Despite the gradual changes in the landscape and culture of the South, Hank Williams seemed stuck in Alabama mud during the long, cold years of the war. His auditions and acetates had gotten him nowhere close to Nashville, and with gigs at clubs running dry—club owners not able to keep the lights on during blackouts—Hank had to stop dreaming about Nashville and instead lower his sights. In 1943, he took a job playing in a medicine show, requiring him to sing from the back of an old house trailer, then wade into the crowd to sell snake-oil miracle cures. This was a laughable waste of his talent. Yet it would be during this phase that he found the best—and worst—thing that ever happened to him, both in the same person.
Her name was Audrey Mae Sheppard Guy, a tall, striking, and married woman and mom, with curly blond hair, high cheekbones, and an aquiline nose, who if not knockout beautiful had a sort of distant, smoky, heavy-lidded Marlene Dietrich sultriness, though some would have just called her cold. When they met on a late summer day in ’43, it began a chemical process not unlike the one scientists were working on in the secret Manhattan Project. Indeed, the atomic bombs that ended the war were only slightly more powerful and toxic than the relationship that began when the medicine show rolled into Banks, a rural speck on the map in Pike County, in southeastern Alabama—its population of around 250 able to be fit into a midsized Montgomery nightclub.
Seven months older than Hank, she had grown up and still lived there, brought up on a farm owned by her parents, Shelton and Artie Mae Sheppard. Like Hank, she sang as a child, to guitar played by her granddaddy, but unlike him, she was uncommonly strong and athletic, once the star of her high school basketball team, and could dance up a storm. She may also have been psychic, at least so she thought, claiming she’d had a premonition of her brother’s death, which came true when he was ten, she thirteen, and he caught pneumonia, unable to be saved.1
Audrey seemed to like letting her hair down once in a while. In 1940, when she was eighteen and still in high school, she eloped with a man named James Erskine Guy. They moved to Gadsden, up near Birmingham, but only until he got her pregnant, whereupon he up and disappeared, never to speak again with Audrey, or at all with the daughter he sired, Lycrecia Guy, born on August 13, 1941. Audrey moved with the child back to Banks, and while legally married hardly acted it, again hitting the honky-tonks seeking company and a man with some money to take care of her. She was no floozy; her father had bought her a new Oldsmobile to get around town in, and she had a good job as a clerk in a drugstore in Brundige.
That hot summer day in Banks, she and her aunt Ethel had driven to the medicine show and parked the Oldsmobile near the stage. Hank was singing at the time, and when he climbed down from the trailer to sell some snake oil, he came upon them in the car. As Audrey recalled, Hank went into his sales pitch. “He had a bottle of herbs and said, ‘Ma’am, don’t you think you need . . .’ He just kind of glanced and looked back, did a doubletake, and said, ‘No, ma’am, I don’t believe you do.’”2 It was corn, but tasty corn, doused in butter. Audrey, who liked to present herself as a lady, might normally have dismissed a seeming backwoods huckster as too crude, but she was taken with him, sensing that his aw-shucks humility was part of a front of clever charm by a man slicker than he let on. Indeed, he had more than a few notches on his cowboy belt. But the way he looked at the magnetic blonde, he didn’t just have a roll in the hay on his mind. He wondered if this was what love at first sight meant.
Both seemed to know it would not end there. Aunt Ethel, seeing the chemistry ignite, helpfully asked the skinny young man if he wanted to go clubbing with them that night in Troy. Now, that was an offer he couldn’t refuse. Wrote Audrey: “We had fun that night.” Hank then asked her if she could pick him up the following day. She did, though when she saw him she was shocked that he was unshaven, barefooted, rumpled, and stinking of booze. Still, she waited while he cleaned up, then drove him around, getting him coffee and tomato juice from the general stores. During the ride he told her his life story, about his music, about how he’d been fired from the radio because “I drank too much.” He also, mysteriously, wanted to tell her something else, “But I can’t now.” She had to admit to herself that she was intrigued by this troubadour tramp, but not half as much as when he blurted out, “I know you’re gonna think I’m crazy, but will you meet me in Troy tomorrow and marry me?”
