Brack Schuffert not only played guitar for Hank; he played nanny, drinking mate, and tour guide on those gigs around Alabama. They also wrote some songs together, notably one Hank would copyright, called “Rockin’ Chair Daddy.” On many of these excursions, Irene Williams would accompany her brother as a sort of road manager, in charge of collecting whatever alms the promoters would turn over by way of compensation, and Irene would bring the loot home for Lillie to decide what cut to give Hank, the rest going into her bank account. Of course, in the big picture it was small change, but Hank’s timing was perfect. As he was moving upward, so was the nature of the music he was singing.
The hillbilly, Texas swing, and bluegrass genres—geared around an acoustic guitar, a stand-up bass, a fiddle, and maybe a banjo or mandolin—were collecting new fans by the day. There was a new instrument, too: a modified guitar played while held on the lap had evolved from the Hawaiian technique to lend an “electric” feel to a song before the invention of the electric guitar. It would be further refined in the electric era, as a four-legged console table with foot pedals and a metal tone bar, and would become known by the ’50s as the pedal steel guitar.
These were influences that shaped Hank’s world far more than the father he thought of only now and then. Lon Williams had been holed up in the VA hospital in Alexandria, Louisiana, until January 1937, when he was sent to another facility in Gulfport, Mississippi. During his confinement there, little was heard from him, or of him. It was as if he had been wiped from the earth, a proposition Lillie didn’t exactly discourage. Although Lon would recall that she brought Hank and Irene to visit him over Christmas in ’37—apparently the only time she did so—she was still telling people around Montgomery, and especially men who had romantic ideas, that she was a widow; it would get back to Lon, who would say that “it was reported in some parts that I was dead.”1 Even his brother and sister seemed not to want to find out if he was dead or alive. During this time, Lon came to see Lillie as his nemesis, not his wife.
He later claimed that she had him permanently committed; in response, J. C. McNeil maintained that Lon “didn’t particularly want to get out” and “would pull all kinds of tricks” to keep doctors from releasing him, like hiding under his bed so he wouldn’t be found.2 Lon also came to some conclusions about the disability money that Lillie had sent directly to her, thanks to Lister Hill; his understanding was that she had gotten a lump sum of “several thousand dollars,” which belied what he said were claims made later on, after Hank died, that Lon was a deadbeat dad who hadn’t provided for his children. “They talk about ‘no support’ from me,” he said. “Where in hell was my money goin’ to then?”3 It did seem as though whatever it was that ailed him had by ’38 healed or receded sufficiently for him to blow the joint, and soon enough he would, putting him and his wife, at least by law, on a collision course.
Meanwhile, the son Lon knew as Hiram was on the prowl in Montgomery, soaking up the clues and directives. Turning fifteen in 1938, he was rough around the edges and his voice not yet tamed. He still had his on-again, off-again radio show, mostly playing old folk and cowboy tunes, not being bold enough to play any original compositions—which he had none of, anyway—but displaying a studied aw-shucks persona that always poured out of radios like syrup. “Friends,” he would purr, lowering his pubescent voice to sound like Roy Acuff, “here’s a song ah’d like to do for ya now.” The station let him read commercials between songs, too, and he seemed to be able to play the pitchman for whatever store, barbershop, or bakery bought time. With such a cachet, he was able to put together a band as if he were the boss, which he believed he was, in all matters—except when Lillie was around.
By the middle of the year, he had prevailed upon Brack Schuffert to not only help form the band but be in it—though it was made clear only Hank would sing lead vocals. Brack brought in his bass player, Smith “Hezzy” Adair, a homeless eighteen-year-old orphan whom Schuffert and his wife put up in their home. He had established a modest reputation as an adjunct comic foil on the country circuit, with a tag line that went “Ready, Hezzy?” His shtick was basically his rubbery face and Coke-bottle eyeglasses, with his hat pushed back on his forehead, the sort of thing many country bands liked to utilize as comic relief à la Gabby Hayes and Smiley Burnette in the movies. Soon, another habitué of the town’s country scene joined up, fiddler Freddy Beach, who had played in swing bands and also traveled as an evangelist in medicine shows for spare change.
