Hank Williams

by Colin Escott

  By the time Lilly, Hank, and Irene left Greenville after school finished in 1937, Hank already had a pretty clear idea what he wanted to do in life. He told his cousin Clara Skipper, “I ain’t goin’ to school always. I’ll sing my song and make more money than any of you.”

  Chapter 2

  “A Hill-Billie is a free and untrammeled white citizen of Alabama who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him.”

  New York Journal, April 23, 1900

  “ROY ACUFF, THEN GOD!”

  LILLY, whose recollections after Hank died were often purposely vague, stated with uncommon authority that she, Hank, Irene, Bernice McNeil, and Marie McNeil arrived in Montgomery on July 10, 1937. Walter McNeil, who had settled in Montgomery a year earlier, moved Lilly and her extended family up from Greenville on a logging truck. He laid planks across the joists, and loaded her stove and all the family possessions onto the makeshift trailer. Lilly was trying to better her lot and that of her children. The rooming house business looked more promising in Montgomery; the schools were better, and there were talent shows, more populous street corners, and a radio station for little Harm.

  Montgomery was uptown as far as you could get in Alabama. It was the state capital and had been the first capital of the Confederacy until the heat, humidity, and mosquitoes had driven the secessionists to Virginia. In 1937, some seventy-two thousand people lived there. Lilly moved into 114 South Perry Street, which she converted into a rooming house. Hank, then thirteen, was sent out to shine shoes and sell peanuts on the street; Irene sold packed lunches at the fire hall, the police station, and the Montgomery Curb Market. From 1937 until 1939, Lilly had Hank working weekends as a painter for the Heath Decorating Company. In September 1937, she enrolled him at the Abraham Baldwin Junior High School, although he arrived with the attitude that learning interfered with the important things in life, chief among them music. He took eighth and ninth grade at Baldwin, and then transferred to Sidney Lanier High School in 1938, quitting in October 1939, shortly after his sixteenth birthday.

  The situation on South Perry Street was complicated when Lon arrived home in August 1938. Lon later told his second family that when he returned to Georgiana and McWilliams, he found people staring at him as if he were a ghost. He would imitate a black man he’d known, who had backed away from him: “Oh, Mistuh Lon, I never done anything to you while you was alive. Why are you comin’ back to haunt me?” Lilly had, said Lon, told everyone that he was dead. Clearly feeling unwelcome and perhaps ill at ease after being so long out of circulation, he returned to the V.A. hospital that October. He said that he spent Christmas with Lilly and the kids, although he might not have had his boots off very long. By his own account, he returned once more to the V.A. hospital, finally leaving in April 1939. He went back to his old hometown, McWilliams, and when he filled out his application for Social Security on October 16, 1941, he described himself as “separated.” One of the apocryphal stories surrounding his return home is that he arrived to find Lilly in bed with another man, but even if that tale is untrue, Lon would have discovered that Lilly had not been missing him. Although she was acid tongued and built like a logger, she seemed to have no trouble attracting men. “She could be charming when she wanted,” said Walter McNeil Jr., and that seems to be the best explanation anyone can offer. She also had a rotating cast of predominantly male boarders at the rooming house.

  The female boarders have been the subject of some dispute through the years. Some say that Lilly was running a call-girl business, and toward the end of his life, Hank told a fellow performer that he had started entertaining as a shill for Lilly’s racket. Others, though, say they saw no evidence that Lilly was running a bordello, and several of the musicians who lodged at the boarding house insist that they would have been regular customers if Lilly had indeed been running a brothel. The only person to state authoritatively that the boarding house doubled as a bawdy house was Marie McNeil’s son, Butch, who said later that Lilly had a sideline running girls.

  Immediately after arriving in Montgomery, Hank set about getting noticed, although many of the specifics have been lost to time. In 1946, WSFA program director Caldwell Stewart wrote an introduction to one of Hank’s songbooks in which he stated that Hank had been on the station since 1936 ” the year before Lilly said she moved to Montgomery. When Hank came back to Montgomery for his Homecoming in 1951 he said he had been on WSFA “eleven years, nine days, and six months,” which, if we take him at his word, would place his radio debut in the late months of 1936, six months or more before Lilly says she moved to Montgomery. An article in the Greenville Advocate written to coincide with Hank’s Montgomery Homecoming also seemed to imply that Hank was on the radio in Montgomery while the family was still living in Greenville. Confusing the issue still further, some around Montgomery swear that Hank was on a rival station, WCOV, before he was on WSFA, but WCOV wasn’t launched until 1939.