He was right; she did think he was crazy.
It didn’t happen quite that soon, but neither did Audrey run for the hills before he could ask again. They would spend almost every minute he was offstage together, during which Audrey tried to get one thing straight: he would have to stop drinking if he wanted her to be his wife someday. It was an easy promise for him to make, as opposed to fulfill, which he had no intention of doing. All he needed to do was stay sober for a few days, wear down her resistance, then do what he always did when Lillie was around, sneak a shot here and there out of sight. There were times when he even went a week staying dry, and even when he had the inevitable backslide, another promise would keep her mollified.
He would sing to her, melting her, making the oddball qualities vanish. Hank was a complicated man, surely trouble, but the way he looked at her with those brown basset-hound eyes, she could tell he needed someone to keep him straight or he’d never get far. Musing to her aunt, she already saw some kind of partnership, telling her, “This guy will be number one of the Grand Ole Opry one of these days.” She recalled: “I had that feeling very strongly. . . . That’s how strongly I believed in Hank. He was lucky with a God-given talent, and I was lucky with a few brains.”3 It seems not coincidental at all that Audrey was as steely as his mother, which is to say he was a little afraid of her but believed he needed her for all those reasons. Perhaps there was some sort of carryover Oedipal mechanism at work. And, of course, she had some undeniable attributes. As Chet Flippo put it, she was “built like a brick shithouse and fucked like a snake.” Just thinking about her one day on a bus, Flippo extrapolated, “he got a hard-on right there . . . and took off his hat and put it on his lap [knowing that] he’d be dipping into Audrey’s soft flesh in another two hours [and then] stroked himself under his hat and thought of Audrey.”4 Hank, indeed, may have gotten himself prepared for her. They surely burned up a lot of beds, and for Hank, it was more than sex; it was proof that he could feel loved by a woman he desperately wanted to be loved by.
For Audrey, there may well have been a rush of a different kind. She knew how to use her sexuality to get what she wanted, which, against all logic and opinion besides her own, was to be a singing star herself. He knew better; hers was a voice with neither melody nor range, flat notes spilling from her mouth like an excess of rainwater. Yet that desire to be Hank’s Dale Evans, and the control it represented, was her goal, and for that there was precedent.
Women were making inroads in country. There were the two Carter Family women but also the Girls of the Golden West, whose songs reflected one theme: to be the mate of a handsome cowboy. Indeed, the million-selling record that made a star of Patsy Montana, née Ruby Rose Blevin, an Arkansas-born thrush who took her name from a famous rodeo roper, Monte Montana, was “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” in 1935. Another was Ellen Muriel Deason, a perky, dark-haired Nashville singer. In 1937, at age eighteen, she married aspiring country singer Johnnie Wright and began touring with Wright’s Tennessee Mountain Boys, with Muriel—now renamed Kitty Wells—the headliner, en route to inordinate fame as the “Queen of Country Music.”
Sheppard seemed to be just that ambitious. But if she was to become the wife of a singer, of anybody, there was business to do. Just days after the medicine show she initiated a divorce from James Erskine Guy, but the rub was that he had enlisted in the army. Under the law, a divorce could not be granted a woman whose husband was overseas during the war. And so she waited for Guy to return home, as did Hank, who with her encouragement now took whatever gig he could. In fact, he lived constantly on the road, Audrey by his side, renting a trailer for them to live in. He was able to line up a steady appearance on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday nights at the Riverside Club, a dance hall in Andalusia, and filled in the week with gigs in a honky-tonk in Opp. Seeing him perform up close, not to mention the reaction he would get from the crowd, convinced her that Hank was on a path to the stars, and she told him so.
