Hiram “Hank” Williams, old before his time and ill in countless ways, was by all measures in no condition to travel long distances in bone-chilling, rainy, blustery weather. He may have wanted to go just as much to get away from the madness in Montgomery, a constant urge whenever he spent any time there. But even if the concert dates over the New Year’s holiday were of critical importance—which they weren’t—looking back, because no one thought to talk him out of that last ride, or at least make sure he wouldn’t be traveling essentially alone in bone-freezing weather, his family and friends did let him down. Indeed, after receiving Toby Marshall’s telegram, Lillie’s only adjustment wasn’t to reconsider her feeling that Hank was well enough to travel alone but rather to give Marshall instructions to be in Charleston with his black bag well stocked. This despite telling Marshall that Hank recently had a “highly upsetting emotional incident” that sent him back to the bottle.1
Hank’s last full day in Montgomery, Monday, December 29, 1952, was especially maudlin. Needing to go to church, an urge he rarely felt, he went to the St. Jude’s Hospital chapel, to pray with the nuns. “Ol’ Hank needs to straighten up some things with the Man,” Billie Jean said he told her.2 He was even more melancholy when he came into his cousin Marie McNeil’s room and handed her forty dollars, which he wanted used to help pay the doctor who would deliver Bobbie Jett’s baby. As he left the room, Marie said, Hank told her, “Ol’ Hank’s not gonna be with you another Christmas. I’m closer to the Lord than I’ve ever been in my life.” Billie Jean recalled that Hank tossed and turned in bed all that night, the pain in his back excruciating. At one point, he leaped out of bed and, she recalled, started shadowboxing, mimicking throwing punches at an invisible target. Startled, she asked, “Hank, what in the world is the matter with you?”
“Every time I close my eyes,” he said, echoing what he’d told newspaperman H. B. Teeter a year before, “I see Jesus comin’ down the road. He’s comin’ after ol’ Hank.”3
None of these mawkish expressions seemed to alarm them, having heard variations of the theme before. The next morning, his travel plans still in limbo, he chartered a flight to Charleston for early afternoon. But because of the horrendous weather—a snowstorm had blanketed Montgomery, one of the few to ever hit the city—he’d had to go about hiring a driver days before. Hank could have pulled out of one or both concerts, but because of his reputation for missing shows he couldn’t afford more bad publicity. He insisted on going, and had convinced Don Helms on the phone to play at both dates. Helms, with Jerry Rivers, was now in Ray Price’s band, and Ray was scheduled to play in Cleveland a day earlier, so Helms signed on to meet up with Hank in Canton, for a $200 payday, and would hitch a ride out with Bam Bamford.
Seeking a driver, Hank first asked Brack Schuffert, but Brack couldn’t miss work at Hormel Meats. An old standby in the Driftin’ Cowboys, “Beanpole” Boling, was working at a Montgomery cab company, but he too was busy. He then went over to the Lee Street Taxi storefront and asked the owner, Dan Carr, who’d gotten him drivers before, if he could spare someone. Carr recommended his son, Charles, a thin, sandy-haired, eighteen-year-old freshman at Auburn University who was home for the holidays. He had once driven Hank, who thought Charles rode the gas pedal a little hard, but then that was how Hank himself liked to drive. So Charles Carr it was, at $400 for the four-day round-trip.
Carr backed up Billie Jean when he confirmed she was still indeed in Montgomery and far from being disowned by Hank. Right up until he drove away, Carr said, she was asking Hank if she could go with him, but Hank said no. Billie Jean would recall that farewell with more melancholy:
Hank was in the car. I was back in my room putting my makeup on. And he came back into the room, came up behind me and kissed me on the cheek. He sat down on the edge of the bed. He just looked at me, not saying a word. I stood in front of the mirror, my back to him, and to me he looked like he was already dead. And I asked him if somethin’ was botherin’ him. And he said, “No, baby, I just wanted to look at you one more time.”4
• • •
At around 11:30 a.m. Wednesday, Hank and Carr loaded up his baby blue ’52 Cadillac convertible. Hank laid his guitar on the back seat and stowed in the trunk a couple of others, along with several stage suits and other things he would need. He was wearing dark blue serge pants and jacket, a white shirt, black tie, navy blue overcoat, white felt cowboy hat, and blue suede shoes. With his pearl-handled .45 tucked in his coat pocket, Hank climbed into his accustomed travel quarters, the well-used back seat of the Caddy. As Carr pulled away, Hank told him to wait and went back in the house, changing into white cowboy boots. Still hoping the plane would be allowed to take off, he had Carr buzz by the airport, but with all flights canceled well into the day, Hank settled in, his back already hurting, for what would be hours on the road.
Before heading out of the city, though, there were some loose ends to tie up. Needing a shot of something for the road, he had Carr stop by a hotel where he’d heard there was a convention of construction contractors going on. Ambling into the ballroom where people stared, their mouths agape, he helped himself to some drinks and left. He then swung by Doc Stokes’s office. He was going to deliver Bobbie’s child, and Hank also gave him forty dollars, then asked Stokes if he could give him a shot of morphine. Stokes, smelling liquor on his breath, refused.
Hank then tried one of the doctors he’d gone to before with Toby Marshall’s card and prescriptions, and the doctor, identified in one account only as a man named Black, shot him up with morphine. Hank walked out, his legs wobbly but feeling fine. He also had several chloral hydrate tables in his pocket, after using the last prescription he had left from Toby Marshall’s stash.
Carr then made two more stops, first at a gas station to change a tire, and even the guy who changed it, Cecil Jackson, would enjoy his fame for entering the coming drama. Hank then stopped at the Hollywood Drive-In diner and bought some sandwiches, coffee, and a six-pack of Falstaff beer. Now he could leave. At around five o’clock, darkness had thrown a veil over the sky and the snow. The Caddy turned onto Highway 31 and headed northbound.
• • •
The itinerary was to cover nearly a thousand miles, from Montgomery to Charleston to Canton. Posters were printed for the appearances, the one for the Canton show featuring Hank’s signature saying “If the good Lord’s willing, and the creek don’t rise . . . I’ll see you at Canton Memorial Auditorium New Year’s Day 1953.” As it happened, an Opry troupe was also playing in Canton on New Year’s Day, starring Carl Smith and the Carter Sisters. And Bamford was quite willing to take a few liberties, plastering the poster for Hank’s show with the words GRAND OLE OPRY PRESENTS IN PERSON. . . . The show would be the same at both engagements, an early set—8 p.m. in Charleston, 3 p.m. in Canton—followed by late shows at 10:30 and 5:30, respectively.
