The rigors of the Depression only seemed to produce more themes of angst and hard-toiling, hard-working men that defined most of the songs being sung in the honky-tonks—the blues, albeit by another name. The irony is that while sales of records dropped off precipitously, country music found its audience in the burgeoning of radio. At the start of the 1930s, only three decades after the medium was patented, around twelve million Americans already owned a tabletop or console radio. By the end of the decade that number would grow to twenty-eight million.1 The demand, and the Depression, made them more affordable—the price dropping from $139 to $47 in four years for popular models marketed by Philco, RCA, Zenith, Emerson, Galvin, and many more. By 1933, America had nearly half the radios that existed in the world, sparking an explosion of stations, 599 in all, most under 1,000 watts, generating revenues of $60 million.2 Some higher-powered stations, such as WHO in Des Moines, Iowa, WBAP in Fort Worth, Texas, KFRU in Columbia, Missouri, and KVOO in Tulsa, Oklahoma, featured western bands like Otto Gray and his Oklahoma Cowboys, though the biggest star was Bob Wills, who in 1934 left Waco with his Texas Playboys to do a show on KVOO.
Wills, a big, handsome man and a former barber who once had worn blackface in minstrels and medicine shows, had cut his teeth with Texas bands like Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers before forming the Wills Fiddle Band. He took a giant step in the early ’30s by unabashedly applying what he called the “rowdy city blues” to country swing. Wills’s noon show, from the bandstand at Cain’s Ballroom, highlighted his Playboys’ reach and daring. They had a sax, a trumpet, a steel guitar, lead and rhythm electric guitars, fiddles, a lead singer, and most crucially in the lens of history, a drummer to keep the beat. The Playboys were half a fiddlin’ country band, half a big band playing dance music. But Wills wasn’t the only Oklahoma voice making a name for himself on the radio.
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, born in Okemah in 1912, was among the scores of Okies who hit the road dreaming of a new life in sunny California. Woody Guthrie’s folk songs about working-class grit would soon get him hired by Los Angeles station KFVD, where he’d host a left-wing show on which he performed protest songs along with hillbilly tunes.
By the early ’30s, the medium of recording had matured. The inevitability of constant change in the industry hit home in the country sector when the first “king” of country, Jimmie Rodgers, who had made the kind of money the other hillbilly singers could only dream of, neared his end. In May 1933, he recorded “Mississippi Delta Blues” and the dewy-eyed “Years Ago” in Victor’s New York studio, so weak that he had to lie on a cot between songs to save his ebbing strength. Two days later, the Singing Brakeman died in his Taft Hotel room from a pulmonary hemorrhage at thirty-five, the first sad denouement of the biggest country star.
Rodgers’s sad, keening voice and soaring yodel had influenced a coterie of singers, and the one positioned to take his place was Roy Acuff. A tall, frail, curly-haired man—it seemed all the seminal country crooners were cut from the same cloth—he had a widow’s peak jabbing at his low forehead, and his flashy white teeth and high cheekbones made him look almost pretty. Acuff had a highly manicured style, his doe-eyed, emotional balladry clashing with the flannel lumberjack shirts and work boots he and his band wore. Born and raised in Tennessee, he taught himself to play the fiddle in his late twenties, around 1930. Soon after, he joined a medicine show band, then formed the Tennessee Crackerjacks. He won a fervent following, which had a lot to do with his own devotion, which would sometimes grow so intense that tears would roll down his face as he sang about God. In 1934, Acuff signed a deal with the American Record Corporation, the leader of the “three records for a dollar” bargain market.
In 1938, ARC would be purchased by the Columbia Broadcasting System, its price inflated in no small measure by the booming sales of Roy Acuff records, including “The Great Speckled Bird” and “The Wabash Cannonball,” two of country music’s most important recordings of all time. The former, written by a Carolinas singing preacher who billed himself as Reverend Guy Smith, was a deep gospel allegory about the moral imperative of adhering to fundamentalist Christianity. Its melody was later conscripted by Hank Thompson’s 1953 “The Wild Side of Life” and Kitty Wells’s “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels,” then by David Allen Coe in his 1985 “If That Ain’t Country,” which ends: “I didn’t know God made honky-tonk angels and went back to the wild side of life.”