It was a motley crew, to be sure, led by a kid barely old enough to shave but a pro at drinking. Late in ’38, the original foursome of what would be a revolving-door lineup assembled in the parking lot of the Jeff Davis for their first publicity picture, dressed not in cowboy duds but more like boxcar hobos. Their collective name had already been determined by Hank and Hank alone—the Driftin’ Cowboys, with a dropped g—but both Hank and Brack were able to pitch the act on their radio shows. They went out to play wherever they could, piling themselves and their instruments into Brack’s old Ford wagon. The only limit was that the gig had to be close enough to get back to Montgomery, since a hotel stay would have eaten up the profits. Hank also made sure to enter talent shows run by Dad Crysell in a hall on Commerce Street, which he usually won, pocketing a quick fifteen bucks. Along the way, Irene Williams, who continued as Lillie’s proxy manager and money collector, was taken into the band as a female backing vocalist, which Hank thought would sweeten the repertoire of cowboy rags and love songs.
Hezzy soon moved in with Hank at the boardinghouse, and the two would usually spend their days knocking around. Hank, of course, was supposed to be in school, but, Schuffert said that “he skipped school a lot” and, telling the usual kind of apocryphal Hank Williams tale, that once he heard of Hank falling asleep in class. When another kid asked the teacher if he should wake him up, she said, “Naw, don’t wake him up, he ain’t gonna learn anything anyway.”4 Fable or not, for Hank school was a dreary, irrelevant chore. Sidney Lanier High School, named after the Civil War–era poet, was and still is a stately-looking place. The irony is that Hank is by far its most famous student—not to be confused with most famous graduates, a list that includes Zelda Fitzgerald and Packers quarterback Bart Starr, given that in the fall of ’40, after starting tenth grade, he ended the charade and dropped out. If Lillie was aghast at such a turn, she didn’t show it. But it wasn’t as if he were just some nobody, after all. He was being heard on the radio, he had a band, he was bringing home the bacon.
Indeed, his real schooling was happening on the stage, and while he was still maintaining notebooks of his inner thoughts, from which he would begin writing songs, he was cautious about the band getting outside of its comfort zone to indulge his personal feelings. Mostly they played stock tunes, folk songs, and Roy Acuff ditties that Hank belatedly took to because of Acuff’s highly emotive style, saying years later the Smoky Mountain Boy was “the biggest singer music ever knew.”5 Hank would throw in a song or two about a great and forgiving God, and there was some bantering between songs, Hank bouncing some well-worn comic put-downs off Hezzy.
The two of them were capable of getting gigs on their own, billed as Hezzy and Hank, which was quickly flipped to Hank and Hezzy, as Hank’s name sold most of the tickets, especially when they’d head to Hank’s old breeding ground and play the Ga-Ana Theatre in Georgiana on Sunday nights. The Driftin’ Cowboys were like any other band scratching and clawing for attention; they were always en route to or back from somewhere. Most of the venues were roadhouse dives reminiscent of the joint in the Blues Brothers movie, where if the people onstage were lucky there would indeed be chicken wire erected in front of the stage to protect performers from the audiences that paid to see them.
South Alabama was “dry” at the time, meaning that no alcohol could be served, at least by law, but this hardly put a dent in the wholesale smuggling of beer through the door, sometimes in bottles labeled as Coke. When those bottles began to fly, hurled by sloshed patrons, often the only defense for a singer or musician was one’s own quick reflexes—or preferably, a song the crowd could get with.
On sawdust-, tobacco-juice-, and bottle-strewn hardwood floors, couples attempted to do early versions of line dancing that wound up more like sleepwalking and groping. Ralph J. Gleason, seeing these native tribal rites of the South years later, would write that the outside world called them “shit-kicker dances.” Of the women, Gleason noted, “There were lots of those blondes you see at C&W affairs, the kind of hair that mother never had and nature never grew and the tight skirts that won’t quit and the guys looking barbershop neat but still with a touch of dust on them.”6
Hank at fifteen was no stranger to the dangers of life on the road. This was why he preferred to take a ride down to Georgiana and Greenville to play a nice, safe high school dance or a club where the folks knew him—his favorite venue being Thigpen’s Log Cabin. The bandstand was in a converted skating pavilion walled off from the dining room. Here, where signs offered steak and chicken dinners, sandwiches of all kinds, gasoline and oil—the last two not on the menu but outside at a Sinclair gas station—Hank felt like family, but that was not enough to prevent fistfights from breaking out when besotted patrons heckled him and he heckled them back. After too many skirmishes for comfort, both inside and outside the honky-tonks, Hank obtained blackjacks (leather-wrapped billy clubs) and gave one to each band member, though when fights erupted during shows, his defense would first be his fists.
