by Colin Escott
Braxton fell out of the picture around 1938, but Hank continued with Hezzy Adair, and Braxton remembers hearing them on WSFA’s Saturday night barn dance. Accordionist Pee Wee Moultrie joined in 1939. He said:
I went in Montgomery with another band We went up to WCOV, played a radio program, and while we were playing I saw a couple of guys watching us from outside the studio. So when we got through, they came out. We went outside and they introduced themselves as Hank Williams and Hezzy Adair. They said that they were putting a band together to be called Hank and Hezzy and the Drifting Cowboys, and they wanted to know if the fiddle player, Charlie Mays, would like to have a job with them. So we had been on the road awhile and we were all broke and hungry and so we accepted. We moved our stuff into his mother’s boardinghouse and started a radio program five days a week on WCOV. For some reason, Hezzy’s name was dropped, but he continued playing bass.
I moved into the 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 in one of ’em.
Late that year, 1939, Hank and the Drifting Cowboys signed up for a tour of theaters in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. It was common at the time to bracket a live performance with a movie, and many of Hank’s performances were in support of Paul Muni and Bette Davis in Juarez. The promoter wanted a girl singer, so Hank and Pee Wee hired a young, fresh-faced cowgirl named Sue Taylor. As Pee Wee remembered:
Hank was on his best behavior the first two weeks. The third week, we pulled into Georgiana and went to the theater. The owner pulled out a bottle of peach brandy. We offloaded the car and Hank and Hezzy went off in search of some more booze. They both got loaded. Hank started the show and told the people that he wished he’d been born in their town and if it happened again, he’d make sure it happened there. He lost his pick and was strumming his guitar with his knuckles. Hezzy walked off to the west wing and vomited. People sitting on the left side could see him, and started walking out. I figured they would run us out of town, but the manager was laughing his head off. He said it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen.
Hank’s early career is largely available to us only as an accretion of fragments, and the picture doesn’t begin to sharpen for several years. Those who knew him and worked with him say that he never expressed interest in any career other than music, but music was barely getting him by. The money would be gone before it was made, and he’d borrow more. He drank whenever he could, and started to write songs by setting his own words to established melodies. Lilly was seldom out of the picture; she drove the station wagon to dates, collected the money, paid the band members, often housed and fed them too. She put up handbills, encouraged Hank, chided him, and cussed him out when he screwed up. Not even family members got into the shows for free with Lilly on the door.
One of the few surviving artifacts from Hank’s early years is a brief audition acetate from the late 1930s. Acetates date back to the pretape era. They were recordings made directly onto ten-inch aluminum discs coated with acetate. Hank and Pee Wee’s acetate was clearly intended to land a steady radio job because it was formatted like a radio show. Hank made up call letters for an imaginary station in Fort Deposit, Alabama, and he and Pee Wee kicked off with an instrumental version of Irving Berlin’s “Marie” (although written in 1928, “Marie” was a big hit for Tommy Dorsey in 1937). Then there was some chatter before Hank turned to the Sons of the Pioneers’ 1935 tune, “Happy Roving Cowboy,” which seems to have been his theme song from earliest times. Like most of the Pioneers’ best songs, it was written by Bob Nolan. Born in eastern Canada, Nolan captured the outsider’s wide-eyed wonder at the untamed vastness of the West, a wonder that filled Hank with ambivalence. The cowboy was never more popular than during the late years of the Depression, and life in the bunkhouse must have looked more appealing than life in the boardinghouse, but Hank got no further than naming his band the Drifting Cowboys and singing a couple of Nolan’s songs. The western makeover didn’t go very deep.
Pee Wee Moultrie doesn’t have altogether charitable memories of his two years as a Drifting Cowboy.
Mr. J. L. Frank [country star Pee Wee King’s father-in-law and manager] would frequently come to town representing the Opry Artist Service Bureau. He’d rent the city auditorium for a Sunday show, and use us to do his legwork. Then he’d bring in Opry stars, like Roy Acuff, and let us do the show with them. We usually got a better response than his Opry folks. Drunk or sober, Hank had the uncanny ability to hold an audience’s attention, [but] by 1940, Hank’s drinking problem was getting worse. All we were getting was three meals a day and most of the money was going to Hank’s mother.