  WSFA was the only game in town when Hank moved to Montgomery. The partnership of two local businessmen, Gordon Persons (later the governor of Alabama) and Howard Pill, the station went on the air in March 1930 and broadcast with one thousand watts from studios in the Jefferson Davis Hotel, within easy walking distance of 114 South Perry Street. In addition to its own programming, the station picked up feeds from NBC and small southern networks. Several former employees of WSFA take credit for bringing Hank to the station, but E. Caldwell Stewart had a better claim than most. Stewart had been hired by WSFA as its staff pianist in 1931 and became the music director several years later. His widow insists that Stewart discovered Hank singing on the street and selling peanuts, and put him on the air. Leaborne Eads, later a performer on WSFA, says that Stewart always told him that he found Hank outside WSFA and ran a remote down so that Hank could broadcast live from his patch on the sidewalk.

  Hank certainly knew what he was doing when he set up shop outside the radio station. Bill Hunt, then the advertising manager at WSFA, remembered that Hank used to bug anyone he thought might work at the station. He would sing a song, then hawk the peanuts that Lilly had bagged. “Peanuts, Mister, only five cents, and believe me, Mister, I need the dough. One bag? Two bags?” Hunt said that he put Hank on the air in a sustaining (that is, noncommercial) slot, adding that Lilly would arrange for people to phone the station demanding more of “The Singing Kid.”

  Chronicling Hank’s career on WSFA is made no easier by the fact that he was continually on and off the station, and the program sched- ules published in the local papers were often sketchy on local programming. Hank might have appeared on other people’s shows, but he wasn’t listed as the star of his own sponsored show until 1941. When he spoke of his eleven years on the station, he seemed to be implying that they were eleven blissfully uninterrupted years, but he was rarely on the air for more than three or four months at a stretch until 1947, his last full year in Montgomery. Between 1937 and 1941 he was off the air more often than he was on.

  If Hank’s early career is hazy, his life outside music as he desultorily attended school is even harder to piece together. Two sisters who lived near him remember that he would be out on the streets playing cowboys and Indians, but when the time came for the other children to go in, Hank would stay outside by himself. Later, he would call the early evening the lonesomest time of the day, perhaps echoing back to those years when Lilly was serving and clearing up supper in the boarding-house and no one had time for little Harm.

  Lilly’s ambitions for Hank were fairly clear. Christmas 1937 brought a new guitar, a Gibson with a sunburst finish. This was a major investment, quite probably the most expensive item in the Williams household. Lilly bought it from Art Freehling’s Music Store around the time of Hank’s first major public appearance at the Empire Theater’s Friday night talent show. She always spoke of Hank’s appearance at the Empire as if it was just one show, but others remember him appearing and winning
so regularly that the management requested that he not appear any more. Talent shows were the entry level of the entertainment business then, and Hank seems to have gone for them all. Members of Lon’s family remember him entering talent shows at the Wilby Theater in Selma, fifty miles away.

  At one or more of the Empire shows Hank sang a self-composed song, “WPA Blues.” Other than the ditty he’d sung in school, it is generally reckoned to be Hank’s first song. As Lilly remembered it, one verse went as follows:

  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.

  There were a couple of tunes kicking around called “WPA Blues,” one of them by Casey Bill Weldon, who later wrote Louis Jordan’s hit “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town,” but if the words Hank sang were as Lilly remembered them, they had, for the greater part, been cloned from a record called “Dissatisfied” by string band veteran Riley Puckett. The one part of Lilly’s account that is almost certainly true is that Hank partied away the first fifteen-dollar prize he won at the Empire. “When Hank was in the chips, so were his friends ” as long as the money held out ” always,” wrote Lilly in a confused thought that barely disguised her lifelong contempt for the way money ran through Hank’s fingers.

  Early on in Montgomery, Hank met fiddle player Freddy Beach. Born in Leakesville, Mississippi, in 1916, Beach was the closest to a seasoned musician Hank had met to that point. Beach had toured as a fiddler with Curly Fox and Texas Ruby and had worked as a traveling evangelist. Freddy and another local musician, Dad Crysel, organized a talent show at a hall on Commerce Street. Hank appeared there in 1937 or ‘38, chaperoned by Lilly. He got up and sang a train song, then started appearing every week. When Hank assembled his first band, Beach was the fiddle player.