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The song brought Acuff to the Grand Ole Opry, where, it was reported, “In the din, Acuff’s brief and impassioned solo spots stood out like gunshots at midnight.”3 Until then, the Opry’s biggest star was Uncle Dave Macon, with his cohorts Sam and Kirk McGee. But Acuff and his Smoky Mountain Boys quickly gained what would be the most listened-to program on WSM, his audience so large that he took his band out on the road with Macon and other Opry performers. By the late ’30s the radio show was reaching around a million listeners every Saturday night, and in the early ’40s, Acuff and the band were traveling in a cream-colored limousine, WSM GRAND OLE OPRY painted on its windows. His private DC-3 airplane was emblazoned ROY ACUFF’S—THE GREAT SPECKLED BIRD.
That level of achievement would beckon many young singers. For Hank, it still seemed a million miles off in the distance. But in 1937, he moved a few hundred miles closer.
• • •
By the age of thirteen, Hiram had been playing on corners in downtown Greenville for a good three years. Even though that city was four times the size of Georgiana, with a district of honky-tonks and businessmen with cash for his hat, his sights were already beyond that horizon. Not by coincidence, Lillie’s brother-in-law Walter McNeil, who was as itchy-footed as his nephew, had once again prefaced movement by the Williams clan, relocating his family up to the state capital in 1936. Hank, who missed the company of his cousin J.C., began to bug Lillie to migrate again, to a real city where the dirt roads and whining whistles of the L&N would be replaced by buzzing streets and downtown honky-tonks. Always the doting mother, she didn’t shoot him down. For Lillie, the possibilities for renting out rooms in a big town were enticing, so she and Walter went up to Montgomery to scout places for her to live and found one at 114 South Perry Street.
Lillie enrolled Hank and Irene in school, and Walter came down to Greenville to help her load the family’s belongings—including a new stove she had bought—into a trailer hitched to a logging truck. Before long, she had rented rooms in the house and planted seeds in another of her vegetable gardens. Hank, too, was again back at it, selling peanuts in the street and working as a house painter.
When he wasn’t hawking nuts or painting, however, he was playing music, and in Montgomery there was no shortage of places to do it. His aim was to go where the moneyed people were, making his way to the sidewalks outside the Pizitz department store and singing for quarters. Or he’d take up a position along the docks on the Alabama river where the speakeasies, brothels, and dive bars were.
The town already had a pedigree in music; Erskine Hawkins, the composer of “Tuxedo Junction,” helmed an orchestra that played at the Casa Loma, the Cavalier Club, Club 31, Clyde’s, the Colonial, the Hi-Hat, and Lake Haven. The Elite Cafe, open around the clock serving split tenderloin, oysters on the half shell, and Maine lobster, was a wee-hours destination for young folks after masked balls at the City Auditorium or mezzanine makeouts at the Paramount, Empire, and Strand theaters, all “separate but equal” facilities. This bustling scene had a strong appeal for a country boy looking for a portal into showbiz, and it felt good being a loner where humanity shuffled through these streets to escape a wife, boss, or some other responsibility.
If Hank was less than attentive in school before, he was there in body only now, and often not even that. He got through Baldwin and began at Sidney Lanier High, but everyone seemed to know that he would never see a cap and gown or diploma. His mates would more often than not be guys his age who’d long dropped out of school, who habituated at the honky-tonks. As he moved into higher gear with his singing, even Lillie began to care less, the thought of which excited her for the money he might make if she called the shots for him. He had also begun to assimilate into the bar scene, his road-weary “Kerouac” look masking his tender age. The hard-bitten musicians he began to meet had no idea he was only fourteen. Neither was he the rube some might have taken him for. He had street smarts. Indeed, it was no coincidence that when he began doing the street minstrel thing in Montgomery, his beat was the sidewalk outside the Jefferson Davis Hotel.
There, up on the twelfth floor, was the studio of WSFA, the call letters meant to promote the recently opened Montgomery airport—the “South’s Finest Airport.” It was the town’s first radio station and one of four 1,000-watt stations in Alabama, and the only one in Montgomery. The station had gone on the air in 1930 when Seth Gordon Persons, a man with big ambitions himself, partnered with a local businessman to lease the rights to the frequency. But it would soon become known as the place where Hank Williams became bankable.