In one incident at a dance hall in Fort Deposit, when the band left the stage and was packing up, a guy for whatever reason came at him with a knife. Seeing the assailant, Hank brandished his Gibson Sunburst like a Louisville Slugger and smashed it on the guy’s head, sending blood spurting and knocking him cold. For Hank, the hardest part of the incident was having to ask his mom for money to buy a new guitar. “I’m sorry, Mama,” he later said he told her, “but it was either get the guitar broke or my head broke.”
Because these almost vaudevillian scenes of crazed violence, which weren’t funny at all when they happened, became so routine, a kind of seriocomic undercurrent would form around him as his career lengthened, with Hank helping to stoke the vibe with lines like “Durn it, I ruin’t a perfectly good twenty-five-dollar instrument on that fella’s head.” Other tales had him using whatever else he could find as makeshift cudgels, such as a tire iron, the wooden stanchions of a pedal steel guitar, the steel bar with which it was played, and of course beer bottles broken over assorted heads.7
One more thread common to his escalating lifestyle of violence and mayhem was that Lillie Williams herself, right from the start, took to acting as her son’s bodyguard, getting involved in physical confrontations when she came on the road with him that left grown men tasting their own blood and pleading for mercy. Again, much of this aromatic scent of hillbilly justice and mayhem may be just so much country corn pone stoked into legend. Yet to many who soldiered with Hank on the chitlin’ circuit there seemed to be an assumption, for friend and foe alike: you might come after Hank for some real or perceived grudge, but you would never, ever, cross his mama. Because she’d make you pay, in blood and tears. The shadow Lillie cast over Hank clearly was getting longer every day, with the accompanying effect that both mother and son were growing more contemptuous of anyone outside their tight knot, even the band members Hank joined with. Like Hezzy, the other unmarried Cowboy, Freddy Beach, stayed at the boardinghouse, with Lillie, to their surprise, charging them rent—a minimal one, she assured them, and just perhaps with some fringe benefits available from the female “guests.”
With Lillie having decided to accompany the band on their travels, she relieved Irene of the chore of collecting receipts, and she bought a Ford station wagon for their transport that she herself drove most of the time. When she was around, and soon that was almost always, the money for all of them was practically invisible. Hank could skim a few bucks for himself, but everyone else was paid at Lillie’s whim. Her rationale was that she was spending money for their sake, buying clothes, feeding them at the house, and deducting from their pay what she swore was a nominal rent—twenty-one dollars a month, though she herself was paying only forty a month for the whole place—as well as paying for gas and car upkeep.
• • •
It’s no wonder the first coterie of Driftin’ Cowboys would soon begin to splinter, the limited rewards for driftin’ with Hank not enough to make life with Lillie tolerable. By ’39, Brack Schuffert and Freddy left, and Hezzy moved out of the boardinghouse, a breach of protocol that put him on Lillie’s bad side. New members came through. An accordion player, Pee Wee Moultrie, was offered the job after appearing on a new country station in Montgomery, WCOV, where he would soon host a show five nights a week. Moultrie recalled that Hank and Hezzy, who were seeking talent wherever they could, happened to be in the studio of the rival station when Pee Wee was performing and made the offer to him and his fiddler “Mexican” Charlie Mays. As Mays recalled: “We moved our stuff into his mother’s boardinghouse . . . on South Perry Street. It was just an old white frame, two-story house, one or two blocks off the main drag. Mizz Williams gave us a room on the second floor. Hezzy lived someplace else. I doubt if Mizz Williams had over three or four people, regular boarders. She had some young girls going to college. Hank took an interest on one of ’em.”8
Hezzy soon would go his own way, though the last straw for him may not have been Lillie’s hectoring as much as Hank’s unabated guzzling. Moultrie told of a tour the band did late in ’39 through Alabama, Georgia, and northern Florida. At one gig with Hezzy Adair at the Ga-Ana Theatre, the manager handed Hank a bottle of peach brandy before the show, and he and Hezzy drained it. Onstage, both were a mess, unable to play the right notes; Hank lost his pick and tried to play, in vain, with his fingers while incoherently babbling to the audience in a slurred voice, leading many to walk out. Hezzy, looking blue, ran off the stage and puked his guts out in the wings. Disaster that it was, Moultrie was shocked that the owner of the joint “was laughing his head off.” Evidently believing it was all part of the act, “he said it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen.”9
• • •