It was Lilly, not Hank, who was the driving force, he said. “She owned the car, and by the time she took a cut for the car and the gas and oil, we usually came up on the short end of the stick. She rode herd on Hank and dished him out just enough to keep him from buying booze.” For a very short period Hank, Pee Wee Moultrie, and their fiddler, Charlie Mays, relocated to WBHP in Huntsville, but they soon returned to WSFA and a regular Saturday night job at the Fort Dixie Graves Armory.
The original Drifting Cowboys broke up in 1940. “A small group of people stayed at the boardinghouse on the way to a rodeo or carnival [in Texas and Mexico],” Moultrie said later. “Hank took off with them, and left his band sitting there cooling their heels, so we started working with another local band led by Dad Crysel.”
Writing to his mother from what is now the Fort Worth suburb of Handley, Texas, on November 18, 1940, Hank apologized for not sending any money. Someone he identifies only as “Jack” had just bought six hundred dollars’ worth of western suits for the band, and Jack had also bought a ranch where the band lived, so there would be no money heading east. The identity of “Jack” is unclear. It could have been Juan Lobo (Jack Wolf), but after Hank’s death, someone named Jack Hughes came forward with information about him, and Irene told her attorney that Hughes had bounced checks at the local five-and-dime in 1939 or 1940, then skipped town.
Hank’s letter was full of instructions. He asked Irene to go see Pee Wee and give him his address. “Tell Pee Wee I said to be ready to come at any time,” he wrote. “This is the greates [sic] country in the world, Texas.” He said that he hoped to be home in seven months with a “real band and pleanty [sic] of money to run one on.” When he applied for shipyard work two years later, Hank stated that he’d toured Mexico as a musician in 1940, presumably with “Jack.” The months in Texas are otherwise blank, except that Hank probably met Ernest Tubb, who’d just moved to Fort Worth to broadcast over KGKO, and was little better known than Hank at the time. Tubb, though, broke through in 1941 with “Walking the Floor over You,” and became the preeminent country star of the war years.
According to Pee Wee, Hank returned long before the seven months were up, claiming that he had back trouble. Lilly said later that he fell from a horse in a rodeo, worsening his already serious back problems. Hank was anxious to reassemble his old band; in fact, more anxious than they were to work with him again. He had no problem finding work, though, and quickly assembled a new group of Drifting Cowboys. The Texas dream would resurface when he drank. He’d pack his suitcase — britches and shirtsleeves sticking out — and tell everyone he was off to Texas. Then he’d sober up somewhere around the Alabama state line and hitch his way back home or wire for money. Soon after Hank returned, Lilly pressured him into taking a bookkeeping course at Draughon’s College, and, according to Hank, he attended for seven months (others, though, say this is unlikely, as a high school diploma was a prerequisite and Hank hadn’t graduated). Lilly, meanwhile, had leased a bigger boardinghouse at 236 Catoma Street, and this would be Hank’s permanent address for the next six years.
After Lon’s brief reappearance in 19
38, he went back to the hospital. Upon his release in 1939, he returned to McWilliams. He divorced Lilly on July 1, 1942, and married Ola Till on September 12 that same year. They had a daughter, Hank’s half-sister, Leila, on June 19, 1943. Lon never again took regular employment. He had a full disability check from the Veterans Administration, and he made his way doing odd jobs, occasionally running a country store with Ola. From the time Lon returned to McWilliams, Hank saw him on a fairly regular basis. Whenever Hank was appearing in the neighborhood, he and his band would descend on Lon’s house in the middle of the afternoon and then stay for dinner. Hank and Lon’s relationship wasn’t close: Lon had been gone for too long for that, and Hank wasn’t much given to intimacy anyway.
One week after her divorce from Lon, Lilly married Hank’s guitarist, Homer H. Haatchett, who played in the band as “Indian” Joe Hatcher. Apparently, Indian Joe died of appendicitis shortly after their marriage. Lilly kept feeding him oil to flush out his system, instead of taking him to the hospital. Two months later, on September 10, 1942, she married a Cajun serviceman, James C. Bozard, and they remained together until May 1, 1946. The one surviving photo of Bozard is of a smiling, gregarious, overweight man in uniform. Those who remember him say that he wasn’t around very much.
