No one knew better than Hank how much creative juice Audrey set flowing and burning inside him. If Lillie had been vital to keeping him in the music game, Audrey was surely the pathway to the top. The trade-off was that one of them might indeed kill the other before they got there. They were absolutely brutal to watch when they fought. Cat and dog. Oil and water. Fire and rain. Any of these metaphors seemed to apply to them. The only question was how far they’d take it. One night in Andalusia, when Hank came back to the trailer stewed to the gills, the usual fireworks began. Fed up with her, he gathered up her clothes and threw them outside, into a puddle of mud. As Don Helms remembered, “She called the police and had him put in jail. I had to go get him out.” When Helms got there, Hank was sitting forlornly in a cell, half sober and still steaming as he explained what set him off.
“What do you want me to do? Stand on my darn head?” he said, meaning that a man had to do something in the face of such abuse by a woman.
The cops apparently enjoyed having him, it being something of a red-letter day with a guy they liked to go hear themselves in their jail. Helms paid the thirty dollars to get him out, and as they were leaving one of the cops called out brightly, “Come back ’n’ see us, Hank.” He took it as sarcasm, not flattery.
“All of you can go to hell,” he growled.1
When he got back to the trailer, he and Audrey did what they always did after a spat: they hit the sack and burned up a few more bedsheets. For Helms and the other musicians, this sort of episode was part of an ongoing soap opera—“Life with Hank and Audrey,” something like the quarreling radio couple on The Bickersons. Hank and Audrey were wacky, but few ever thought their warfare was funny. Indeed, for Audrey it was serious business. She was willing to brave hell and high water to see that business through all the obstacles of Hank’s crazed life. Sadly, he had been right; Lillie Williams came with the package, and that was another drama in itself.
As often as Audrey and Hank went at it, Audrey was also at loggerheads with “Mother,” especially after Lillie felt stabbed in the heart when Hank and Audrey married and Audrey apparently had legal rights on his earnings. As Marie McNeil once said with prodigious understatement, “Aunt Lillie and Audrey didn’t get along.” She even told of hearing an “awful noise” coming from Lillie’s room one day. Peering in, she saw “Lillie and Irene had Audrey down on the bed and they were fighting,” hair being pulled and fists thrown. “I went to pull them off her,” she said, “but my hand got tangled in Audrey’s long hair.” According to Marie, mother and daughter “ganged up” on Audrey “quite often,” but Audrey “wasn’t afraid of nobody.”2 In fact, Hank was impressed by his wife’s grit, even depended on it, as it would become the source of many of his song lyrics, even if they cast her in the role of the heavy, to Audrey’s dismay.
• • •
The irony of Hank’s tussles with Lillie was that he had inherited his combative nature and his arrogance from her. Unlike her, though, he had little sense of right and wrong. While he never got a driver’s license, and refused to put on his glasses when he did get behind the wheel, he bought a 1935 Ford sedan and tooled around in it, putting everyone in his path, including himself, in immediate peril. Indeed, if Hank got a hankerin’ to do something, no law and no woman was gonna stop him. A car was often the place where he and Audrey would find something to argue about. Once, said M. C. Jarrett, en route to a club called Mose’s, Hank ended an argument by telling the driver, a guy nicknamed Cannonball, “Stop the car.” Said Jarrett: “I swear he just opened the door, snatched Audrey out by the hair of her head, got back in and said, ‘Take off,’ and left her there in the ditch. Then we stopped at Mose’s and Hank got four or five Falstaffs. And we stopped a couple more times for beer. When we got to Andalusia, Audrey was already sittin’ there waiting for us . . . and they got back together and everything was all right again.”3
They seemed to know they were joined in a tinderbox. Not that either could stand the other for any extended period. Unable to stomach Lillie, or Hank, or both, Audrey several times fled to her parents, to spend time with Lycrecia. Hank would come after her, and Shelton Sheppard would stand in his way, until Audrey inevitably had a change of heart. Still, Hank made no effort to pull his punches or hold his tongue when it came to his wife. M. C. Jarrett recalled that he “heard Hank say things that ought not to be repeated about Audrey,” while adding, “but there’s no doubt in my mind that he loved that woman better than he loved life.”4 And that was the rub. No matter how bad the circumstances, Audrey believed they had a love only the poets could write about, and that would keep her going back. She had committed herself to sticking it out, getting him a record contract, and she intended not to stop until she did. With the fervor of a missionary, she convinced the bosses at WSFA in ’45 to rehire Hank and give him back his morning show.
