“COUNTRY MUSIC AIN’T NOTHIN’ BUT WHITE PEOPLE’S BLUES, ANYWAY”
As months lengthened into years, Lillie Skipper Williams had gotten to know a lot of people, doing what would be called in future generations “networking.” Herman Pride was always a help, and when another pol, Lister Hill, was running for the US Senate and campaigned in the town, Irene Williams approached him. “My ma wants to see you very badly,” she said, later recalling, “He went home with me and sat on our front porch talking to her. Then he got her a pension.”1 Lister also was able to pull strings to have Lon’s VA disability checks sent directly to Lillie; she’d run into miles of red tape trying to arrange that herself. But what really turned the corner for her was when she had an idea about making money from that wonderful house. Instead of going to Thaddeus Rose with it, however, she had Lister impress upon Rose the good sense of allowing Lillie Williams to rent out rooms there, as the proprietor of a boardinghouse for the business set that came through Georgiana.
Rose had no objections, as long as he was given a cut of the money, and Lillie was in business. Soon after, there were even more loose lips around the town about what might have been going on inside some of the rooms, and with whom. In Paul Hemphill’s suggestive take, Lillie “found her calling as a boardinghouse operator—some would say, unkindly, a madam—in a town throbbing with people just passing through.”2
Whatever was going on, if anything, it turned into the most profitable of Lillie’s professions, one that would become her only profession for many years. She didn’t fool herself that she was getting to be rich, but at least the family had one thing they could boast of. “We were poor people,” Irene Williams once clarified, as proud as her father; despite hardship, she said, “we weren’t in poverty. No matter what anyone says, we never begged.” Even more prideful to the family, she said, was that despite their hand-me-down existence and time spent on streets paved or otherwise in town, Lillie had a rule: as soon as they walked in the door, they were to bathe, change their clothes, and comb their hair. In fact, Irene pointed out, “the welfare department refused to give us aid because [we] were too clean.”3
• • •
The man of the family was getting more and more confident as he reached puberty in the pit of the Depression. It didn’t hurt that he had cowboy clothes that Lillie—it was said she would have done anything to make her boy happy— sometimes spent her last dollars on. She did the same when she finally acceded to Hiram’s clattering about getting a guitar. With Lon gone, it seemed the least she could do for him. He was eleven when she went to a music store and bought a used Silvertone model for $3.50, to be paid off at fifty cents a month. However, in keeping with Hank lore, others would claim to be the benefactor of that guitar. One of them was the proprietor of a Ford dealership, Fred Thigpen, in whose store the radio was tuned to stations playing hillbilly. When he gave the teenager his first guitar, he said, he also taught him the words to cowboy songs that came over the radio. Another was Jim Warren, who also had been a musician and owned a jewelry and musical instrument store. Of course, none of these narratives could approach the one Lillie, a born storyteller, would want to stick. Hers came with a possibly apocryphal extension. While “the little fellow was overcome with joy when I brought the guitar home from the music store,” she would write years later, he subsequently “ran into the yard and swung the gate. He leaped on a young calf that was lying just outside the yard and twisted the calf’s tail. The yearling bawled with fright. He leaped into the air and before Hank knew what was happening the calf had thrown him to the ground, breaking his arm. It almost broke his heart too, for he couldn’t play the guitar with a broken arm. Three days later, though, when he could wiggle his fingers, Hank was trying to chord the guitar.”4
As industrious as he was, Hiram had a way of ingratiating himself to people he met. He also would not be deterred from sidling up to someone who might have had a reputation among the town folk. Jim Warren, for example, had gotten himself into trouble on the suspicion that he had befriended a black family. The local Ku Klux Klan chapter believed in the fever swamps of their minds that he was sleeping with a female member of that family—the worst crime a white man could commit, according to the canons of bigotry. Though Warren took a beating, he refused to be intimidated, denied the charge, and said that a lot of white preachers he knew were having sex with black women.5 This was clearly a brave man, and listening to him broadened the young man’s purview, breaking down the conditioned reflex so common in his world to stereotype and reduce the dignity of people of color.
When Hiram would sit around with Warren, he would hear the black musicians the music store owner knew. One was a guitar-playing blues man known as “Tee Tot,” who lived several miles down the road in Greenville, the seat of Butler County, but came over to Georgiana a few times a week on the L&N to play and sing on the street for spare change; sometimes he’d get a gig at a church supper or black dance and make the joint jump. Hank apparently witnessed this Tee Tot fellow; as Herman Pride would later recall to author Roger Williams, “there was always a crew of little boys around him, followin’ him from store to store,” a group that included Hiram.