Hank would headline on an “All-Star” bill with the cornpone comedy team Homer and Jethro, the Webb Sisters, Alabama warbler Autry Inman, who had played bass in Cowboy Copas’s band, and Harold Franklin “Hawkshaw” Hawkins. Most of the acts would play behind Hank, with Helms, and be joined by Bill Monroe’s fiddler, Red Taylor.
Because Hank had gotten out of Montgomery late, he decided to stay the night in Birmingham, raising some hell as usual. When Carr parked illegally in front of the posh Tutwiler Hotel, a cop ticketed him and, not moved when Carr told him who was in the back seat, shooed him away. They then booked two rooms at the Redmont, where three women recognized Hank within minutes and spent the next hour in his room. Carr and Hank ordered room service and after a good night’s sleep were off early the next morning, New Year’s Eve day. They made a stop in Fort Payne, where Hank bought a bottle of bourbon, and made it to Chattanooga by lunchtime and ate in a diner. Hank dropped a dime in the box and played Tony Bennett’s cover of “Cold, Cold Heart,” then left a $50 bill for the waitress, saying, “Here’s the biggest tip you ever got.”
By 1 p.m. they were in Knoxville, still three hundred miles from Charleston. He had Carr check on flights. There was one at 3:30 that would get there by 6. Hank bought two tickets, deciding to keep Carr along for company. During the ride up, Hank had gotten along well with the kid; they had sung to keep the boredom away, and he liked the kid’s spunk. The Caddy would be left in the airport parking lot until they came back on the return trip.
With time before the flight, Hank found his way to St. Mary’s Hospital, where, in mysterious circumstances Carr never explained, he was able to have a doctor give him another morphine shot. The plane boarded and took off on time. But the weather was rough, and the plane was ordered to turn back to Knoxville, landing at 6 p.m. By now, as Carr learned when he phoned Lillie, the two Charleston shows had been canceled due to the storm. Most of the performers were able to navigate the icy roads and get to the theater just as it was being boarded up. Bam Bamford, arriving with Don Helms, was particularly peeved, knowing he’d be refunding two sellout houses of 4,000 people. Bam instructed all of them to get going to Canton for the next night’s shows. One other interested party had made it to Charleston as well—Toby Marshall, who called Lillie for his marching orders.
Meanwhile, stuck back in Knoxville, Carr and a dog-tired Hank checked into the Andrew Johnson Hotel. Hank, who had drained the bourbon, could barely stand, and two porters all but carried him to his room. One of them, Emmanuel Martin, recalled that Hank “was very much alive. I talked to him coming in, talked to him coming out, and I remember he made one little statement, ‘When you drink like this, this is the price you gotta pay.’ ”5 Carr ordered two room service steaks, but Hank was laid out on his bed, kept awake only because he developed nagging hiccups that seemed to approach convulsions. Concerned, Carr also called Lillie again, who proceeded to call Marshall to tell him where Hank was. Marshall then phoned Carr with instructions to have the front desk summon a doctor. Minutes later, Dr. Paul Cardwell rushed to the hotel and, possibly having conferred by phone with Marshall, injected Hank with two more morphine shots along with vitamin B-12. Brought up to speed, Marshall informed Carr not to stay overnight at the hotel and to get back on the road to Canton, and whatever he did, keep Hank away from the sauce.
From this point on, mysteries abound that have never been solved, mysteries with plenty of clues but a lot of doubt. Some have, through the years, advanced the theory that when two porters carted Hank down to the Cadillac at around 10:45 p.m. he was already dead, although the hotel manager would offer later that Hank was still alive albeit looking “groggy.” And Carr, for his part, later noted, “If he was dead, it was a dead man walking around when we stopped later.”6
Over the next eight hours, as Hank sat almost silent in the convertible, which even with the heater blasting was as cold as a meat locker, nobody apparently tried to speak with or check on him, nor heard a peep from him in the back seat. Carr would later say Hank had spent time writing songs and chugging some beer, and noted that the last song they sang was Red Foley’s “Midnight,” a song that may have matched the mood he was in as he sang for the last time:
Midnight, I lie in bed awake and stare at nothing at all
Wonderin’, wonderin’ why you don’t care, wishing you’d call
• • •
Ensuing police reports and investigations only served to sow doubt and confusion, keeping the Hank legend appropriately, and eternally, necromantic, aptly bathed in a dark, cold, pitch-black midnight.
Charles Carr, who should have known all there was to know, didn’t make the enigma any clearer. From what is known, Carr headed through Rutledge Pike toward the West Virginia border, but just before the new year rang in, exhausted, he nearly collided head-on with a highway patrol car while trying to pass a truck in Blaine, notably the hometown of Roy Acuff and Carl Smith. A rookie cop, Swann H. Kitts, was riding with a veteran sheriff, J. N. Antrican, in the car, and after pulling the Caddy over, Kitts later testified, he saw a lifeless-looking man, his collar and hat covering his face, slumped across the back seat, seemingly asleep, and asked Carr if something was wrong with the passenger.
“No,” he said, acting very nervous, “he’s been drinking six beers and the doctor gave him a sedative to make him sleep.”
“That guy looks dead,” noted Kitts, who later ventured that he thought the “pale and blue looking” man was dead but, inexplicably, did not check his pulse or try to rouse him.
Neither did Carr say who it was, possibly guilty he had not followed Marshall’s orders to keep Hank dry. Even more oddly, the sheriff never got out to add his expertise. Adding to the mystery, Kitts would also recall seeing in the passenger seat a “serviceman” in uniform. Carr disputed this later, as well as the testimony of the manager at the Andrew Johnson, who said that he had arranged for Carr to ride with a relief driver in case he grew too tired, and that the driver wore a chauffeur’s uniform and cap.7 Rather than giving him a ticket, Kitts had Carr follow the police car to a magistrate in Rutledge, who fined Carr twenty-five dollars. He paid out of his pocket—even as, incredibly, a man that a police officer believed was dead was simply left in the back seat outside, still unchecked.
By now, it was 1 a.m., the new year having come during this bizarre interlude, which was nowhere near over. In no mood to celebrate, Carr hit Highway 19, crossed into West Virginia, and stopped at a gas station in Bluefield to fill up. It was around 4:30 now. He asked the attendant if he knew where a relief driver could be found and was directed to a diner, the Doughboy Lunch Restaurant. Here, Carr claimed later, Hank got out and stretched his legs. “I asked him if he wanted a sandwich or something,” Carr recalled. “And he said, ‘No, I just want to get some sleep.’ I don’t know if that’s the last thing he said. But it’s the last thing I remember him telling me.”8
Carr said Hank did not go in the diner, though waitress Hazel Wells said Hank did come in, said who he was, and also inquired about a relief driver. Carr found a thirty-seven-year-old local cabbie, Don Howard Surface, who was in a booth having breakfast and agreed to take over the driving through the dangerous mountain roads of the Appalachians, in exchange for an unknown sum and bus fare back to Bluefield. Carr would also say that before they left the town, Hank awoke and—contradicting his assertion that Hank had already spoken his last words to him—wanted to find a doctor to give him another shot of morphine, but at that hour it was impossible, and they pushed off again.