And Hank himself was seemingly under her spell. Not a secondary consideration was that he was writing so many good songs now. The kind of music he wanted to sing and the flavor of the act he wanted were being refined almost daily. Some of the country genre he himself had no use for, including Texas swing; he called the popular Bob Wills idiom “longhair crap,”5 presumably meaning too hoity-toity for the common-man country crowd—which Audrey wanted him to look beyond, another bone of contention between them.
Audrey was, however, adamant about cleaning him up, washing his face, elevating him from the junkyard dog life he knew so well. As he indulged his drinking habits, he had grown slothful, sometimes wearing the same clothes for days and avoiding the shower stall. Audrey would have none of that. She dragged him to men’s shops to buy double-breasted gabardine and linen suits, which he usually ignored in favor of cowboy chic but for more than a few photos slipped into one of those city-slicker suits to prove he wasn’t merely a hillbilly. She kept on him to go more pop, something classy and not suggestive of flea-bitten overalls and manure-caked boots. And Hank himself often turned back to the blues for creative comfort, highly admiring black performers who not only sounded but looked cool and sophisticated. When alone with a Victrola, he would pull out records like Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Matchbox Blues,” prefiguring in his head when, a decade later, that song and other blues rags would be the vehicles of rockabilly music. Blues gave him his marching orders, it seems, keeping pop firmly off his stage.
In fact, before performing, hearing the band tune up by playing Tin Pan Alley standards, he’d tell them, “Awright boys, get them pop licks outta ya before we get out onstage ’cause we’re gonna keep it vanilla.”6 This sounds odd now, since in modern parlance “vanilla” means without soul or fiber—in other words, too white; but for Hank, it was the opposite. Another song he listened to for cues was Delta blues man Tommy McClennan’s “Bottle Up and Go,” which was also recorded by Sonny Boy Williamson (and later John Lee Hooker) and was filled with racially charged lingo—“Now the nigger and the white man playin’ seven-up, nigger beat the white man [but he’s] scared to pick it [the winnings] up”—and sexual innuendo that he toned down. To some of the musicians, it was too simple. Sammy Pruett once said, “I always thought Hank was too corny,” a common reaction upon first listen. Pruett spoke in musician language about Hank doing no more on his guitar than playing an open “A or D or G, just as plain as you can get.”
But such palaver was Greek to Hank, who barely knew what an A or C was, only what he wanted to play and sing, explaining why he didn’t get too carried away with what was technically possible. If he screwed up, got too drunk to remember the lyrics or chords, the band would nod at each other and play the correct song—or, as they had agreed was the best all-purpose song to cover for him, “Blue Steel Blues,” playing so loud it drowned him out.7 If they were lucky, he’d never even realize it; if he did, he’d give them hell for it, never admitting he’d screwed up.
They could put up with Lillie and Audrey, but Hank would wear their tolerance down to a nub. And because they ran in their own circles, other musicians would hear the horror tales. Once, so the story goes, Hank was hanging at WCOV and got into an argument with Dad Crysell. It was on the latter’s program at WSFA that Hank had made his debut, but Crysell left, his feelings hurt that he’d been shunted into the background by the bosses in favor of Hank—a not uncommon reaction at the station. What the argument was about is not known, but by one account Crysell’s band took “great pleasure in beating [Hank] senseless and tossing him out onto the street.”8
• • •
Hank had written a large number of songs, still reluctant to play most of them. Believing he needed to collect and present his emerging oeuvre, Audrey suggested he bundle them up and put them into a songbook, a popular means of presenting songs either for sing-along purposes or as hymnals. Not having any recorded or even copyrighted songs, he could at least semi-copyright them and protect them from pilferers by paying to bind a collection of just the lyrics, as he had no idea how to pair them with sheet music.
In June 1945 he took seven songs—“Grandad’s Musket,” the perhaps wishful “Mother Is Gone,” “Won’t You Please Come Back,” “Six More Miles (to the Graveyard),” another perhaps wishful “I’m Not Coming Home Anymore,” “You’ll Love Me Again,” and “Honkey Tonkey”—to Leon Johnson, a Montgomery print shop owner, and came away with a few hundred copies of Songs of Hank Williams, the Drifting Cowboy, with a cloying introduction written by Audrey calling him “a lean, lanky fellow [with] a lazy good-natured air about him which endears him to his radio audience and to all who see him and his gang on their personal appearances throughout the South.”9 Audrey talked Johnson into doing the job on credit, with a promise to pay later when they sold.