She was right, too. When the fiddler and bandleader Pee Wee King made an appearance in Dothan, Alabama, in ’44 he crossed paths with Hank, who had been told by a member of King’s troupe that Pee Wee was looking for a patriotic number. And so Hank wrote one, proving he was no ordinary songwriter. With the drums of war beating in Europe and the South Pacific, he came up with a seminal folk song about war, “(I’m Prayin’ for the Day That) Peace Will Come,” pining for the day “when the black clouds roll away and the skies are bright and gay / And the guns are silent once more, / And the bombs no longer fly from the planes up in the sky.” It closely channeled “We’ll Meet Again” and “(There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover,” the sentimental wartime songs sung by British thrush Vera Lynn that helped England through the Nazi blitzkrieg, but it had a harder, even somewhat protest-like bite at a time when American wartime songs normally didn’t make mention of the sorrows of war, only the shared resilience and faith of seeing it through. When he sang “Prayin’” for Pee Wee, he was cool to it but agreed to try it onstage. And when he did, the crowd ate it up, convincing him to buy it. Hank would tell folks he pulled in seventy-five dollars for it, a kingly sum.
Also in King’s troupe was a rubber-faced comedienne from Tennessee born as Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon, aka Minnie Pearl, in the role of a “mountain woman.” In her bit, wearing a hat with a dangling price tag, she squealed “Howwwdyyyy!” and told stories about stereotypical hillbillies named Uncle Nabob, Aunt Ambrosia, and Lucifer Hucklehead, a shtick that won her a place in the Opry in 1940. She also would become close with Hank, whom she remembered years later meeting by sheer coincidence, though Hank had a way of making such “coincidences” happen by being in the right place at the right time, as if he had antennae. Often, that would be in the office of some radio station God knows where, hoping to get an offer for more money than WSFA was paying him. On the day they met, Pearl said,
we went to the country radio station [in Dothan]—it was a dreary day—and there was a man sitting there in an old beat-up cowboy hat, old boots, and a beat-up brown suit. . . . He was sort of crumpled up, like a stick man, on the sofa. . . . It was Hank Williams. He wanted to sell a song. . . . He was obviously down on his luck, and Pee Wee bought it from him for ten dollars.5
Whatever amount the transaction was for—other references say it was twenty-five—King did nothing with the song, even as war made such songs much in demand. But there was a side benefit for Hank, who, while his name was listed on the song when it was registered, had willingly signed away any claim of publishing ownership. Those rights were shared by King and the publishing house he sold it to—Acuff-Rose Publications, the first time the Nashville company became connected with a Hank Williams property, even if indirectly. Minnie Pearl remembered little of the song in future years, but everything about Hank. “Especially his eyes,” she said. “He had the most haunting and haunted eyes I’d ever looked into. They were deep-set, very brown, and very tragic.”6 She also remembered that with him that day was “a very, very pretty” woman he introduced as his “wife.” That was Audrey Sheppard, who in every respect except taking the vows was married to him. They were continually interlocked, arm in arm, gazing at each other between arguments. And for Audrey, the fringe benefit she wanted began to accrue when, acceding to her not-very-subtle hints, he allowed her onstage to sing some of his songs as duets. This wasn’t much of an intrusion for him, as he’d used female singers periodically to spice up the act. The difference was that, now, while Audrey could project personality and sex appeal, and banter with him with an innate sense of playful, coy innuendo, he was doing it as an obligation, a favor to her as the price of keeping her. And while few in the audience would show any disfavor when she did her turns, the fact became clearer all the time that Audrey Sheppard simply couldn’t hold a tune, and that every time she sang she was undercutting his talent and personal connection to those audiences.
He may have also let her have some of his spotlight as a way of mollifying her father, who from the start was dead set against their relationship, not so much because she had fallen for another man while still legally married but because of whom she had fallen for. To the tall, stone-faced Shelton, Hank was no more than a bum and a drunk who made his living performing for other drunks. It was no kind of life for his daughter, who had quit her job in the drugstore to tag along with the skinny drifter on the road to nowhere.