Surface was still there when the Caddy stopped for coffee and sandwiches somewhere in Princeton, West Virginia at around 6 a.m. It was still dark and freezing, and Hank was out cold. Carr said Surface left to go back home here, but it was later determined Surface was still at the wheel when they stopped in Oak Hill, in Fayette County, a half hour later to fill up again and get some grub at the Skyline Diner. Only now did Charles Carr think it necessary to pay much attention to the man in the back seat, and only because the blanket Hank had wrapped around himself had fallen off. He was lying still on the seat in a kind of coffin pose, on his back, arms folded across his chest, eyes closed.
As Carr reached back to pull the blanket over him, he touched one of Hank’s hands. It felt cold as a stone and stiff. As Carr would put it, “I felt a little unnatural resistance from his arm.” Panicking, Carr rushed into the restaurant—it’s unknown whether Surface, if he was still there, came inside with him—and came back out with an older man who took a look at Hank and summed up the situation with classic understatement.
“I think you got a problem,” he said.9
Police reports would indicate that Carr and Surface, if he was there, knowing they had a famous corpse in the back and needing to get it to a hospital, asked for directions to one at Burdette’s Pure Oil gas station. Carr asked the owner, Peter Burdette, to call the local police station and tell them a dead man had been driven into his place. Within minutes, a police car arrived, and Officer Orris Stamey confirmed Hank was dead. His body was still somewhat warm, but his extremities were numbed by rigor mortis. Stamey then had Carr and Surface follow him to Oak Hill Hospital. Once there, Carr raced into the emergency room. “I ran in and explained my situation to the two interns,” he recalled. “They came out and looked at Hank and said, ‘He’s dead.’ I asked ’em, ‘Can’t you do something to revive him?’ One of them looked at me and said, ‘No, he’s just dead.’”10
The orderlies pulled Hank’s body from the car, lifted him by his armpits, and toted him inside. He was laid out on a stretcher, and another intern, Diego Nunnari, listed the time of death at 7 a.m., though Nunnari estimated that Hank had died between two and four hours before that. Carr, walking around in a daze, couldn’t face calling Lillie. Instead, he called his father, who told him he had to call Lillie.
No doubt gulping hard, Carr did, and was floored when her reaction was nothing like a mother’s anguish over losing a son; rather, she was all business. “Don’t let anything happen to the car” were her first words when Carr had finished telling what happened, apparently thinking that if the car was impounded by the authorities, it might never be returned, and possibly could offer incriminating evidence of what Hank was doing to himself, something Lillie wanted never to become public knowledge. Lillie also sent a telegram at 10:33 a.m. to Irene in Virginia, which read perfunctorily, “Come at once. Hank is dead. Mother.”11 As it happened, eerily, Irene had had another premonition during the night that her brother was dead, and had even packed a suitcase so she could go to Montgomery for his funeral.12
Toby Marshall, after Lillie called him in Charleston, was ashen but probably not completely shocked. He hopped a bus and arrived in Oak Hill early the next day. By then, Hank’s body had been removed to the Tyree Funeral Home. Lillie was already in town, having arrived with Carr’s father, flying to Roanoke because the Charleston airport was still closed, then taking a cab. Lillie didn’t go right to the funeral parlor; instead, she went to the police station to find out what they knew of Hank’s death and the belongings in the car. She was armed with legal papers saying she was his next of kin, and others showing that Billie Jean’s belated divorce from Harrison Eshlimar invalidated her marriage to Hank, and she therefore was not Hank’s next of kin, with no right to his remains and belongings.
“Mrs. Stone made all the arrangements,” Joe Tyree, who ran the funeral parlor, said. “She chose a Batesville casket with silver finish and white interior. She went out to his car and chose one of his white cowboy outfits to bury him in.”
Tyree recalled that she was a “nice, stately-looking woman, very pleasant and composed. She held her grief.”13
• • •
Lillie did not bother to call Billie Jean, who had only been home a few hours, at her parents’ house in Shreveport that New Year’s Eve. She was awakened by the phone at around 8 a.m. As Billie Jean would recall, “The operator asked for Sergeant Jones. I said, “‘Daddy, the call is from West Virginia, so Hank must be in trouble.’ Usually he would call my dad, if he was stopped for speeding or something. I went and laid back down and I heard him talking to Hank, but it was the chauffeur. . . . My daddy said, ‘Oh Lord.’ . . . He held me and said Hank was dead, and I was screaming and crying. I said, ‘Don’t let them touch him. He often pretends he’s asleep.’ I thought they were going to bury him alive.”14 She and her father made arrangements to travel to Oak Hill early the next morning, with Billie Jean assuming she would claim Hank’s s body and bring it back to Montgomery on January 2.
Audrey Williams, who her daughter, Lycrecia, said “was expecting Daddy home soon,”15 was still sleeping after her New Year’s Eve partying with Maxine Bamford when she was awakened in Nashville around the same time by a phone call from a friend who’d gotten the news about Hank. Her housekeeper, Audrey Ragland, would recall, “Mrs. Williams told me he was dead. I could not believe it, but she said, ‘Yes, Hank is dead.’ Then she went all to pieces.”16
Not far away, Fred Rose was awakened by a call from another industry man who’d gotten early word of the tragedy, though Wesley Rose’s story in future years that his father called him “at 3 or 4 a.m.” to break it to him was clearly wrong. “Sit down,” he said his father told him, “or this might knock you down. Hank died tonight. Now don’t fall all to pieces.”17 Nashville seemed to be paralyzed as more and more people heard the news, and at the Opry, they began putting together a tribute to the reprobate who had been fired to air in place of the regular show the next Saturday.
Frank Walker also got the news from Fred. Not knowing what to do, he sat down and wrote an open letter to “Hank Williams, c/o Songwriter; Paradise,” which read: “I don’t know much about the circumstances and it really doesn’t matter, does it? What does matter though is that the World is ever so much better for the fact that you have lived with us, even for such a short time.”18 Walker would run the letter on the back of the memorial album of Hank songs MGM would soon rush out.