With his guitar in tow, and not really knowing how to play it, Hiram began strumming and singing cowboy songs on street corners and at the train depot, hat at his feet, which some passersby may have dropped coins into just to get him to stop playing.
• • •
Lillie again took Hiram to a doctor to have his back checked out, but this time, too, there was no diagnosis of anything major amiss. It would only become known later that Hank Williams had something called hemangioma, a clumping of blood vessels, which would lead to fully blown spina bifida occulta, a spinal deformity that is present in 10 to 20 percent of people. The condition can be benign unless the spinal cord is tethered, or not attached properly to bones, causing chronic, at times severe, neurological problems and debilitating pain.6 Though the condition is now preventable with prenatal supplements like folic acid, it was far too exotic at the time for many country doctors to even know about. Instead, the boy was told he was fine and the pain would one day be gone. But along with loneliness, the pain knotting his lower back would be constant.
At age five, Hiram would begin to write rudimentary songs. Those tunes were not about cowboys on a distant range but rather the emotional attachment to his dad and the void not having him around created. In fact, Hiram filled up entire notebooks of pages with feelings of emptiness and abandonment, the lines structured like a song. The beginning of one such passage, which was titled “I Wish I Had a Dad,” went:
I guess I’m awful lucky, my mother says I am
She says why son you have a lot
And I reply yes mom, I’ve got a knife
I’ve got a bike, I’ve got a dog named Tad
I’ve got a lot of comic books, I’ve got a drawing pad
I’ve got a Roy Rogers gun and I ain’t doing bad
But if I really had my wish I’d rather have a dad7
Sometimes on cold days he would slide into the crawlspace under the house and sidle up next to the draft of the fireplace to keep warm, sit in the dark, and sing hymns while picking at the guitar. Hiram lugged his old Silvertone wherever the day would take him, trying somehow to get his guitar to sound like the beat-up guitar of Tee Tot. However, before he had any real idea of where he was headed along a musical locus, he had some more growing up to do. As it happened, he would do some of that courtesy of an unwitting Lillie, who, too tired from work to keep tabs on a son becoming more restless with each day, paved the way for him to get more enlightened than she would have wanted.
Not that he was trouble or anything, even if it was a chore just worrying about him. But she made it her business to lay down the law when she had to, such as when he used some of his secret earnings to buy firecrackers, which in another of those Hank tales reputedly were in his back pocket when he was just a shaver and she gave him a whipping one day, and they began to explode, burning his butt worse than the switch did. Seeing how restless he was, Lillie thought it would be good for the young ramblin’ man—who had already lived in more places than most do in a lifetime—to go live with the McNeils. They had recently relocated to the “country,” in Fountain, smack on that ramblin’ Highway 41, in Monroe County, about a hundred miles to the west. To make room for him, Walter McNeil sent his teenage daughter, Opal, to live with Lillie and Irene. The McNeils were settled in a logging camp, in two converted boxcars, and while it was hardly the Ritz, these prototypical “mobile homes” could be quite roomy. Hiram would also be around his cousin J.C., who was always up for a good time and a bit of trouble. Walter and Alice McNeil took a hands-off approach to the kids, as long as they went to school and didn’t stay out late. But Alice McNeil did have one rule, identical to her sister Lillie’s: the boys’ attendance at church on Sunday was nonnegotiable. Hank had no problem with the mandate, especially considering it was on those mornings that he always could connect with the Lord and pray for deliverance.
Being separated from Lillie also opened new doors. By 1934, he was eleven and a man, by the ethos of the hills and backwoods. He and J.C., who was a little older and manly, became inseparable. They’d hunt and fish in the daylight, and when darkness set in, J.C. seemed to know where to go to meet up with young girls in the moonlight, and where to be able to tickle the tongue with some moonshine. Hell, sometimes he could do that right at home. Walter McNeil was no choirboy himself; he was said to have stashed bottles of liquor under his mattress. And out there in the woods, there was no dearth of mountaineers willing to spill some of their hootch into the kids’ cups—to help “make a man of you.” Saturday night barn dances at the camp were eagerly awaited, as that was when booze flowed like water, and like a river in ’33 after Prohibition was lifted.