And they did. Selling them from the stage, Hank, the great pitchman, sold every book. In March 1946, he then paid his bill to Johnson—in a pile of nickels and quarters—and had him print up an expanded second volume, the Deluxe Hank Williams Song Book, adding to the first songs around two dozen more. For the preface, Audrey took a few, well, liberties with the truth, going from his appearances in the South to the claim that he had now “traveled through thirty-eight states [and had] appeared on dozens of radio stations and also in several rodeos out west,” which would have been a whole lot of traveling in nine months. Wishful herself, she added: “He is happily married and he and ‘Miss Audrey’ are already famous as a team.”10
This remarkable, prodigious collection ranged over the themes of unrequited love, personal confession and lamentation, and religious purging that would be his signature—“Am I Too Late to Say I’m Sorry,” “The Days Are So Long,” “I Bid You Free to Go,” “A Helpless Broken Heart,” “I Just Wish I Could Forget,” “Some Day You’ll Be Lonesome Too,” “I Loved No One Like You,” “I Don’t Care If (Tomorrow Never Comes),” “Won’t You Sometimes Think of Me,” “Take Away Those Lonely Memories,” “I Watched My Dream World Crumble Like Clay,” “Why Did You Lie to Me,” “I Never Will Forget,” “I Just Wish I Could Forget,” “Me and My Broken Heart,” “Never Again (Will I Knock on Your Door),” “In My Dreams You Still Belong to Me,” “Let’s Turn Back the Years.” There was the self-explanatory “Back Ache Blues,” mandatory gospel numbers like “Calling You” and “The Heavens Are Lonely Too,” and one written with Audrey, “My Darling Baby Girl,” one of two songs about his stepdaughter, Lycrecia, the other being “There’s a New Light Shining in Our Home.”
These songs prove he was quite adept channeling loneliness, heartache, fatalism, faith, regret, and vindictiveness into commercial fodder. The songbooks became underground “gets” for his growing cadre of fans, and a fair revenue stream. WSFA, seeing a promotional hook, released an edition of it, altering the title to Hank Williams and His Drifting Cowboys, Stars of WSFA, Deluxe Songbook. However, in typical fashion, just when things were running smoothly for him again, he was once more taken off the air in early 1945 for continually showing up drunk, at 6 a.m., yet. This so upset Audrey that she henpecked him to do something beyond making idle promises to stay off the booze. It was getting grotesque now, the incidents that made people shake their heads about him escalating. En route to one gig around this time, he passed out in the car, and when he couldn’t be awakened the band went on alone, leaving him snoring in the back seat. Halfway through the set, Hank opened his eyes and stumbled onto the stage, making an idiot of himself. That was one of those nights they had to play “Blue Steel Blues” a lot. Then, afterward, Hank got into an argument with a cop and was thrown in jail for the night, again, like the town drunk sleeping it off, before Lillie and Audrey could get there to take him out.11
The solution was to check him into a sanitarium over in Prattsville early in 1945. All he really would need to do there was sleep most of the day. As M. C. Jarrett once said, “He’d done that before. He’d get the d.t.’s and all. It’d get so bad that his mother’d put him in the hospital. The reason that he had to go to Prattville that time in ’45 was because they wouldn’t take him anymore at the hospital in Montgomery.”12
And still he kept gaining fans and gigs. After a yearlong absence from the air, WSFA reinstated him a second time in January 1946. It seemed that whatever he did by impulse to strike back at the ills life had dealt him, none of it was going to stop him from climbing beyond himself.
• • •
Even with his songbooks and demos, Audrey believed he was still playing in the bush leagues. He needed to make a bold move, she concluded, and he would take her up on her continual directives that he had to go to Nashville. He got the name of the station manager at WSM, home of the Grand Ole Opry, from WSFA’s program director and, early in the spring of ’46, drove up Route 31 to Nashville. WSM—the call letters for “We Shield Millions,” the slogan of its owners, the National Life and Accident Insurance Company—was situated in an office building downtown on Seventh Avenue and Union Street, but its famous diamond-shaped 878-foot tower was located out in the country. There it pumped out a 50,000-watt signal so strong that during the war it was used as a backup transmission source for American submarines and during the Cold War was part of the CONELRAD national defense network.13
In May of 1946, Hank, expecting to be received as a star, sat himself down outside station manager Jud Collins’s office. Collins recalled that when he came out, “this guy with blue jeans and a white hat” leaped to his feet.
“I’m Hank Williams,” he said. “Charlie Holt from WSFA told me to come up here and see you. He said you’d tell me what I have to do to get on the Opry.”