When Bam Bamford arrived at the theater in Canton later that morning, he called home, and Maxine, crying hysterically, broke the news to him. Cut to his knees, Bamford, who had already given back refunds on the two shows in Charleston, had to straighten up and save these two. People began to gather at the Memorial Auditorium for the 3 p.m. performance, not yet aware that Hank was dead. Don Helms, who had gotten into Canton at 5 a.m. with Autry Inman, went to the auditorium, where, he would recall, Bam met him at the dressing room door.
“Brace yourself,” he said. “Hank died on the way here.”
Backstage, Helms broke it to Jerry Rivers; the latter would say it was “shocking but not unbelievable. . . . It came almost inevitably as the closing chapter.”
Bamford chose not to inform the audience, lest they want their money back right away. After the curtain was raised, the emcee, local disk jockey Cliff Rodgers, grimly walked to center stage and, rather than trying to rouse the crowd, said quietly, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been in show business almost twenty years, and I’ve been called upon to do many difficult things in front of an audience, but today I’m about to perform the most difficult task I have ever done. This morning on the way to Canton to do this show, Hank Williams died in his car.” There was a murmur, then some nervous laughter by people assuming it was a rib about Hank’s habit of missing shows. Rodgers went on, “Ladies and gentlemen, this in no joke. Hank Williams is dead.”19
Then the lights dimmed, a single spotlight was shined on the curtains, and Hawkshaw Hawkins—who would also die prematurely, in the 1963 plane crash that killed Patsy Cline and Cowboy Copas—began to mournfully croon “I Saw the Light.” When it was clear it was no joke, the entire house began to join in, many in tears. The show went on, the Canton Repository writing the next day, “That was the way he would have wanted it.”
• • •
In Oak Hill, Hank’s body reposed at the Tyree Funeral Home, but had not yet been embalmed. An autopsy remained to be done, but because there was a recent welt on Hank’s forehead, an inquest was ordered by the Fayette County prosecutor, Howard Carson, who quickly assembled a panel of six local citizens to serve as the coroner’s jury. Officers Janney and Stamey were called into the second-floor room where Hank’s naked corpse lay on a table under a sheet, to be asked questions about what had happened; oddly, Swann Kitts was not summoned. Charles Carr and Don Surface were also called. Two state troopers stood guard as a pathologist from Beckley Hospital, Ivan Malinin, and county coroner J. B. Thompson went about the autopsy. One of the citizens on the panel would remember, “Howard Janney took us upstairs to where the body was lying under a sheet. We spent about 15 minutes looking at it, and couldn’t see anything wrong at all, just that he was unhealthy-looking. He was very, very skinny. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but there was sort of a comic feel about being there, because we didn’t really know what we were doing.”20
For Charles Carr, it was anything but comical. Carr had reason to be nervous, and not just because of the bruise on Hank’s head, which was actually quite common for Hank given the scrapes he got into. Carr’s account of Hank stretching his legs in Bluefield may have been meant to blunt his inability to check on his passenger for so many hours and the snail’s pace of the journey, which never would have gotten Hank to Canton in time and would put the heat on Carr.
It was a particularly gruesome six hours in that airless room, and as blood and organ samples were taken from the body and readied to be sent to Charleston for analysis, several people nearly passed out. The body itself was enough to sicken an observer; looking at it unclothed, one could see why he was so ill. A ghastly sight, Hank’s bones and ribs poked through his pale, scaly skin. His arms were covered with needlemarks, and the clumping of scar tissue and scabbing was so thick that Malinin had a hard time finding a vein he could puncture with a needle to draw blood.
Over the next eight days, the cause of Hank’s death remained undetermined as labs analyzed the blood and organ samples. But it was assumed that he didn’t just up and die, that he had been slowly killing himself for months, years. Billie Jean, to whom he had predicted Jesus was about to come for him on the road, would provide the coda of his life and death years later when she mused, “They always said he died too young, but he was much older than his years. And he was in too much pain to live.”21
• • •
Around the country, word of mouth had almost immediately begun to spread. For many in the country niche, it felt like a deep personal loss. George Jones, who was a young serviceman at the time, recalled that Hank “had been my biggest musical influence. By that thinking you could say he was the biggest part of my life at that time. That’s how personally I took him and his songs. . . . I lay there and bawled.”22
At around 1 p.m., the Associated Press learned of Hank’s death and sent the news out on its ticker, and word broke on the radio. Among those on the air at the time was Nelson King on WCKY in Indianapolis. He, of course, had been given a writing credit by Hank on “There’ll Be No Teardrops Tonight” and may have been Hank’s closest ally on the radio. King stoically delivered a five-minute soliloquy as he read the bulletin about Hank. He then played Hank’s “I’m Bound for That Promised Land.”
By the next morning, newspapers across the country had picked up the AP story. After having ignored him, save for a few scattered mentions when he was on TV or the radio, the New York Times gave him a grudging two-paragraph item with a headline about the late “King of the Hillbillies” on page 4. However, in Nashville, emblazoned across page 1 of the Tennessean was the headline HANK WILLIAMS DIES IN AUTO. A separate death notice began: “It is a tragic fact that Mr. Hank Williams was never able to bring to his own life the satisfaction that he gave to so many others. . . . For all [his successes], he was never at peace with himself.” H. B. Teeter could now write about Hank’s “premonition of death” the year before. In Montgomery, meanwhile, the loss was like family; the Advertiser front page blared HANK DEAD AT AGE 29. Everyone knew who that was.
In Knoxville, the first rippling of doubt about where and when it happened appeared that same day in a Journal article headlined MYSTERY SHROUDS DEATH OF SINGER HANK WILLIAMS, citing Swann Kitts’s statement that Hank had “looked dead” when he saw him. The “mystery” would soon become a subtheme. In Nashville, sad as they were over at the Grand Ole Opry, it was an awkward situation. The Opry hadn’t seen him since August 11 when he came in to cash that $300 check. But now they embraced him, even if they had to embellish a wee bit—Jim Denny falsely insisting that Hank would have appeared on the Opry show in Canton on New Year’s Day (years later Denny would have the Opry poster for that show doctored so that Hank’s name was on it).
• • •
When Billie Jean arrived by plane in Oak Hill on Friday morning with her father and brother, she burst into Tyree’s Funeral Parlor and screamed, “Where is my baby, if I can only kiss him, I can breathe life back into him!” She had to be led out of the room to regain some composure. When she did, Billie Jean’s thoughts, like Lillie’s, were on the car. As she would later say, “[Lillie] had hid the car from me, taken all his possessions from his body, his billfold, his rings, everything personal, all the money that he had.”23
Worse, Lillie had all but abrogated Billie’s rights as Hank’s widow. Her request to be allowed to take the body back to Montgomery was summarily rejected by the authorities, who gave all rights to Lillie. These were the first steps in what would be a decades-long campaign by the Williams family, in conjunction with Audrey, to render Billie Jean irrelevant, even invisible, a rank outsider. In the face of this blatant favoritism, Joe Tyree would swear later that he acted evenhandedly, because “neither the mother nor the wife ever saw the body while it was here.”24 But that seems far-fetched, since Lillie had made sure that when Hank was embalmed and put in a casket for the ride home, he was dressed in his dazzling white cowboy suit.