Those parties were of value for other reasons, too. When the amateur hillbilly bands began to play, Hiram could jump up onstage and play with them, the booze in his belly making his voice seem splendid to him, if not to everyone. His confidence at those moments felt so good that he saw no reason why he should avoid getting tanked on firewater whenever he sang. The only downside was that he and J.C. would have to stumble back into the camp car, where Walter was already passed out drunk, and know that their heads would be in a vise when Alice got them up to get dressed for church. The only solution, it seemed to Hank, was pouring so much hootch into himself that his body would surely learn to obey its commands to feel good. It was like medication without a doctor writing one of those prescription things. It seemed a hell of a plan, a minor exception to the rules of his Good Book.
When he returned to Georgiana after a year’s sabbatical, Hiram was a head taller, a year bolder, and not in need of a dictionary to know what “vices” meant.
• • •
Hiram “Hank” Williams wasn’t particularly taken with the emerging caste of country singers. He was more lost in his own prism of feelings and music as it applied to his life; yet what was happening in the evolution of country would have everything to do with his own emergence. He would grow in tandem with the not entirely admirable phenomenon of the Grand Ole Opry, which began on the radio when he was a toddler and lurched into something that was both advantageous and damaging for the country brand. The first murmurs of the Opry arose on November 28, 1925, when a radio program called Barn Dance began on a small Nashville station, WSM. The studio was housed in an office building owned by the National Life & Accident Insurance Company, and the show copied the format of a show on WLS in Chicago, National Barn Dance. The Nashville station hired away the Chicago station’s program director, George “Judge” Hay, and his first show featured a seventy-seven-year-old fiddler, “Uncle” Jimmy Thompson. Each Saturday night new, mostly unknown acts in the “barn dance” idiom appeared, the names including a then-obscure Bill Monroe, the Fruit Jar Drinkers, the Crook Brothers, and so on. The show followed an NBC network feed of a classical music show, and two years later, Hay announced:
For the next three hours, we will present nothing but realism. We will be down to earth for the earthy. . . . We have heard grand opera from New York, but now we will be listening to the Grand Ole Opry.8
The show became progressively more popular, necessitating that National Life & Accident Insurance build a larger studio for it. In 1934, the Opry took up residence in the Hillsboro Theatre, then two years later moved to the Dixie Tabernacle theater in East Nashville.
Hank, of course, grew up aware of the Opry but usually had better things to do on a Saturday night than sit in front of a radio, and Lillie didn’t even own one until 1934 or so. As for his own music, that pretty much came out of expressing what he saw around him. He did seem to appreciate the yodeling thing, because his throat was supple enough for him to do it naturally. Mainly, he just trilled in the manner of the singing cowboys, regarding it as “folk.”
Though there wasn’t a cowboy within a thousand miles of South Alabama, the cowboy culture was the beau ideal for a generation of maturing boys all across the country. In the South, however, all that blues music could find a neat context when a guitar was thrown into the mix. So while he may have sounded like a white-gloved, sharply pressed, campfire-singing Gene Autry and Roy Rogers model, Hiram wanted to be a dirty-fingernailed, dusty-booted, sweat-and-soot-faced southern Alabaman, animated by black blues and mixed with a reminder that God was the big cowboy. And for this ambitious and seemingly unreachable objective, his timing was perfect.
Perhaps not having his father around helped, too. While Lon never believed his boy’s obsession with music would amount to a tinker’s damn, Lillie had the makings of a stage mother from the start, and far more sense than her husband. She knew her son had singing ability; from what she heard on the radio, he was just as good as anyone playing hillbilly music for profit. If he could, through her work on his behalf, get himself on the radio and make records, the family might even break the yoke of dead-end Alabama living. Lillie had scraped together enough money to send him to a voice teacher for a while, but he refused to change what he felt when he sang to what he was supposed to be doing with his voice and diaphragm. There was just something about singing from the heart that wasn’t meant to be tamed, he believed, and he would ride a long way down the road on that impulse.