Hank, however, was only now becoming aware of the emerging idiom, and cultural framework, he was stepping into. He’d never had much to listen to back where he’d been before, but now radios at home and around town made him aware of people like Jimmie Rodgers and Roy Acuff. And in that vein, he was writing fragments of songs that reflected the marketability of those two. For a teenager not particularly interested in learning in school what Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal was, it was impressive that the first tune he ever sang for a formal audience was not anything about goats and Fords but one with a very topical theme—“WPA Blues.” That song likely reminded little Hank of his mother trying to find a job through the enormous federal agency that would put eight million lower-income Americans to work constructing buildings, roads, and bridges.
It was the kind of stuff that inspired blues metaphors, given the long hours and skimpy pay. In 1936, country blues slide guitarist Casey Bill Weldon had a decent hit with the first “WPA Blues.” Billie McKenzie recorded “That Man on the W.P.A.” And Big Bill Broonzy did a jazz stomp called “WPA Rag.” Hank, who could assimilate what he heard on the radio, used as his melody Riley Puckett’s “Dissatisfied” and employed some quite grown-up lyrics, apparently, though the only fragment that is known was recited by Lillie years later:
I got a home in Montgomery, a place I like to stay
But I have to work for the WPA, and I’m dissatisfied, I’m dissatisfied
Sadly, Hank would never record the song, nor was it ever copyrighted. He began playing it in the street, as a sort-of Woody Guthrie workingman’s blues. Using a trace of Puckett’s yodel breaks, Hank soon had people coming back regularly at lunchtime just to hear it, requesting it over and over as the coins clanged into his hat. Stoked by the reaction, he hitched up his britches and when he was fourteen entered a talent show at the Empire Theatre, playing “WPA Blues.” Lillie, who chaperoned him, would recall that he sang it as “a cry of despair” and that “most of the audience worked for the WPA at the time [and] they laughed and stormed. Hank got the $15 prize.” She added that Hank “took the money and set up all his school friends,” meaning spending it like a big shot, something she clearly bridled about, though she would not be able to hoard enough of his money to suit her. “He never stopped doing that,” she said, her irritation palpable. “When Hank was in the chips, so were his friends, as long as the money held out.”4
What Lillie was owed would become an ongoing bone of contention between mother and son, but in those early days, Hank was focused laserlike on conquest. After winning the Empire show, he boldly marched into the lobby of the Jefferson Davis Hotel and then upstairs to the WSFA office, where he said he’d won a contest and should have an audition. Liking his moxie, program director Caldwell Stewart told him to sing right there on the spot, and was impressed enough by what he heard to gave him a slot on a program hosted by local bandleader Dad Crysell. The first time he sang “WPA Blues” on the air, letters and calls came in asking for more of the kid. Stewart sometimes ran a microphone hookup from the street so he could catch the vibe of Hank’s homey act, the strength of which was connecting at close range with people.
As with so many other aspects of the story, there are other claims about how Hank got on the air. Guitarist/singer Gordon Braxton Schuffert, seven years his senior and the host of WSFA’s very popular 6–6:30 a.m. morning program, as well as a truck driver around town, told of making a stop at Lillie Williams’ boardinghouse in Montgomery, where he spotted a “boy-sized” guitar. He picked it up and played a couple of songs, whereupon, he said, “I heard Miss Williams holler, ‘Hiram, Brack’s got you beat.’” He added: “And I did.” Then, when he was on his way out the door, “I heard this voice that was just as strong and clear. It was a man’s voice in a boy’s body. Hank was only 14 at the time, but he could sure sing. Even then I knew he had a one-of-a-kind voice.”5
Brack Schuffert invited the aspiring singer to accompany him on his truck route the next morning. “I told him we’d sing all day. That’s all he needed to hear. He was for anything to do with music.” He also had to listen, he said, to Hank not so subtly asking him if he could get his own show at the station. Not long after, Hank was a guest on Schuffert’s show, which the latter insists was Hank’s first time on the air. It would have been early in ’38, but this was before stations preserved programs on tape and is impossible to corroborate. Similarly, it can only be assumed, given fleeting references in the literature, that, weeks later, the management gave him a fifteen-minute show of his own, twice weekly in late afternoon after school. If so, this was not as startling as it seems; the paucity of employment records went along with the fact that the station doled out these shows like candy to all manner of performers, probably with no contracts signed, hoping to fill airtime, usually for a week or two before the next singer or band took their place. There indeed was no contract signed, no hard terms of payment, no promise of long-term employment. Hank would be on one week, off the next, not anything close to a regular for another three years.