Also in Oak Hill that morning was Toby Marshall, who like Lillie seemed to be thinking of covering up things. Neither was he overly broken up. When he arrived in Montgomery for the funeral, he had a bill prepared for Lille, totaling $736.39 for his travel expenses and his fee for prescribing some of the last shots that helped stop Hank Williams’s heart.25 Lillie ignored it. With Hank gone, she had no use for Marshall. He then tried to stick Billie Jean with the same bill.
In truth, Lillie really didn’t hide the car from Billie Jean, and she couldn’t do much about keeping it from the prying eyes and hands of strangers. When police searched it, they found Hank’s gun and felt hat on the floor along with several unopened beer cans and notebook pages, one with freshly written lyrics for a song that clearly came from the most tortured crevice in his broken soul, where he was still obsessed with the failure of his union with Audrey. The only lines he had gotten through read:
We met we lived and dear we loved, then came that fatal daylight
The love that fades far away
Tonight we both are all alone and here’s all I can say
I love you still and always will, but that’s the price we have to pay
These artifacts were of no value to investigators, and most were quickly given to Lillie. The Caddy was then stored overnight back at Burdette’s gas station, during which time people gawked at it. At that point the gun and cowboy hat were still inside it, and although the car was supposed to be kept locked, they were apparently stolen. Decades later, Howard Janney told a reporter that Peter Burdette “had the hat and was wearing it around. I went up to get it, and he said that Hank’s mother gave it to him.”
According to local lore, the hat became a curse for Burdette; after he started wearing it, the yarn goes, his hair began to fall out, and then, spooked by the curse, he committed suicide behind his station.26
As for Charles Carr, he had been given a room in Tyree’s apartment above the funeral parlor the one night he was kept in Oak Hill. He was permitted to go back home the next afternoon, eight days before he would be officially cleared of any charges. Carr, his father, Lillie, and Toby Marshall crowded into Hank’s Caddy for the trip to Montgomery. Lillie had decided there was no room for Billie Jean and her father, who had to get to Montgomery by plane. Grudgingly, Lillie let her stay at the boardinghouse until the funeral, which would be on the following Sunday.
The drive must have been surreal indeed. The car followed a hearse with Hank’s body, driven by Joe Tyree and his assistant Alex Childress. Tyree once recalled that “all the way down, we kept hearing [Hank’s] songs on the radio. It wasn’t until then I realized how famous he was. We’d pull into filling stations and the attendants would wipe the dirt off the license plate and see the West Virginia tags. They would figure it out and comeask me if we were carrying Hank back.”
In Montgomery, they took the body to White’s Chapel Funeral Home, and at about seven in the morning, Daniel Carr dropped Lillie and Marshall at the boardinghouse, where Billie Jean had arrived the night before, then drove his son home in his car. Carr would not be forgotten. He would come to the funeral, and comfort a weeping Irene Smith.
• • •
When Lillie, the Carrs, and Toby Marshall returned to the boardinghouse, Billie Jean was still seething over being treated so shabbily in Oak Hill. According to what Irene Smith posited many years later, her mother had gone to her room to lie down when Billie Jean went to use the phone on the wall in the hallway just outside the door. “Get up here,” Lillie overheard her say, perhaps to her brother back in Shreveport. “This old gray-haired bitch is trying to steal all of Hank’s stuff from me.” Later in the day, Irene said, “[Lillie told me that] if I did not get [Billie] out of the house, she would kill her.”27 Irene said she acted as a peacemaker between the two, if only temporarily.
Billie Jean—who would insist, dubiously, that she had actually brought Hank’s body back from Oak Hill, in an ambulance with her brother—had her own take on these moments.28 At one point, she and Lillie, she said, “were fightin’ in the bathroom and elsewhere. She was so big—[a] good six-foot and no less than 250 pounds—and I had to get up on the commode to slap her. . . . All the fighting was taking place because during mine and Hank’s marriage she hassled him for money and, hell, she had more than he did because Audrey got it all when they divorced. I put my foot down: no more money.” Still, all the decisions pertaining to the funeral came down to Lillie. When Billie Jean wanted to buy a new suit for Hank to wear in his casket, only to be overruled by Lillie, an exasperated Billie Jean gave up. “This is your mother’s show,” she wearily told Irene, “let her run it.”
• • •
Almost immediately, Lillie began taking charge of the gravesite she wanted for Hank. Oakwood Cemetery, which wanted very much to be his final resting place, gave her wide latitude, allowing her to bury Hank temporarily in one plot while an elaborate mausoleum was built on another. The cemetery’s owner, John Hart, anticipating that it would be a tourist attraction, began the process of clearing as much land as he could for the plot. There were two parts to the cemetery, the original, now quite crowded section and a newer, less congested annex. Hank’s plot would go into the latter, but only after Hart could arrange with the families of many buried there—including British and Free French soldiers killed while training in Alabama during World War II—to return their loved ones’ remains to them. Digging them up would be a horrific task, as many had been buried with no coffins, and those whose relatives couldn’t be found would be reburied in a mass grave, all to serve the interest of an alcoholic, philandering country singer.
Lillie began to be inundated by calls from stonemasons around the country—and she knew many, from the years she spent in the Masonic Temple—filling her head with grand and grander design ideas. Willie Gayle, who designed monuments for the Henley Memorial Company in Montgomery, won the job for what he called “a good five figures,”29 designing a family plot cut from Vermont granite on a two-step pedestal. Among a number of carvings in the stone would be lyrics from “Kaw-Liga,” “Hey, Good Lookin’,” and “Jambalaya,” and notes from “I Saw the Light.” There would be a bronze plaque of Hank and his guitar being bathed in pastoral rays from the sun. At the base of the monument would go a marble cowboy hat replicating Hank’s favorite in minute detail, under which would be carved the names of some of the religious-themed Luke the Drifter songs. And, pointedly, a poem would be embedded in the headstone, written by Audrey Williams. Titled “Thank You, Darling,” it thanked him for “all the love you gave me,” for “the many beautiful songs,” for “being such a wonderful father to Lycrecia,” and “for our wonderful son.” Its last lines were:
And now all I can say:
There are no words in the dictionary
That can express my love for you
Someday beyond the blue
As much as it was a poem, it was also a warning that Audrey’s preferred status as “Mrs. Hank Williams” was itself being carved in stone. Indeed, with Lillie’s benefaction, she already had a reservation to be buried in the family plot as well, right next to Hank and Lillie.