Looking at times like a geek with his wire-rimmed glasses over his nose, he was not the worldly fellow he saw himself as. But when he would cut school and hang at the barbershop by the tracks, he mingled with the grown men as if he were one of them. The owner of the shop, Austin Reid, later recalled him even further back in time, in the early ’30s, as “a little bitty feller, with legs no bigger’n a buggy whip. He hung around here a lot, looking for food and cigarettes. . . . If I tossed a cigarette butt away, he’d dive for it ’fore it hit the floor.” Reid remembered Hank then as “a happy boy,” exactly the opposite of the way Hank’s cousin J.C. once described him, as “a real loner. He never was a happy boy. . . . He didn’t laugh or carry on like other children. It seemed like somethin’ was always on his mind.”9
Even then, barely a teenager, he seemed to be a split personality, his real feelings known only to himself. A schoolteacher who taught both Hank and Irene during their days in Georgiana once said that it was Irene whom she remembered as “much more forward, with a good bit of braggadocio.” Hiram, she said, was “so ordinary he merges with the crowd in my memory.”10 Something always seemed to keep him distant from the world he lived in. It was probably a factor that the world changed so much, never really giving him a breather before he was on the move. That happened again in September 1934 when Thaddeus Rose suddenly up and died. Rose’s family let it be known that the house he had so nobly (or not) allowed her brood to live in would be sold. Lillie, aware that her income from the boarders would dry up, reckoned the time was right to make a go of that business in a bigger town.
By chance, the McNeils had also moved again, from Fountain to Greenville, and did some scouting for Lillie of possible houses where she could live and turn a profit in the town where old tattered signs at the rail station called it “the Camellia City.” In May 1935, she loaded up her pickup truck again and headed for Greenville, with enough money to settle into an even bigger house with a lot of sunny rooms; the street name is lost in the dustbin of history. This was quite propitious for Hank, who was now an able and ready man of twelve and bent to take his street singing to a higher level. And good Lord almighty, sometimes things happened for a reason, he must have believed, because beating his feet up to Greenville would bring him into closer proximity with the man who may have influenced him the most. It was neither Lon Williams nor Jimmie Rodgers but the stooped, gray-haired old black man he had trailed on the streets in Georgiana, the one they called Tee Tot.
Tee Tot’s real name was Rufus Payne, and he was a classic example of the black Alabama underclass, a bluesman with talents deserving of great attention who only became known in death by the testimonial graces of a white man. He went through life with no status as a living human. By his own rendering to those he knew, he was born in Greenville, but a birth certificate was never found for him, and one created ex post facto for him after his death had blank lines for the names of his mother, father, and date of birth.
According to latter-day research by the Alabama historian Alice Harp, he was born in Sandy Ridge in Lowndes County circa 1884, the son of freed slaves who moved to New Orleans around 1890. Only later, after his parents died and he had become a minstrel, did he arrive in Greenville.11 He never made a record, never made it into the Lomaxes’ research, never recorded, never seen in a photograph. His real identity was not known until he was long in his unmarked grave, and the only time Tee Tot was on a record, he was not heard but rather mentioned, when Hank Williams Jr. recorded a tribute song called “The Tee Tot Song” on his 2002 album The Almeria Club Recordings. Apparently the name was given him because he usually had beside him a bottle of something that he liked to say with a wink was tea. While his street playing earned him notice, he never had more than a few pennies in his pocket. Hank later told one of his band members that Payne had a job as a janitor in a Greenville high school—actually only one of his jobs, another being as a delivery man for a drugstore called Peagler’s—but when he went out with his guitar to the street corners, white people would reach in their pockets and throw some change into his hat or cigar box.