By the 1940s, gigs cropped up for Hank in some strange ways. When the rodeo came to Montgomery, its star attraction, a cowboy performer named Jack Wolf, who went by the stage name Juan Lobo, heard Hank at a club and invited him, quite literally, to join the rodeo, singing between bull roping and bullwhip slinging (Lobo’s specialty was knocking a cigarette from a man’s mouth from fifty feet away). It went so well and the pay was so good that Hank—without telling the band—stayed with the rodeo, going with it through Texas and into Mexico. Stories would be told, emanating from Hank, that “Hank Williams the Singing Cowboy” actually did some bronco ridin’. Some of the stories mentioned that he didn’t come out of the chute until he had knocked back enough corn whiskey that he didn’t know what he was about to do. Given his frailty and bad back, this seems risible. Indeed, when Hank sent letters from the road to his mother, they dealt not with rodeo exploits but with money, or lack thereof, a subject Lillie always complained about in her own letters to him. In one, sent on the rodeo’s stationery from Handley, Texas, on November 18, 1940, he wrote:
Mother, the reason that Jack has not sent you any money is because he just bought $600 worth of cowboy suits and boots for all of us. . . . I just signed a contract to advertise the Rodeo over the air for them [that] will mean $50 a week for me, and I will send you money. . . . I all so sent you a letter with a $5 bill in it, did you get this ore not. . . . I will be back in 7 months with a real band and pleanty of money. . . . Love, Hank.10
Some of his remarks in the letter were pointed. He said he was so happy to be in Texas—or, one can construe, away from Lillie, Alabama, or both—and declared, “This is the greates [sic] country in the world, Texas.” Only reluctantly did he return to Alabama, Lillie later saying he did so after being thrown from a horse in the rodeo, exacerbating his back woes. But he was always uneasy having to stay put, often talking of going back to the rodeo in Mexico; he’d even set out on the road, only to run out of money before crossing the border, and either hitchhike to Montgomery or call Lillie and beg her to wire some cash for a train ride home. In some of the literature it is said that Lillie persuaded him—after he came home from touring—to go back to school and take bookkeeping courses at Draughons Junior College in Montgomery. If she did, the idea of Hank as a bookkeeper even then must have been preposterous, and he was done with it soon after.
Sometimes he would go on the road only with Irene. Another time, in 1939, he took Moultrie and Mays for a short run he did on the radio in Huntsville, keeping it from the powers that be at WSFA, something he also did when he was given an early morning show of his own on WALA in Mobile, meaning that for a brief time this sixteen-year-old kid had two radio shows. Thinking he might stay there a while, he wrote to Lillie asking her to send a “big picture of myself” and a book of popular songs from which he broadened his repertoire, only to be sacked from the station when he came in drunk. Yet another time that year he went alone to perform on a show hosted by Pappy Neal McCormick and his band the Hawaiian Troubadours on WCOA, a high-powered station located in the San Carlos Hotel in Pensacola, Florida. Joining up with this band for outside gigs as well, Hank, who had never sung with steel guitars and loved the effect, seemed contented in Florida; in a photo of him from that interim, he posed for a snuggly picture with Pappy’s pretty teenage daughter, Juanealya, her forehead pressed against his cheek. He was able to camp out in Mobile; luckily, his uncle Bob Skipper had a flat there, and he slept on his couch. But this gig also ended, sending him reluctantly back to Montgomery, and back on the air at WSFA.
Despite a rolling-stone existence, he was making strides. When the Grand Ole Opry’s own road show rolled through town, he and the ever-changing Driftin’ Cowboys were on the same bill as Roy Acuff, which is probably when Hank met the Opry’s biggest star, though Acuff would say that he had met Hank in ’39 while he was with Pappy McCormick’s unit. Seeing Hank sloshed onstage, Acuff told him after the show that night, “You got a million-dollar voice and a ten-cent brain.”11 As Pee Wee Moultrie told it, however, Roy may have been pissed off because Hank made him look bad, given that “We usually got a better response than his Opry folks.” As for those early meetings, Acuff said:
I guess in a way he idolized me as a country artist. He’d usually come by my dressing room, sit around, sing songs and play the guitar. He was just a little fellow, and he just hunkered around in the corner, waiting for a chance to sing. He’d sing some of my songs and sometimes one of his.12
He noted that Hank “didn’t try to copy anybody much,” adding, “I guess he copied me more than anybody, but he was developing a style of his own.”13 As Boots Harris recalled, while Hank had the ability to hold an audience’s attention drunk or sober, by 1940 and at only the age of seventeen, “Hank’s drinking problem was getting worse.” That boded ill for everyone, most of all the musicians, since as Harris, a steel guitar player who arrived in 1940, said, “All we were getting was three meals a day and most of the money was going to Hank’s mother.”