When Hank was interred in the permanent plot, he would go in a vault that Lillie had secured through Leaborne L. Eads, who handled such things for the Henley company. She demanded only the best vault and purchased a Wilbert Continental model, lined with solid steel, asphalt, and copper. Eads made the sale with an observation that appealed to Lillie’s desire to keep Hank’s remains pristine, forever. “That’s what preserved King Tut,” he said.30
• • •
Hank, meanwhile, seemed almost an afterthought lying carefree in a casket over at White’s funeral home, peacefully insulated from the mayhem brewing at the boardinghouse. By day’s end, Billie Jean’s mother and brothers had arrived, and the place had become not the site of a sad vigil but a snake pit of bad blood and intentions, the Hatfields and McCoys under the same roof. It became so intolerable that the Joneses decided to spend the night before the funeral in a hotel room, with one bed, the younger ones sleeping on the floor. During those two miserable days, the Cadillac was hidden from Billie Jean by Lillie and Audrey, along with any other possessions Billie Jean would have a claim on. While Audrey, who had arrived with Bam and Maxine Bamford and stayed with Lillie in her room, planned the funeral, not once did she or Lillie consult with Billie.
Many of the funeral expenses were shouldered by the city of Montgomery, which volunteered the use of Municipal Auditorium, and by local florists eager to contribute arrangements in tribute to the city’s best-known celebrity, some extraordinarily ornate, two fashioned as giant guitars. The entire police and fire department would be on call to clear the way for Hank’s casket to be transported to the arena. Bam Bamford was called on to use his promotional skills to create a funeral for a king, much like Oscar Davis planning Hank’s royal weddings in New Orleans—only Bamford had to put up with what he would say was “terrific friction between Audrey, Billie Jean, and Hank’s mother.”31 All of them acted like scavengers combing through whatever possessions of Hank’s they could find. “There was a briefcase that they were all looking for,” he said, “and they found it in Billie Jean’s room, and they got it while she was in the toilet and gave it to me and I put it in the trunk of my car. The following day I gave it to Fred Rose.”
Audrey, who had come with Lycrecia but not Randall, whom she left home with Audrey Ragland, put on an emotional show of mutual grief with Lillie, on some level meant as a message for Billie Jean, to whom neither woman spoke a word. Lillie had to respect the fact that, because of Audrey’s divorce settlement, she couldn’t do anything about the half-split Audrey owned of all Hank’s future royalties or her ownership of his Nashville house. But Lillie did have hegemony over Hank’s personal estate, and she meant to control every dime of it for as long as she lived. Still, in order to make herself executrix of the estate she needed to take care of a few more details, cutting out not only Billie Jean but the husband that had been left behind long ago and was dead to her.
As it happened, she could achieve the latter that weekend, when a heartbroken Lon Williams made his way up to Montgomery for the funeral by bus, five dollars in his pocket. As Brack Schuffert recalled, he was at the front door when a bedraggled man in the crowd outside the house inched his way toward the house late on Saturday night and said meekly, “I’m Hank Williams’s daddy.” Lon told him he needed to buy some flowers for his son, and Brack took him to a local florist, who asked Lon what size bouquet he wanted. “I’m a poor man,” the aging, nearly forgotten patriarch said. “All I can afford is five dollars.”32 The florist took pity on him, giving him a large bouquet, gratis. Lillie, though, took no pity on him. When he and Schuffert returned to the house, she refused to allow Lon free boarding for the night. Brack would put him up instead. And Lillie pounced, denying Lon his rights as the paternal survivor.
Because Hank had not left a will, Lon was by law the executor of Hank’s estate; Hank’s own lawyer Robert Stewart had so advised him. However, Lillie also advised him of something—she would drag him through the courts, spending anything necessary, to challenge his standing, telling everyone she could that he had abandoned the family and seen his son only a handful of times. Lon, who had once beaten her in court just to be able to get out of the VA Hospital, had no stomach to go through it again. He told Lillie that the happiest day of his life would be when he died and was rid of her, and within a week he signed away his paternal rights, asking nothing in return.
Lillie did allow him a seat at the funeral, though not with the family in the first several rows but lost in the general seating section dozens of rows behind. Nor did he appear in any of the family photos that day.
However, not all family business had been settled yet. Shutting out Billie Jean wasn’t good enough; she had to be bought out to avoid future static. As it was, Billie Jean was being shamed by everyone in the Williams family. Toby Marshall, who thought he was still doing Lillie’s bidding, he lit into Billie when he heard her throwing around her “old bitch” complaints about Lillie.
Billie, having come to Montgomery without any black clothing, was wearing red slacks. Marshall, whose expertise apparently included sartorial advice, got in her face to say that she was dressed inappropriately and her behavior was unacceptable.33 It must have taken superhuman will for Billie Jean to let that slide without letting the bogus doctor know what she thought of him.
And, of course, there was another sticky wicket: the future heir sitting in Bobbie Jett’s womb. Indeed, Lord knows what Bobbie must have been thinking during all this clamor on North McDonough, doing her grieving alone and knowing that she would be giving birth any minute now to a child with no father. Lillie had reminded her that the agreement she and Hank had signed was still in force, that Lillie would still be the child’s legal guardian, and Bobbie was still bound by the terms to leave for California. Just in case Bobbie did go into labor when everyone else was at the funeral, Lillie’s doctor would be stationed with her in her room and take her to the hospital.
Because so many people began gathering outside both White’s and the boardinghouse, Lillie decided to have Hank’s silver-and-gold-trimmed coffin carted to 318 North McDonough Street and placed in the anteroom, a quite unnerving sight, especially to Billie Jean, who was allowed only twenty minutes by Lillie to say goodbye to Hank in private. During this interim Brack Schuffert was enlisted as a kind of gatekeeper, allowing a few people at a time to come in and file past the casket, which he would open briefly, offering a glimpse of Hank’s embalmed face beneath a protective thin mesh screen. Many of them cried, some as they draped themselves over the casket.
• • • *
Bamford had quickly accepted the city’s offer of the use of Municipal Auditorium for the funeral, and invites went out to industry people that almost alone would fill all of its 2,700 seats. Nashville would be well represented, as would the big boys from New York. Oscar Davis and Horace Logan would be there, but for the most part the Shreveport crowd was deemed too small-time. The stage was prepared for a combination funeral and tent show. The voices of Nashville would be there—Ernest Tubb, Roy Acuff, Red Foley, Ray Price, Bill Monroe, the Carter Sisters, Carl Davis, Kitty Wells, Johnnie Wright, Jack Anglin, Little Jimmie Dickens, Webb Pierce—as would Jim Denny, the man who had fired Hank, Oscar Davis, Horace Logan, and Frank Walker.