Collins had never heard of him, and sized him up as just another shambling singer, the likes of which he saw dozens of times every day. He gave the latest pretender the same line he did the others: he’d need to audition for Jack Stapp, the Opry’s talent coordinator and soon to be co-composer of “Chattannoogie Shoe Shine Boy,” which Red Foley had a No. 1 country hit with in 1950. However, Hank would not budge.
“You tell Jack Stapp I’m here,” he said, as brazen as a twenty-three-year old could be.14
Collins did no such thing, shooing him out of the building, and when Hank got back in his car, he drove back to Montgomery, personally insulted by the frigid reception he’d gotten. It had been a long shot anyway, but he didn’t help himself with his arrogance, as Audrey kept reminding him. She too was arrogant, however, enough to believe he’d make Nashville come beggin’, if he made the masses sit up and take notice. It was to his advantage that the lay of the land in country was ripe for guys like him. Its many branches—singing cowboys, bluegrass, hillbilly, rockabilly, western swing, jug band, backwater boogie, banjo boogie, etc.—were becoming more and more fused, waiting for someone to unite them. And Ralph Peer yet again was the protagonist. Peer in the late ’30s had established his own publishing company, Southern Music, from which came classic tunes by Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, and Fats Waller, and country classics like “Deep in the Heart of Texas” and “You Are My Sunshine.” In 1940, when ASCAP stubbornly refused to license country songs, the new, rival BMI stepped in, and Peer, supported by radio stations, funneled country as well as blues and gospel songs to it, making life easier for song publishers to commit to country artists.
The Opry itself seemed not to have any bounds. Unable to accommodate the demand for 25-cent tickets, in June 1943 the show moved to the Ryman Auditorium, a block-long, brown-brick fortress of a building with a high, sloping A-shaped roof and elliptical stained-glass windows—an ideal setting for what would be called the “Mother Church of Country Music.” On Saturday nights, its crowds spilling onto the street outside, mobs came seeking to be purged of sin and jump for joy, served a steady supply of top acts, the most popular being Roy Acuff. A possibly apocryphal story had it that when Japanese soldiers mounted banzai attacks at Okinawa they would scream “To hell with Roosevelt! To hell with Babe Ruth! To hell with Roy Acuff!”15 Also enormously popular were Bob Wills and Ernest Tubb. In every way, it was the white version of Harlem’s Apollo Theater, a homegrown communal mass.
One hour of the Opry was nationally broadcast by the NBC Red Network starting in 1939, and would go on uninterrupted until 1956, for much of its run airing after the program that had inspired it, National Barn Dance. As the war neared its end, one could barely have recognized the town now being billed as the capital of country music as the one where the Grand Ole Opry had begun in 1923. Nashville’s population, around 118,000 then, had grown by 30 percent in the ’20s and after the war sat at around 170,000. The Opry was a vivid advertisement for the still-growing music it presented in its most cleaned-up form but also uncomfortably synchronous with the Old Confederacy, a whites-only affair of flashy rhinestones, rigid rules of behavior, and worship of a tightwad ruling elite that thought of this society as “high class,” even as it perpetuated the self-mockery of hillbilly singers.
With his radio work, Hank was tracing the path of Bob Wills, who had cultivated a large fan base through the ’30s, helping root jazz, pop, and the blues into his country swing. After leaving the army in 1943, Wills had moved to Hollywood and reorganized the Texas Playboys, becoming an enormous draw where many of his Texas, Oklahoma, and regional fans had relocated during the Depression. He was of such import that his appearance at the Opry in December 1944 became a historic coup, temporarily breaking the taboo against drums and horns.
As for Hank, he was still seemingly trying to catch up with the trends that occurred in country music during the war. Other than “(I’m Prayin’ for the Day That) Peace Will Come,” his lone wartime song was “Grandad’s Musket,” a country-fried marching song that told of “the boys in the mountains” closing down their stills and moving to the city to make “leaded pills” and using the old musket to “join up with MacArthur and even up the score.” It took another six years before he did a patriotic turn, warning Joe Stalin in one of his Luke the Drifter “talking blues” songs, “No, No, Joe”—written not by him but Fred Rose—that “The Kaiser tried it and Hitler tried it, Mussolini tried it too / Now they’re all sittin’ around a fire and did you know something? They’re saving a place for you.”
But it wasn’t hot and cold wars that fueled Hank’s writing. It was the war with his sometime wife/sometime enemy, who between fights had convinced him—or else—to try, try again in Nashville, and do what Joe Stalin wanted to do: conquer the world. Not one country but one song at a time.