By 1941, the original Cowboys had scattered to the Alabama wind. In addition to Moultrie and Mays, a new edition now also included a thirteen-year-old steel guitar player, James Porter, and bass man and comic foil Shorty Seals, who came from Pappy McCormick’s band and would willingly play the village idiot role, complete with blackened teeth. Lillie, of course, couldn’t have cared less who the supporting players were, and often didn’t know their names, nor one from the other; to her, and more and more so to her son, they were disposable parts. Anything but the unseen force behind Hank, she sucked up every ounce of oxygen in any room she was in, not a nanny as much as a drill sergeant, never letting the band drift far from the objective that she had in mind for them, and the enrichment it would bring her. Through her son, wrote Paul Hemphill, Lillie had “found her destiny.”14 It certainly had to bring her a feeling of exhilaration that everyone was scared to death of her. She would have done something she rarely did—smile—if she knew that whenever Hank could sneak a drink behind her back or even pocket a few dollars and keep it from her clutches, he would tell whoever he was with the same thing, to the point of it being a mantra:
“Don’t tell Mama.”
• • •
While Lillie may have wished, or even taken steps, to keep him confined and forgotten, the husband and father no one ever spoke of turned the tables when, over the Christmas holiday back in 1938, Lon Williams was able to check out of the VA hospital in Gulfport. Lillie had pressed to keep him there; she had even said everyone in Lon’s natural family was dead, forcing him to have his brother Mack come to the hospital with affidavits that he was indeed his brother as a requirement for release.15 Lon then headed home—at least to what he thought was home, in Georgiana, where he believed Lillie and the kids still lived. When he got there and found that they had moved, he asked around and was dumbfounded when people began doing double takes, having been told by Lillie that her husband had died years ago.
With nowhere to go, he checked back into the hospital, but when he was able to locate the brood he again split and showed up at the boardinghouse in Montgomery during the holidays. In spite of Lillie spreading the lie that he was dead, he never had even thought about divorcing. And so he dropped by her home unannounced, seeking to resume the marriage and fatherhood. However, he was disabused of that plan straightaway. Tales were told that he found her in bed with a man and trailed away, not saying a word, his plans crushed. However, Lon did spend some time with Hank, and later said that, to his dismay, he found his son “in a drinkin’ place,” stewed on beer, and that “I done my best to talk to him.” It seems that Hank had no use for a father that day, other than putting the screws on him to buy him more drinks. As Lon recalled, with pride, “I never did buy him whiskey.”16
Those old notebooks full of deep feelings about being abandoned were forgotten now. Lon, it seemed, was a closed book to his own family, and so he returned to Gulfport, then checked out for good, going back to McWilliams to live, not needing to find work after he convinced the VA to send him his full disability checks, ending Lillie’s gravy train. Their marriage was over, but officially in a state of limbo; on the 1940 census, Lillie is listed as being “single,” while Lon said he was “separated.”
With Hank’s money augmenting her rent collections, Lillie moved her family and her boarding business to a larger house at 236 Catoma Street in ‘41, advantageously for Hank closer to the downtown clubs clustered near the Alabama River. Still the optimist, Lon would periodically drop by there for brief visits with his children and then be gone, though as Hank would bridle ever more about Lillie, he would be in the mind to seek out his father, if only to remind himself of those songs stored up in his head from childhood memories.
In that 1940 census, as well, Lillie told the taker her son’s name was Hiram, a name that would never legally be changed. But if “Hank Williams” was making a name for himself, his future was not going to thrive unless he could move beyond the radio signal and honky-tonks of Montgomery, the blood buckets of Georgiana, and the cow manure of the rodeo in Texas and Mexico. The problem was, as good as he was, the gathering clouds of war in Europe and a mood of impending uncertainty about America’s role in global war stopped him in his tracks.