One of Hank’s surrogate fathers was Pappy Neal McCormick, a Creek Indian who led a band variously called the Barn Dance Troubadours or the Hawaiian Troubadours. McCormick was based 150 miles south of Montgomery, in and around Pensacola in the Florida panhandle. He played steel guitar; in fact, he had invented a four-head steel guitar. Four guitars in different tunings were mounted on a railroad tie that turned on a barbecue spit. McCormick’s band played for dancing, and although none of his music has survived, Hank almost certainly acquired some ideas about showmanship from McCormick. He might also have dated McCormick’s daughter, Juanealya; there’s a photo of them together dated April 24, 1941. Hank worked a few weeks at a time with McCormick for several years. Whenever his relationship with Lilly reached boiling point, he would take off for Pensacola, sometimes to work, sometimes to hole up in the San Carlos Hotel and drink. WCOA, where McCormick worked, was also in the San Carlos, so work and play were no more than an elevator ride apart.
A few surviving fragments give us some idea of what Hank was up to as war loomed. Three guys fresh out of high school in Hayneville, Alabama (about twenty miles from Montgomery), heard Hank on WSFA and decided to present him at the local courthouse. They wrote to him in care of the station at the end of March, and several days later Hank wrote back in pencil on lined paper saying he’d work for 60 percent of the gate. The promoters made up thirty signs and posted them around Hayneville. Hank and three pickers led by guitarist Zeke Crittenden arrived during the afternoon of Friday, April 4. Hank seemed shy and very unlike the outgoing performer the promoters had expected from his WSFA shows. He was shown the courthouse where he’d be playing, and he saw the jail cell. “Awright boys,” he said, “they’re ready for us. Ever’body on their best behavior tonight.” Hank went over well that night, and the following morning the three promoters went over to the courthouse to move back the benches and divide what was left of the thirty dollars they’d taken in.
Two weeks later, Hank worked his bread-and-butter gig at Thigpen’s Log Cabin. Perhaps he was working his way south, because he was photographed with Juanealya McCormick shortly after. Thigpen’s had opened in 1931 just off old Highway 31 in Georgiana. Fred Thigpen, at six feet four inches and 230 pounds, made a formidable combination with Lilly for anyone who threatened trouble. Hank played for dancing in a walled-in skating pavilion behind the main dining room. The pavilion was roofed, but open to the air with canvas curtains that had to be lowered when it rained. Admission was a quarter, and Hank and his new Drifting Cowboys would play from 8:00 p.m. until midnight or 1:00 a.m. Butler County was still dry, so Thigpen sold ice and setups, and the dancers would retire discreetly to fill their glasses with hooch. Playing every second week, Hank quickly became Thigpen’s major draw between 1940 and 1942. Hank alternated with a full dance band led by Cecil Mackey, and even outgrossed name dance bands like Wayne King. He mixed up his set, and did a square dance interlude when he would play fiddle tunes. He couldn’t call a square dance, but knew enough hoe-downs to get the crowd on the floor. If Hank served any kind of apprenticeship, it was at Thigpen’s and at Pappy Neil McCormick’s show dates.
The 1941 Drifting Cowboys included Shorty Seals, who had worked in the McCormick band. Shorty played the bass and did the comedy routines that were expected of bass players back then. Pee Wee Moultrie’s buddy, “Mexican” Charlie Mays, played the fiddle (the “swing fiddler,” he was called in the band’s announcements). Lilly’s future husband, “Indian” Joe Hatcher, played guitar and fiddle (he was dubbed the “wrong shoulder fiddler"). Clyde “Boots” Harris played the “singing steel guitar.” They gave themselves nicknames to sound like outlaws. Many others dropped in and out of the lineup. Paul Dennis played bass and rhythm guitar; Paul Compton played guitar; and Millard “M.C.” Jarrett and Jimmy Porter played steel guitar. No one stayed long, and playing with Hank wasn’t considered a plum job. On most schoolhouse dates, Hank sang without amplification, accounting in part for the forcefulness of his singing style: he was literally struggling to be heard. When Dennis played, the band had a portable public address system that comprised two twelve-inch speakers mounted in a box that could accommodate eight input jacks. The entire band used it until it was smashed in a traffic accident on the outskirts of Montgomery in late November 1941. The same accident permanently crippled Compton when a sun visor bracket penetrated his skull.