Still, it was startling that he had landed an actual gig at a big-city station at his age, which no one at the station realized was fourteen but with his baby face made for a marketable novelty. Stewart took to introducing him on air as “the Singing Kid.” This was in part a goof, but Hank took it seriously. He was paid fifteen dollars per show, more than he’d ever seen at one time for singing, and every penny of it must have seemed like it was dropped from heaven.
• • •
Lillie Skipper Williams had developed a hard crust that helped her cope with the more hectic pace and competition for opportunities. And, just as in Georgiana, people did talk about her boarding of men who came through town for one night, or perhaps shorter stays. By the Montgomery phase, the subject of just what she was running in her home seemed less of a secret. When the BBC produced a documentary about Hank fifty years later, it found a photo of Lillie in the middle of a group of very young and very winsome girls, with a sheepish but hardly uncomfortable Hank at around thirteen seated beneath her, his arms around the shoulders of two of the girls. It also found a jovial fellow named Lewis Fitzgerald, a cousin of Hank’s, who had no compunction riffing, “Do you know what kinda house Lillie run? You only think you do. Yeah—call girls, prostitutes. All kinda girls were comin’ in and out of the house all the time, some good looking, some not so good looking. Now, where she was getting all these girls I have no earthly idea.” The same documentary gave equal time to a family friend who denied this was ever the case, saying, “I know this for a fact.”6
There was, however, more to Lewis Fitzgerald than the BBC knew. Born in 1943, he was the son of Walter McNeil’s daughter Marie, and Fitzgerald liked to tell people he just might have been Hank Williams’s illegitimate son, meaning that Hank would have knocked up his own cousin. This kind of gossip seems to breed around Hank like fruit flies, and as if transfixed by the subject of Madam Lillie, the BBC put another source in its film, country singer Billy Walker, who claimed that Hank told him when he was thirteen that “he’d sing down at the end of the stairway in [the house], and these men would gather around and she’d come down and take ’em upstairs. He said it was just a come-on for the guys at the place where [Lillie] was doing her trade.” Chet Flippo salaciously wrote that the goings-on at 114 South entailed “strange noises in the night, moans and groans and bed springs creaking [and] the sucking sound of wet, hot flesh sticking to and popping loose from . . . wet, hot flesh.”7
If Hank was a teenage accomplice in the flesh trade, no one knew if he was a willing accomplice or instructed by Lillie. But even if he was so sickened by what he heard in the other rooms that he jammed his fingers into his ears during those hot, sticky nights, he had no choice but to obey her. And when Christmas came around in ’37, Lillie, seeming to cater to her boy’s musical whims, bought him a real guitar, a Gibson Sunburst, the body of which seemed to indeed burst in a gush of red, brown, and yellow. Of course, it’s possible that Lillie changed her tune once she had come to see that Hank was proving his mettle as a performer and that her own upward climbing would be aided if she tied herself to her son’s advancement. If so, she was prepared to move mountains for him.
WSFA promoted itself by sending out its on-air talent to perform in clubs and at barn and high school dances around town. When Hank began to make his first appearances, going out with Brack Schuffert, Lillie started calling around to see if she could get other bookings for him, and he soon had a pretty fair fan base. Wisely, Lillie didn’t shoot for the moon; she booked him first back on his old turf, in the gym at Georgiana High School, then in Greenville at the Ritz Theatre, with Schuffert, who recalled it as “the first show Hank ever booked. After that we played in pretty much every theatre in Alabama and Florida. I’d like to say I helped him out, but I didn’t give him that voice and I didn’t teach him to write those songs. That’s something you get from God.”8