weave in commercials for the product, usually with Cousin Louie Buck, and wrote a theme song that went:
I love to have that gal around
Her biscuits are so nice and brown
Her pies and cakes beat all the rest
Cause she makes them all with Mother’s Best
As good as he was at injecting quite nearly subliminal plugs into any small talk he did, he would preface a song onstage by saying “Here’s a song that’s bought us a lotta beans and biscuits.” When he would flirt with the ladies at home by cooing, “Hey, good-lookin’, if you’ve got anything cookin’, just make sure you’re cookin’ it with Mother’s Best Flour,” it wasn’t only a good line—it was good for sales. And of course, it would be good for a song that soon would be heard on just about every radio and jukebox in the land.
This was a Hank at the top of his game, even as his home life was falling apart, the depth of his natural and created personality evident in what are by turns humble and swaggering charm and withering empathy, the stuff of which sold his records. And his range of material on these shows revealed a remarkable sweep of musical knowledge, his selections darting in machine-gun style from a familiar hit to the unknown.
No dummy when it came to business, he made sure to play the standards all the time, “Lovesick Blues” and “I Saw the Light” always in the rotation. And Mother’s Best was the single most repeated phrase of any show. After Hank began with a few bars of “Lovesick Blues,” he would cue “Luigi” for Buck’s typical intro, at which point Hank would interrupt, “Cousin Louie Buck! Beat ya to it.” Then, “You fellers are just so wide awake and scrappy this morning, I don’t know what I’m gonna do with you. How ’bout comin’ in, everybody, and sitting down. I’ll fix ya up a mess of biscuits.” Or, “Get over in the corner, get your apron on, and stir up a batch of that Mother’s Best Biscuits. Give me a chord in A, everybody. [Breaking into a makeshift melody] Yessir, it’s Mother’s Best biscuit kind. . . . Here we go, we’re gonna go down to Louisianer, Louisianer, I said, where the red river flows. Let’s go. . .” He then began a spirited, fiddlin’ version of “Where the Old River Flows,” yodeling mutated into ten-second falsetto riffs. He delighted in singing “a song I wrote about my home state,” the slow, sinewy “Alabama Waltz.”
It was intimate, fun, homey, revealing. There was not a slurred word or flat note—except by Audrey. Indeed, one of the great finds in cultural archaeology was when someone at WSM in the late 1970s happened to see the acetates for all the shows, which included an amazing 143 songs, in their original casings discarded in the trash, waiting to be dumped into the next garbage pickup. Fortunately, someone picked them out, and decades later they formed several retrospective albums of unreleased Hank songs, one of which was nominated for a Grammy as Best Historical Album.
If only he’d known what he was doing was historical. For Hank, it was all just a day’s pay.
• • •
On March 16, 1951, Hank assembled with Rivers, Helms, Pruett, Shook, Newton, and Owen Bradley on piano and recorded four originals—“I Can’t Help It if I’m Still in Love with You,” “Howlin’ at the Moon,” “Hey, Good Lookin’,” and “My Heart Would Know,” one of the most productive sessions Hank ever had, as well as one of the most carefree. As though he had gotten all the bile out of his system about Audrey, the abortion, and Lord knows what other bugaboos he was carrying inside, he had created these songs with a dose of wishful thinking, and just had fun with them.
After he sang the word “moon” on the second tune, someone in the band bayed an ow-woooooo and the arrangement was an upbeat fox-trot beat, as Jerry Rivers pegged it. “That was when all the records said ‘Fox Trot,’” he said. “Personally I never knew what the fox trot was, but I knew that tempo.”12 Of course, so did Fred Rose, and it was just what he wanted, and would release as the next single. But the others were top shelf, too. “I Can’t Help It” and “My Heart Would Know” were wailing ballads that exposed the same nerve of love no matter what, the former sighing that if his lips could tell a lie, his heart would betray him.
“Hey, Good Lookin’” was the biggest lark he ever sang, Hank having appropriated the title and hook from the 1942 Cole Porter show tune “Hey, Good Lookin’ (Something for the Boys),” changing the rest to a litany of corny courtin’ cliches and double entendres about things like a “hot rod Ford” sung in eight-to-the-bar blues tempo.
If ever Hank had actually enjoyed being in love, or just the thought of it, it was when he scribbled the lines of this song, intending it as the sort of change-of-pace, pop-friendly, see-I-can-do-it dance record that Fred had longed for from the beginning as an entree to the crossover pop market. Rose let some backwoods patois go unedited (though this was one of the few Hank sessions where he didn’t officially produce, his influence was still felt), but the yodeling was all but gone now, as Rose consciously turned toward breaking Hank into the more generic fold.
As part of the bargain for the nagging in his gut that told him he was indeed still in love, he was back at Castle on March 23, 1950, to cut two gospel duets with Audrey, Johnny Bailes’s “The Pale Horse and His Rider” and Hank’s “A Home in Heaven.” And his star was of such magnitude that, with Paul Cohen having fulfilled his obligation to release two records by Audrey, Hank had prevailed on Frank Walker to sign her as a solo act to MGM for two years, a minor concession by Walker and a small price for keeping her from crimping any more of Hank’s sessions with those cursed duets. Audrey cut her first two MGM solo records at that same session, both written by her, “Leave Us Women Alone” and “If You See My Baby,” the latter notable as the title of a different song sung years later by Merle Haggard.
Hank, meanwhile, did indeed seem to be crossing over to a place in his own head in which he could live without all the usual stress and strife. Though the clothing store would lose thousands before they shut it down, it didn’t deter him from sinking $60,000 more into a 507-acre farm as a getaway in Carter Creek over in Franklin, buying it from a widow named Lois Brown. The grounds were even more Graceland-like than the Franklin Road estate, an old cotton plantation anchored by an alabaster-white antebellum mansion built in 1856, called Beechwood Hall. The property sat on a hilltop, offering sweeping vistas of the Tennessee Valley. Even though the place had fallen into disrepair and needed tons of work, with bales of hay stacked up in the manor house, Hank believed he could dry out in a real country setting more distant from the web of Nashville, and give Audrey another reason to feel like a queen of the manor, masking the mutual loathing they now had for each other when they were alone. With all that he’d spent on keeping her around, it was just some more good money thrown after bad. And, as always, it could only be so long before that Band-Aid broke, too.