Contrary to oft-stated lore, Hank’s praise of him was never full-throated but measured, limited by the conditioned native tongue of the racist South; by example, in 1952 he told the then-young Ralph J. Gleason:
I learned to play the git-tar from an old colored man in the streets of Montgomery. He was named Tetot and he played in a colored street band. They had a washtub bass. You ever seen one of them? Well, it had a hole in the middle with a broom handle stuck in it and a rope for the strings. I was shinin’ shoes and sellin’ newspapers and followin’ this ole Nigrah around to get him to teach me to play the git-tar. I’d give him 15 cents or whatever I could get a hold of for a lesson.12
It hardly helped elevate Payne, who had died in 1939, that he was consigned to history as “this ole Nigrah,” or even years later by J. C. McNeil as a man with a “hunched back with long arms that extended almost to his knees,” much the way one might describe a simian. Neither did Hank apparently ever learn, or care, what Tee Tot’s name was, his paean not nearly as heartfelt as narratives told by other white musicians in the South taking inspiration from black performers. Neither was Hank much interested in becoming skilled as a professional musician. In later years he would have no trouble admitting that “I never have read a note or written one” and “I don’t know one note from another.” What he did want was to vicariously live the life of an itinerant street performer, who knew how to make the guitar set a tone, a beat, become an extension of the feeling in his gut. Hank had always been introverted with strangers, not warming up to anyone until he knew them. But that wasn’t going to cut it singing for strangers he had to make like him enough to put a dime into a hat. “Keep the crowd’s attention,” Payne was said to have told him. “When they start to slip, you’re in trouble.” The secret in doing that lay in the music he would sing, and by listening to Payne at close range he absorbed the “personality” of music; how to stress certain notes, how to make them sound hurtin’, how to turn up the corner of his mouth in a wary smile or yodel as a sign of relief. And perhaps it’s not so ironic that decades later Payne’s son revealed the delicious tidbit that “Hank wanted to learn how to play blues. My dad knew how to play blues, but he didn’t like to play blues. He wanted to make money playing hillbilly music. [Laugh] They go together regardless of black and white.”13
That the two forms indeed went together was proven by the fact that in ’49 Hank would record “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” a classic drinking song from the Prohibition days. And even with revamped lyrics replacing the song’s warning “Better look around, police firin’ squad is on their beat an’ you’ll be jailhouse bound,” and a steel guitar, it was pure blues, closely tracking the 1933 Clarence Williams composition, later redone in 1937 as “The Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” by several blues acts, the best known being Washboard Sam. The languid, slow-motion cadences of many of Hank’s records certainly gave them a bluesy feel; so did the yodel, which, like Jimmie Rodgers’s, was more in the black wailing tradition than the upbeat, goofy hillbilly style. “It’s sooo obvious,” Hank Williams Jr. has said. “Man, that E chord and that blues. If Daddy wasn’t a blues singer, just tell me who was. Lightnin’ Hopkins, he said that country music ain’t nothin’ but white people’s blues anyway.”14 Added Henderson Payne, “Anything my daddy played, Hank could play it, too. Very few people know how to play blues. Hank knew how to play blues. That’s why he sings so good.”
However, so much would be embellished about the Tee Tot connection that it is impossible to separate fact from fiction. While several biographers have repeated Irene Williams’s 1993 recollection that Payne had called Hank “Little White Boss,”15 there is something scripted about the notion that Payne was the wry, wise old sensei and Hiram Williams was his “karate kid.” Irene also gave Lillie the props for Tee Tot becoming a mentor to her son; “Mother was afraid that Hank would get lost or hurt” somehow in Greenville, she said, and “she asked Tee Tot to give Hank music lessons in exchange for food.” If so, Lillie deserved props, since this sort of racial comingling by an Alabama boy would have raised a lot of eyebrows. Not that Lillie ever bowed to many people’s rules of behavior—Irene once said that “if you made her angry, you had a wildcat on your hands,” and that for her children “she would turn the world upside down.”16 Still, Payne gave many white kids tips about playing guitar, and when he died he might not have known any of their names.
After Rufus Payne died a pauper in a Montgomery charity hospital on March 17, 1939, his age thought to be around fifty-five, no one really knew where he was buried. His death certificate read “unknown” for his age and profession. He probably was taken to the mainly black Lincoln Cemetery, a few miles from Oakwood—the “white” cemetery—and put in the ground, without a marker, resting in a kind of potter’s field for African Americans.
To this day, Lincoln Cemetery is a neglected, outrageously unkempt place, where headstones are often displaced, left in disrepair, or vandalized. Some 6,700 people have been laid to rest in this graveyard designed for 700 graves. “When somebody would be buried here,” says Phyllis Armstrong, a volunteer who has been trying to trace and identify them, “they were burying people on top of people.” Says another volunteer, “What people don’t understand is that [racism] also applied in death. Not just at bus stations or restaurants or bathrooms, but in death also.”17
The best that can be said of Hank’s brief intersection with Rufus Payne was that it happened at all. Obscure blues men like Rufus Payne spread their influence in small doses, putting the blues in the whitest of singers and musicians with only a word or two of tribute in exchange. Hank would never actually sing or play with a black man onstage or in a studio. But at least he would remember the stooped-over old black man, even if he didn’t know his real name. For the times he rambled through, that was called progress.