Fortunately, Banks was far enough from Montgomery not to hear some of the choicer rumors already afoot about Hank, such as that he had fathered a bastard child after knocking up Marie McNeil, his cousin. That one got started after Marie married a serviceman named Conrad Fitzgerald and then in June 1943 gave birth to the aforementioned Lewis Fitzgerald. Conrad was either away at war or otherwise absent, and Hank took a most effusive liking to the boy, nicknaming him “Butch” and saying things like “That’s my Butch,” thus giving rise to the tawdry claim advanced years later by Butch that Hank was his real daddy. By 2000, he was embroidering the tale, saying that Lillie, in whose home Marie lived in a room next to Hank’s on the second floor, had more than once walked in on Hank and Marie having sex.7
Clearly, there was much inherent craziness in his life. In courting Audrey he would assume a veneer of normalcy. He tried to win points with Shelton Sheppard by going hunting and fishing with him, but the old farmer never took a liking to Hank. Not that this deterred him, or her. Audrey, as the wife of an active serviceman, was receiving an eighty-dollar allotment check from the government every month, which she now was using to help feed and clothe not only Lycrecia but her new boyfriend, who obviously had no objection to accepting such alms in exchange for his attention and allowing her on stage with him.
• • •
As their romance intensified, so did Shelton Sheppard’s disgust. He was so horrified that he would tell people only half in jest that if his daughter didn’t come to her senses he’d take that hunting rifle and use it on the driftin’ cowboy. As it was, her little girl, Lycrecia, hardly saw her mother, out as she was with her “husband” on the road in a trailer. Lycrecia lived with Shelton and Artie Mae Sheppard on the farm, Shelton adamantly refusing to allow them to take her with them when they traveled. At the same time, in equal measure, Lillie was just as aghast that her son was running around with the painted-up married woman.
Hank was so sure his future lay with Audrey that only days after they met, he took her home to Montgomery to meet his “maw.” On the way, he told her what it was that he had wanted to tell her but couldn’t right away. “It’s my mother,” he said. She was going to complicate matters, he told her; any woman who wanted to be with him would have to accept that “mother” came with the deal. She had her good qualities, he told Audrey; she was loyal and would move mountains for him. But she was also volatile and insanely protective of him, and no woman would likely be acceptable to her. Indeed, he knew what she was in for. As she recalled in 1973, “He said, ‘I want to take you home and introduce you to her,’ then he said, ‘You know what she’s gonna say when she meets you? She’s gonna say, ‘Where’d you get this whore?’ ”
“Hank,” she said, laughing, “your mother couldn’t possibly say that. I know she couldn’t.”
Then they got to Catoma Street and went inside. Hank asked Lillie to say hello to the woman he said he loved.
“Where’d you get this whore?” Lillie said, right on cue.8
The crack initiated yet another yelling match between mother and son that turned into a fist-throwing affair. Audrey must have looked on like a spectator at a prizefight, mouth agape, realizing that nothing Hank had said about Lillie was an exaggeration; she was a complication, about six feet and two hundred pounds of horned-toad complication. Audrey’s own recollection was that, thrown back on her heels, “I ran back to the car. Hank and [Lillie] fought like men would fight. I tell you, she was his trouble. . . . When I met him, he didn’t want to live, and he was like eighteen or nineteen,”9 apparently unaware at the time that he was in fact twenty.
While Hank and Lillie went at it, Audrey may have cried in the car, but she had no intention of letting the “complication” crimp the fable she’d created in her mind. She recognized that it was Lillie’s way of setting ground rules, but Lillie would have to recede, if grudgingly, and never fully. What else could she do? They were hell-bent on getting hitched, just waiting for Audrey’s divorce to finalize. Hank was willing to take a bloody nose to make the point. And that night, Audrey moved into Hank’s room. Soon, both women had committed to an understanding. Lillie would remain in charge of Hank’s career and would still go along on some gigs to collect the receipts. But when she didn’t, Audrey would fill that role. What’s more, Lillie was pleased that Audrey was already letting Hank have it about his drinking. She would tell him, “If you’re going to go with me, you’re going to have to leave whiskey alone.” Yet even on the way to Montgomery, Hank had stopped several times, ordering her, “Audrey, get me a bottle.” She would hem and haw, but sometimes he’d be so tortured, and plead like a child, that she’d go get him one just to keep him pacified. Once she and Lillie got to talking the problem over, they began to practice a ritual whenever he went out for a gig. As M. C. Jarrett recalled it, “Audrey and Mrs. Williams kept him dry till intermission time, then they let him have a pint. By midnight, the show was over and they had all the money. He’d be drunk . . . and they were in charge.”10 It was hardly a curative, but the women believed they were at least doing something about it.