  It was also around this time, 1937 or ‘38, that Hank met Braxton Schuffert, who remains the most voluble source for Hank’s early career. Born near Montgomery in 1916, Braxton had an early morning radio show on WSFA when Hank was living in Greenville. Lilly later told Braxton that she couldn’t get Hank away from the radio when he was on, so Braxton was a bona fide star in Hank’s eyes when they met. Braxton was a delivery man for Hormel Meats, and made a regular delivery to the boardinghouse on South Perry Street. One day, he saw the guitar and played a few songs, then Hank played a few. Hank was fourteen or fifteen, but his voice, Braxton noted, was as strong and clear as a man’s. The following day, Braxton had to make a delivery to the CCC camps in south Alabama, and Hank went along. Hormel didn’t allow riders, but Braxton told his boss that Hank was his little brother. Hank, said Braxton, wouldn’t lift more than approximately ten pounds. “Some way or another,” concluded Braxton, “I took a likin’ to him.”

  Braxton worked in tandem with a harmonica player, Smith Adair, who called himself “Hezzy.” There was a cornball group, the Hoosier Hotshots, on the National Barn Dance in Chicago, who’d introduce most songs with “Are you ready, Hezzy?” They were so popular that “Are you ready, Hezzy?” became a national catchphrase, and perhaps that’s how Smith Adair became Hezzy. Originally from Birmingham, he moved to Montgomery from Sylacauga when he was sixteen. Braxton met him one morning when he was coming back from the station. Hezzy was walking down Bell Street playing his harmonica. “I said, ‘Boy, can you play with a guitar?’” remembered Braxton, “and he said, ‘Hell yes, I can play with a guitar,’ so I said he should come up to the house and we’d play some. His mother was dead and his dad was a roving sign painter, rode a bicycle. Smith was on his own. We’d go down and play all the cafés. I’d sing, Smith would play the harp, pass the hat around.” Braxton and Hezzy figured out when the firefighters got paid, then they’d set up and busk outside the fire halls. They played small theaters, restaurants — anywhere they could draw a crowd and pick up a few nickels and dimes.

  By the time Hank arrived in Montgomery, he had decided to drop his given name, Hiram, in favor of Hank. He developed a little set piece to explain how this came about. According to one of his first steel guitarists, Boots Harris, he’d say that “there was a fence outside his house and he’d sleep with the window open, and there was an old cat walking up and down that fence yowling ‘H-a-r-r-m-m, h-a-r-r-m-m.’ He said he thought the cat was calling him so he changed his name to Hank.” The truth, of course, was that “Hank” sounded more like the name of a hillbilly and western music star than “Hiram.” That’s why Clarence Eugene Snow became Hank Snow, Hubert Penny became Hank Penny, and Lawrence Locklin became Hank Locklin.

  In 1938, when Hank was starting out with Braxton Schuffert, Freddy Beach, and Hezzy Adair, he heard the performer who, more than any other, would shape his music. Roy Acuff was twenty years older than Hank, and outlived him by almost forty years. Born on a tenant farm near Knoxville, Tennessee, Acuff grew up in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. A baseball career seemed likely until he was sidelined by a debilitating bout of sunstroke. During the layoff, he honed his skill on the fiddle and formed a band called the Crazy Tennesseans. Later in life, Acuff tried to gloss over this period, but the Crazy Tennesseans put on a vaudeville show that included several smutty songs. Two of them, “When Lulu’s Gone” (better known as “Bang, Bang Lulu") and “Doin’ It the Old-Fashioned Way,” even got onto disc. Acuff then paid fifty cents to someone he remembered only as “Charlie” for a song called “Great Speckle [sic] Bird.” In the Book of Jeremiah, the speckled bird was a metaphor for the church assailed by evil ("Mine heritage is unto me as a speckled bird, the birds round about are against her"). The song was strange and elliptical, unusually rich in metaphor for a country song, and Acuff performed it on the Grand Ole Opry on February 5, 1938. The overwhelming response led to an invitation to join the cast.