Bamford, who also arranged for two Montgomery radio stations to carry the event live, carried out these chores, torn up that he had to jazz up the denouement of a man of simple tastes, but it was Lillie and Audrey’s call to make the funeral and burial the largest event in Montgomery since the inauguration of Jefferson Davis. At Oakwood Cemetery, the temporary plot had been set aside for Hank to tarry in while Willie Gayle’s stonecutters and landscapers erected the permanent plot and monuments in the annex.
On Sunday morning, January 4, 1953, the crowd outside the boardinghouse was so large that some of the pallbearers couldn’t get there. Jerry Rivers had driven from Nashville with several Opry musicians, who like the big stars had performed the night before at the Ryman in tribute to Hank and were all bleary-eyed. Rivers became a “temporary pallbearer” in taking the coffin to the hearse for the slow ride to the arena. There, the casket was carried through the crowds already massing on the street outside the auditorium, which were estimated at 25,000. It was then set up just under the stage, and again the coffin was opened so the multitudes waiting outside in the bitter cold could file past Hank in his repose, clad in the white Nudie suit. This went on for several hours, during which at least four women fainted when they saw him.
These were folks that Hank would have appreciated. What’s more, a distinct number of black fans were in the crowd. Several hundred were able to enter for the service, funneled upstairs into the “colored” section of the mezzanine. Lillie, to her credit, made room during the service for a black gospel quartet, the Southwind Singers, as the chorale during the musical segments.
As limousines pulled up outside and celebrity and important-looking folks alighted, flashbulbs took to popping and newsreel cameras whirring. The teeming crowd heaved in great waves, scaring the police. Then, at 2:30 p.m., the procession to the casket was ended and the doors closed to all but the capacity seating of 2,750 people. The service began, to the harmony of a church organ and women, and more than a few men, sobbing, including Little Jimmie Dickens, who stood backstage openly bawling.
Ernest Tubb opened the program singing “Beyond the Sunset.” Roy Acuff, after a brief elegy, began a group sing-along of “I Saw the Light,” joined by Foley, Smith, and Pierce. Red then took center stage and sang “Peace in the Valley.” He and Hank had made a mutual compact a few years before that whoever died first, the other would sing the song at his funeral, and Foley finished the song in tears. The musicians—Helms, Rivers, Hillous Butrum, Sammy Pruett, and Hayride guitarists Felton Pruett and Dobber Johnson—played sad dirges and bouncy foot-stompin’ tunes. Looking back, Helms would say “the eeriest thing I ever had to do in my life” was to “stand up there and play with Hank’s coffin right below me” just under the lip of the stage.34
Because Lillie and her husband, Bill Stone, rarely touched or even spoke to each other, Tubb lent his shoulder for her to cry on, sitting on her other side during the service. Even now, though, the feuding was not put aside. When Billie Jean and her family got to the auditorium, no seats near the stage had been saved for them. They found some well back, until someone who knew her moved them up to where Lillie, Irene, and Audrey were—though photos taken during the service show Billie in the second row, behind them.
Billie’s agony continued when she mistook one mourner, a young Indian girl, for someone else and the girl, recognizing Billie, told her, “I’m not anyone you ever heard of. I’m just a person who loved Hank with all my heart, not a tramp like you that married him for his money,” touching off a brief scuffle.35 Billie also had to put up with Tubb, who in his role as Lillie’s paraclete, Billie said, “looked at me like he didn’t even know me.”
• • •
The service was given by Rev. Henry L. Lyon, pastor of the Highland Avenue Baptist Church, and Rev. Talmadge Smith of the Ramer Baptist Church. Lyon, with a quiet, polished theatricality, spun tales of Hank interwoven with biblical homilies and patriotic fervor. Hank, he said, “has just answered the call of the last round-up,” going on to eulogize him as “the man who climbed from the shoeshine stand to the heights of immortal glory. . . . When he played on his guitar, he played on the heartstrings of millions of Americans. They listened to Hank over the radio in their homes, in the bus station, in the office. They listened everywhere—white and colored, rich and poor, the illiterate and the educated, the young and the old. . . . Hank Williams did have something that humanity universally needs—a song with a heartfelt message.”
The service done, the pallbearers—among them Denny, Bamford, Jack Anglin, Johnnie Wright, and Brack Schuffert—carried the coffin back to the hearse, which had one more slow ride through Montgomery. More big crowds had waited patiently at the Oakwood Cemetery in the hills overlooking the city, many having brought their young children with them, who could someday tell their own children and grandchildren that they had been there when God called home his ramblin’ man. The family and invited guests arrived at around three, Lillie still clutching Ernie Tubb, a pale Billie Jean kept from collapsing by her brother Sonny. Seeing the grounds, she hated the place, and the whole “Hank-a-palooza” nature of the day, which one country chronicle later called an “emotional orgy.”36 She would say:
It reminded me of the rebirth of the Hadacol Show. Everybody wanted to “sang.” And they did. For us who was hurtin’, it just left us lingering on for hours, having to sit silently looking at Hank. Cold. Still. Dreading the inevitable—puttin’ him in the ground, throwing dirt on him. Dreadin’ the coffin lid to shut because you knew you’d never see his face again. . . . If I hadn’t been broke, country, a child, ignorant, I would’ve brought him home to the bayou . . . but as it was, my daddy took me back home from Alabama on the Greyhound Bus. . . . Hank was gone—the buzzards had started to pick at his leavin’s. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of there. We did—back to my dad’s shotgun house in Louisiana. Sure was dull without Hank buggin’ mamma to cook him some biscuits and sorghum syrup.37
That claim may have been to some sorghum syrup itself. Billie Jean’s lawyer Robert Stewart later said that before she went home, she warned him that “if I didn’t have them seven Cadillacs ready for her to take back to Shreveport, her brothers would personally stomp my God-damn teeth down my throat.” She might have gone home, but she seemed as determined to stand her ground as was Lillie, and collect as many “leavin’s” as she could.
When the mourners had dispersed, one other family figure went home. That was the sad, mostly unrecognized figure of Elonzo Williams. Rather than the boardinghouse, he headed for the bus depot for the next Greyhound to McWilliams, alone, penniless, grieving. He kept his thoughts private, still probably wanting to kick himself for not being at home when Hank had dropped by a few weeks before. Then he went home, where all he had left of his son was the note Hank had left for him that day with a lighter and a box of chocolates, all of which he would zealously preserve in protective cases until the day he died.