In the opinion of many who knew them, when Audrey said “I do,” what she meant was “You do what I want.” Still, she bent to his will when just after New Year’s 1944 he got all patriotic again and wanted to go back to Mobile, where he could reclaim his shipyard job and make some money while continuing to play the bars around the bustling navy base. Audrey could at least appreciate that this would create separation from Lillie.
Down in Mobile, Hank and Audrey had few of the comforts of the boardinghouse. Both found work as welders at the shipyard, working shoulder to shoulder, blowtorches in hand. Audrey would write later that after work “we’d go back to this terrible little old hotel room and I’d wash out our clothes for the next day.” This being nothing like the life she believed she was meant for, after a few weeks she laid down the law.
“This is just not it, Hank,” she told him. “I want to go back to Montgomery. I want to get a band together for you and get you back on a radio station and start working shows.”11
She didn’t need to add that these plans also included her getting onstage with him. Lillie, who for once didn’t have to pay the freight to get him home, was pleased to have him—as opposed to them—back, always keeping his room undisturbed, unrented, and cleaning it every day. But no longer did he exist as a single entity; he was soldered to Audrey as one. That she would be part of his musical pursuits was obvious when he called her his “secretary.” Marie McNeil, notwithstanding her own rumored visits to Hank’s room, recalled that the place became “the craziest house you ever lived in in your life,” what with the rigors of trying to sleep in a room next door to equally loud arguments and lovemaking, rehearsals with musicians, Lillie’s constant turmoil, and her own arguments with Hank and Audrey.
It was clearly a relief when they could flee the tension and get on the road again. Sometimes, they repaired to a farmhouse out in the country where Hank could breathe a little and go hunting and fishing with bandmates. Audrey would dutifully fry up the fish for everyone to eat. Even though they were still living by the seat of their pants, Audrey became enamored of the on-the-road lifestyle and being part of a musical unit. Hank, relieved she was there and able to dodge her efforts at keeping him off the booze, not only entrusted her to collect the proceeds at the clubs but more and more included her in rehearsals and in the shows. The other Driftin’ Cowboys would try hard not to wince when the notes came out of her mouth, and per Hank’s instructions to them in private the guitar players turned up their amps when she sang, the objective to drown her out. If she noticed, she was having too much of good time playing a bargain-basement Kitty Wells. Someday soon, she would tell Hank, they wouldn’t have to be doing the act in the sticks. They’d be doing it in Nashville. The way she said it, he believed her.
• • •
In the winter of 1944, James Erskine Guy was still nowhere to be found. Audrey’s lawyer had gotten the papers to a Pike Country circuit court judge who on December 5 granted her a divorce on grounds of “voluntary abandonment” and ordered Guy to pay her the same amount in alimony and child support that he had when his government checks were sent to her, around eighty dollars monthly.12 (She later said he never paid her a cent.) But Hank and Audrey were still not in the clear. By Alabama law any divorce had to be followed by a sixty-day waiting period before either party could remarry. Not willing to wait that long, Hank and Audrey decided to marry anyway, damn the law. Said Audrey later: “Pretty soon [after they met] he said, ‘I love you’ so often that I got to believing it. I had wanted to believe it a long time.” Then, “all of a sudden one afternoon, he asked me, and I said ‘Yes.’ He’d been doing real good, not drinking.”13
They were in Andalusia at the time, playing the Riverside gigs, and the only justice of the peace they could find willing to perform the ceremony under the tricky circumstances was a man named M. A. Boyett. So on December 15, 1944, Hank spent the morning finding a doctor in town to give him a required certificate that he was venereal-disease free, then a notary public to endorse a marriage license, which he did, ignorant of, or perhaps given a little something extra to ignore, the sixty-day restriction. On the marriage certificate, Hank wrote in his profession as “Band Leader.” As it happened, Boyett owned a filling station in town, and because he was there when the license was signed, Hank and Audrey, wasting no time, strode to an empty spot under the Texaco sign with Boyett, a couple of Driftin’ Cowboys coming along as witnesses, and recited their vows as cars drove up over cables on the ground setting off that familiar ding. It was just impetuous enough to fit the lifestyle they were living.