  Once on the Opry, Acuff dropped the smutty songs, and the Crazy Tennesseans became the not-so-crazy Smoky Mountain Boys. Acuff sang in a full-throated, emotional style that sounded good crackling through the ether on Saturday night. He hired a Dobro player, and the instrument’s tremulous sound perfectly echoed his style. He appeared in movies, toured the country, and twice ran for governor of Tennessee. During the war years, enlisted men would request more songs by Acuff than by anyone else, even Sinatra, and he reportedly earned an astonishing $200,000 in 1942. In Acuff’s hands, country music was just that: music for the country people of the South and Southeast. He bridged the gulf between ancient string band music and the modern era, and came to epitomize country music’s innate conservatism.

  Roy Acuff’s Appalachian music resonated with Hank Williams in a way that no western song or parlor ballad ever did. There were no electrified instruments, and no songs of liquor or sin that didn’t end in death or perdition. It was highly charged, emotional music, and Hank Williams was riveted. Talking to Ralph Gleason in 1952, after his star had eclipsed Acuff’s, Hank was still in the thrall of the older singer. “Roy Acuff is the best example [of sincerity in singing],” he said. “He’s the biggest singer this music ever knew. You booked him and you didn’t worry about crowds. For drawing power in the South, it was Roy Acuff, then God. He’d stand up there singing, tears running down his cheeks.” Acuff became Hank’s benchmark, both of success and of heart-on-the-sleeve sincerity.

  Acuff met Hank in the late 1930s or early 1940s and would eventually become Hank’s music publisher. When Acuff recorded a complete LP of Hank’s songs in 1966, he stated on the liner notes that Hank was working with Pappy Neil McCormick, a country bandleader based in the Florida panhandle, when they first met, which would place the meeting in 1940 or 1941. Acuff later told Hank’s first biographer, Roger Williams, that Hank would come by his dressing room whenever he played Mont- gomery. “[Hank] would sit around, sing songs and play the guitar,” Acuff said. “He was just a little fellow [Hank at age nine was already taller than Acuff, so quite what Acuff meant by this is unclear], and he just hunkered around in the corner waiting for a chance to sing.” Later, Acuff clai
med to have gone out to see Hank in the honky-tonks, even going so far as to get up and sing with him. “I wasn’t as big then as I am now,” he explained. “We both had a type of cry in our voice, and we sang with a lot of energy and feeling.”

  One of Hank’s band members, Paul Dennis, remembered an altogether different encounter. Hank was half tanked, and Acuff admonished him: “You got a million-dollar voice,” he told him, “and a ten-cent brain.” For all the crocodile tears he shed over Hank’s casket, Acuff’s opinion never changed much. He later disinherited one of his grandsons who had been busted for drug possession, and his attitude toward Hank’s transgressions was never marked by much compassion. Hank, though, never lost his respect for Acuff, and from the late 1930s until his death, he would introduce Acuff’s songs in his shows. One of his first recordings, an acetate that ended up in his father’s hands, featured an Acuff song, “(Beneath That) Lonely Mound of Clay.”

  By the time Hank started listening to Roy Acuff in 1938, he was already determined to carve out a career in music, but Acuff became a beacon. On a commercial level, Acuff’s success proved that hillbilly music could sell nationwide; on an artistic level, Hank gravitated toward Acuff’s full-throated, emotional style. Hank would have played music without Acuff, but whether it would have sounded the way it did or whether the market would have been as ready for him is doubtful.

  Hank’s first taste of touring was probably in support of Juan Lobo, aka Jack Wolf, a cowboy performer who claimed to have been in Westerns with Ken Maynard. No one named “Lobo” or “Wolf” is listed as one of Maynard’s costars, but a ropin’, wranglin’ extra who could spin a few tales of Hollywood would have impressed Hank Williams in 1938. Hank and Juan Lobo went out on a brief tour supported by Hezzy Adair, Braxton Schuffert, and Freddy Beach. Lobo sold handmade bat-wing chaps and belts, and performed standard cowboy shtick, like whipping a cigarette out of someone’s mouth with a sixteen-foot bullwhip, or dancing through twirling lariats. Hank was in his element. School couldn’t hold a candle to this, and Hank’s teachers knew it. “Aw, don’t wake him,” they’d say when he fell asleep in class. “He isn’t going to learn anything anyway.” After Juan Lobo left, Hank recruited Irene for the act and took a steady date at a theater in Roanoke, Alabama, ten miles from the Georgia state line. Braxton remembers that they drove up in Lilly’s Ford station wagon, and played three shows a night at 3:00 p.m., 6:00 p.m., and 9:00 p.m. for around one hundred dollars. Everyone came away with fifteen dollars, excellent money for that time.