Steel guitarist Clyde “Boots” Harris was from Opp, Alabama. As a kid, he coveted a pair of boots in a Sears catalog, but when they arrived, he was disappointed to discover that they were both the same color, not one black and one white as they had appeared in the catalog. Boots led a band with his brothers, but decided to try for a job where he could play three or four nights a week, so he caught the bus to Montgomery in September 1941. First he went to WCOV, then WSFA, where the program director told him that their only hillbilly act, Hank Williams, played solo. Boots went to Lilly’s boardinghouse and found Hank lying on the couch. They played a few songs together, and Hank became friendlier.
He said, “Let’s go get a cup of coffee,” so we went out the front door, and there was a little café right there and I started in it and he said, “Naw, their coffee ain’t no good,” so we went on down a ways to a little restaurant and they had whiskey lined up on the wall. I had just quit the mill in Opp and I had maybe a week’s salary in my pocket. Hank said, “Have you got any money on you?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Have you got enough for a half-pint?” I said, “I guess so.” I didn’t drink at all then, so I hadn’t been knowing him but thirty minutes and I bought him a half-pint of whiskey.
Lilly put up Harris and other band members at the boardinghouse, docking their pay accordingly. When they were out on a job, Hank used to tell the audience that he paid his band $21.50 a week: “Twenty-one hamburgers and fifty cents.” It got a lot of laughs, but it was too close to the truth for the band to find it really funny. They joined him on WSFA from time to time, but the sponsorship fees didn’t stretch to cover a band. Joints like Thigpen’s together with schoolhouse or courthouse dates were their bread and butter. They played for dancing at the joints, but worked a little comedy into the schoolhouse dates. The latter worked on a split of the gate. Lilly would book a schoolhouse for an evening, and then she, sometimes in conjunction with Leaborne Eads, would put up flyposters all around the neighborhood. On the posters, Hank billed his act as “one-and-a-half hours of good clean comedy, songs and music,” and he would announce the show on the radio every morning. After the show date, Lilly would share the door money with the school on a seventy-thirty or sixty-forty split.
Those who paid the twenty-five or thirty cents Lilly charged for admission heard a show comprising, for the most part, other people’s son
gs and traditional favorites. Hank didn’t make any commercial recordings during the early 1940s, but he cut several acetates. The problem with acetates is that they can be played only a few times before the acetate coating begins to break up, and that’s what happened to a record Hank left with his father. It coupled Roy Acuff’s “(Beneath That) Lonely Mound of Clay” with the very appropriate “Mother, Guide Me” (possibly derived from the same root as the Stanley Brothers’ “Mother’s Footsteps Guide Me On"). The acetate was recorded at Sears, but after Lon hauled it out and played it too many times, the grooves simply wore away.
One set of recordings from Hank’s earliest days has survived, though it is not in much better shape than Lon’s acetate. The owner of Griffin’s Radio Shop in Montgomery recorded Hank off the air at some point in the spring of 1942. As usual, Hank kicked off with “Happy Roving Cowboy,” then tackled a sentimental pop song, Bob Miller’s “Rockin’ Alone in an Old Rockin’ Chair,” followed by Red Foley’s hymn to his dying dog, “Old Shep.” An unknown female vocalist joined Hank on the black spiritual “Jesus Walked That Lonesome Valley.” Then came Acuff’s “(Beneath That) Lonely Mound of Clay” and Ernest Tubb’s “I Ain’t Gonna Love You Any More.” The latter is intriguing because it was recorded before Tubb’s breakthrough hit, “Walking the Floor over You,” lending credence to the idea that Hank had met Tubb in Fort Worth a few months earlier. Next came Rex Griffin’s “The Last Letter.” Griffin was another Alabamian, and again it’s entirely possible that Hank knew him. Griffin traveled throughout the South and Southwest, but was back in Gadsden, Alabama, in 1941 with a band that included Pee Wee Moultrie. Griffin’s big hit, “The Last Letter,” was the suicide note of an older man besotted with a younger woman. The depth of personal feeling that Griffin invested in his songwriting would inspire Hank to share more of himself in his songs, and Griffin’s version of an old pop song, “Lovesick Blues,” provided Hank with his breakthrough seven years later.