It could even be called romantic in a rustic, manic way, with carefree young lovers too much in love to know what the hell they were doing. Audrey, who had told her aunt that she hated the sound of “Audrey Williams,” took it as part of the toll for snaring him. It happened so suddenly that, perhaps as a tangential factor, the other Mrs. Williams could not be there, nor would she have made the long trip to a gas station to see her son marry; and indeed Lillie would hold it against her son that he had done it this way. When Hank called her after the pumpside ceremony, Lillie expressed her disgust and anger, though Hank expected nothing less of her. There would be no wedding gift from Lillie; merely allowing them to stay at the boardinghouse was grudging acceptance enough.
Ironically, their marriage was in name only, never to be declared legal by the state of Alabama and officially falling under common law. Yet they seemed to live by their own common law. When the sixty days were up, they considered the union to be legal. Who needed the law when their love was so strong?
• • •
The marriage came six months after the D-day invasion of France, and the bitterly won victory in the Battle of the Bulge a month later presaged the impending fall of Berlin and defeat of Hitler in the spring, though too many more marines would have to die in the Pacific, and a monstrous new weapon would incinerate two Japanese cities before the end of all hostilities in late summer. The sudden arrival of a terrifying and uncertain nuclear age—and revelations of Nazi death camps where civilized men actually went about nonchalant genocide—would change all calculations of war and notions of morality and immorality, and just as in the aftermath of American slavery, lessons about right and wrong would not be learned easily as the Cold War dawned and black men who fought in segregated units came home to face Jim Crow and the hanging tree.
If Hank was seemingly ill suited for stardom before and during the war, the world was moving in a direction in which living on the edge, and on the edge of disaster, and comfortably in amorality would be a perfect context for his songs, which would feel something like dancing on a grave. His problem was having to deal with the Audrey issue. To her, being made a member of the Driftin’ Cowboys may have been her reward for putting up with the primitive conditions of the early years of their marriage and trying to keep his nose clean. But as Hank and the boys seemed to know, her pushing him to a higher level was being undercut every time she warbled. Don Helms told of Hank’s dilemma. “He came off the stage one time shakin’ his head. He said, ‘Man, it’s hell to have a wife who thinks she can sing, and she can’t.’”14
Worse yet, while Hank knew the kind of fight that would ensue if he told her as much, and thus bit his lip and held his tongue, Audrey seemed to live in an ether of delusion, not just about her singing but his. Guitarist Clent Holmes, who came along a few years later, recalled that Audrey, as she had been almost right from the start, was Hank’s biggest critic. “When he would write a song and sing it on the radio,” he said, “she’d tell him he wasn’t singing right. And that’d upset him. He said, ‘I wrote that song and I know how it’s supposed to go.’ And that would cause a big argument. But she never would back down. They’d have a real row.”15 It was the classic example of not being able to live with a woman or without her.
There were so many psychological and pathological undercurrents about them, individually and together, ranging over love, need, control, ambition, cultural gender roles, egos, and, at worst, boiling hatred. As volatile and able to unfurl so many turn-on-a-dime emotions in the blink of an eye as they were, when their fighting peaked and then was replaced by making up, their lovemaking must have been like the Fourth of July. No one ever knew if one of them would wind up killing the other, yet when they weren’t fighting they wandered about with their eyes fixed on each other like school kids. It was no small wonder that Hank’s songwriting in the mid-’40s took off, in direction and depth. They would come from a place he hated but which gave him creative sustenance.
He didn’t know whether, at any given moment, he loved or hated Audrey Sheppard, but that mix of bravado and fear would be at the crux of almost every song he would write and sing from now on.