• • •
The medical examiner’s autopsy report and the coroner’s inquest report were released on January 10. The former—which apparently later vanished without explanation from the Fayette County medical records—was surprising in its omissions but not its conclusion, which was that cause of death was “Acute rt. ventricular dilation,” one of a dozen ways of saying heart failure.
In layman’s terms, it meant a longtime enlargement of the ventricular walls of Hank’s heart, making it work too hard.38 In full, Hank technically had “edema of the brain, congestive hyperemia of all the parenchymatous organs and paralysis of the respiratory center with asphyxia.” As well, his seated position on the long ride had raised the level of his diaphragm, another dangerous trigger.39 It seemed that Hank had not suffered any pain when he died, as other hemorrhages on his tongue suggested an “unconscious death,” meaning he had slipped away while he slumbered.
Although coroners didn’t test for drugs in most autopsies then, it was assumed that Hank would be so tested. Carr had told police of the sedatives and shots, and the pocket of Hank’s overcoat was empty, making it clear that he had taken all of the chloral hydrate tablets. However, out of incompetence, or deference, or maybe fear of Lillie’s wrath, no testing was done. While alcohol was listed as being in his blood, it was not said to be an immediate contributor to his death, a cop-out if ever there was one. Lab reanalysis of the autopsy samples in future years would establish definitively that he had alcoholic cardiomyopathy, a fatal toxicity of the blood.40 The shorthand explanation would be that Hank Williams drank himself to death—a technically incorrect premise, given that his liver was found to be healthy—and when his drug abuse became common knowledge a decade later, that too became part of the equation. Toby Marshall emerged as the chief foil, but dozens of real doctors went along for the ride, for a buck or to succor a famous man they knew could not survive long. All of them had blood on their hands, even if they could brag at dinner parties that they had tended to Hank Williams.
The inquest panel signed a statement in its report to Magistrate Virgil Lyons that read: “We the jury find . . . that Hank Williams died of a severe heart condition and hemorrhage. No evidence was found of foul play.”41 The welt on his head was brushed off, as was the coroner’s finding that Hank also had “small subcutaneous hemorrhages” on his back and groin, it being impossible to pinpoint how and when they occurred. The overriding theme of these reports was that nothing was out of the ordinary in the death of a very sick, twenty-nine-year-old “radio singer,” as the death certificate would read when it was finally issued on March 15.
Now came a new round of news stories, with hundreds of papers putting a period on the story with headlines such as that in the June 11 Milwaukee Sentinel—FIND ATTACK KILLED HANK WILLIAMS, not that speculation and skepticism wouldn’t go on, as they still do and likely always will. Still, this was not really major news in America at the time. Billboard, which had charted his unlikely rise, relegated his demise to its January 10 issue, on page 13, headlined HANK WILLIAMS, FOLK TUNE STAR, DIES SUDDENLY, and maintained the old nomenclature by calling him “one of the nation’s best known and loved hillbilly artists and songwriters.”
In Nashville, where disdain for the working-class audiences at the Opry and its “hillbilly” stars had kept mentions of him to a minimum, the extraordinary outpouring of grief was sudden cause for deification. Editorials were written about him as a man with “the unusual gift of seeing, and feeling, life’s repertoire of deepest sentiment,” whose “brief life was nothing short of fabulous,” and who despite being “the most lonesome, saddest, and frustrated of individuals . . . never forgot his fans . . . many of whom are found here in Middle Tennessee [where] his death is counted a distinct loss.”42
Of course, in Alabama they claimed territorial dibs on him—MONTGOMERY’S FAMOUS FOLK SINGER, the Alabama Journal codified him—but the loss was felt far outside the South. Way out in Spokane, an editorial titled A GREAT SINGER PASSES concluded: “Hank Williams’ tunes went straight to the heart of his hearers, and . . . let it be said that he who writes the songs of a people is greater than he who taketh a city.”43 A paper in Hartford, Connecticut, noting he sang “hillbilly music,” went on to offer him his due props, before concluding with faint praise, “It would be fine if American tastes became more widely cultivated to something better. But the opposite seems true. Slowly but surely the cult of hillbilly spreads over the land [and] the hillbilly singer is a new category of national hero.”44
In Montgomery, people wrote letters to the newspapers every day for months with heartfelt testaments about what he had meant to them. And no doubt the industry barons were moved, too, by a surge in his sales, a common dynamic in showbiz when a star dies, but not to this extent. When he died, “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)” was still No. 5 on the Billboard country chart. One week later, it vaulted to number 1 on the newly renamed “C&W” chart, and the prophetic “Settin’ the Woods on Fire” would soon grab the No. 2 position, while “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” had just hit the chart at No. 3.“I Could Never Be Ashamed of You” was the top country entry on the “Coming Up in the Trade” list, and his face was alive as ever in a big MGM ad for its new releases. On the front page of the trade paper, an article titled FANS CLAMOR FOR DISKS OF LATE SINGER reported the “immediate and tremendous upsurge for all of the hillbilly writer-singer’s past records,” noting this was “reminiscent of what happened to [Al] Jolson’s records after his death.” He had not been ranked on top in any of the trade papers’ polls for the year just passed, but a year later, readers of Down Beat voted him the most popular country and western performer—not for the year but of all time.
• • •
On January 16, when the permanent plot at the Oakwood Cemetery Annex was finished and the remains of those who made way for it disinterred, Hank’s body was moved in the dead of night and buried in its vault, with no pomp and ceremony. Seeing men with torches carrying things from open graves, some local citizens called police, thinking someone was robbing a grave. Just as John Hart had figured, so many people would come here that a large sign was needed to direct them to the “Hank Williams Memorial Annex.” A stone hat was placed where his head would be if he were lying above the grave. A bench would be added for visitors to sit on. Two concrete vases for fresh flowers every day were put on each side. Two stone-carved guitars were also added. Standing or sitting in silence, stone guitars and engraved sheet music all around, one could hear the romantic sound of railroad-train horns in the distance through the woods, and yet as rustic as the setting is, Billie Jean always thought these stately granite walls would be of no comfort to Hank in his repose.
“Hank was afraid of the dark and graves,” she said later. “He wouldn’t have wanted to be in that cold, dark ground.”45
But that is where Hank Williams went, under the imposing granite pillar on which some of his song titles were carved, the eeriest of all being “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive,” looming over a ghostly sketch of Hank Williams with no face, just an outline with empty space inside it. Nothing could have better illustrated a man nobody really knew but for the outer lines, a man who was all too comfortable with the darkness.