Hank Williams

by Colin Escott

  The radio shop acetates also included a 1912 pop song, “Aunt Dinah’s Quilting Party,” that had crept into country music in the 1930s, but the most interesting song was “I’m Not Coming Home Any More” because it was the first known recording of one of Hank’s own songs. Boots Harris insists that Hank had yet to find his own style. Hank would, said Harris, sing Ernest Tubb songs like Tubb, and Acuff songs like Acuff. “We’d get after him all the time,” says Harris. “ ‘Hank, why don’t you sing like Hank?’ Because we drew better crowds when he did. But he’d sing like Acuff and Tubb, and he’d do recitations like a guy on the border stations called the Texas Drifter.” Perhaps Hank sang like Hank on “I’m Not Coming Home Any More” because it was his own song, but, on the skimpy evidence of that one song, his style was intact very early. Backed by a steel guitar and bass, he sings a little higher than he would in later life, but the timbre of his voice and his phrasing are remarkably similar to his first professional recordings five years later. The song, too, is identifiably a Hank Williams song.

  Shortly after “I’m Not Coming Home Any More” was recorded, Boots Harris left the Drifting Cowboys to join Curley Williams’ Georgia Peach Pickers. The rift came when Hank was on a short tour backing folk and western singer Tex Ritter. They reached Albany, Georgia, where they played a date with Curley Williams. Curley was hopeful of landing a spot on the Opry, which was still a pipe dream for Hank. Boots recalled:

  We’d hear records on the jukebox, and Hank’d say, “Someday, I’m gonna be doing that — they’re gonna be playing my records.” But I didn’t see it coming any time soon the way he was going. He was pretty bad into the drink then. I was having to play guitar, emcee the show, do the jokes, and it was just more than I could put up with. I’d already quit him once because of the drinking. I told him if he’d quit the drinking and we’d get on with it, we’d get somewhere. I said, “If you keep drinkin’ ain’t nobody in the business gonna pay us no attention.”

  It was an admonition Hank would hear countless more times in the decade or so he had left.

  The middle months of 1942 seem to mark one of Hank’s periodic troughs. War had been declared in December 1941, but Hank was unfit for service because of his back. Even so, the war took its toll on him. The pool of musicians in Montgomery was depleted, and then gas rationing was introduced. Hank was on WSFA consistently for a little more than a year, from July 1941 until August 1942, but then he was kicked off the station for habitual drunkenness. He moved to WCOV, but by September or October he had quit music altogether.

  Hank went to Portland, Oregon, to work in the shipyards. It’s unclear why he chose Portland when there were shipyards 170 miles away in Mobile. Perhaps he was trying to get as far as possible from Lilly; perhaps he simply wanted the adventure. The incentive was provided by Kaiser Shipbuilding, which offered free tickets to Portland, free training, free accommodation, and good wages. Paul Dennis says that Hank was drunk on the day he left, so it might have been an impetuous decision made under the influence. He was probably there no more than a few weeks before he wired Lilly for the money to come home, although he later stated that he was there for two months.

  In November 1942, Hank moved in with his uncle Bob Skipper in Mobile and applied at the Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company. He was there on and off until mid-1944, never for very long at a stretch. Lilly later recalled the end of the first stint: “I believed in Hank,” she wrote in Life Story of Our Hank Williams. “I knew he had what it took, so I rented a car and went to every schoolhouse and nightclub in the Montgomery area. I booked Hank solid for sixty days. Then, the third week he had been out of the music business, I went to Mobile and got him and put him back in it. When Hank saw the datebook for those shows, he gave me the sweetest smile I’ve ever seen.”

  “Thank God, Mother,” Hank is supposed to have said in one of the most uncharacteristic remarks ever attributed to him. “You’ve made me the happiest boy in the world.”

  Chapter 3

  Long Ike and sweet Betsy attended a dance

  Where Ike wore a pair of his Pike County pants,

  Sweet Betsy was covered in ribbons and rings,

  Said Ike, “You’re an angel, but where are your wings?”

  (Trad.)

  SWEET AUDREY FROM PIKE

  AUDREY Mae Sheppard Williams spoke often of her late husband. In her revisionist view of their life together, they were young star-crossed lovers. Disturbingly quickly — within days of Hank’s death, in fact — Audrey began finding it hard to distinguish between the Hank Williams she’d married and the Hank Williams she wished she’d married.

  “I met Hank in Banks, Alabama,” Audrey told journalist Dorothy Horstman.

  He was working a medicine show. My dad’s only sister was with me and it was her idea to stop and see what was going on. I said, “I never heard of Hank Williams before,” but I learned later that a lot of people in the area had heard of him. I said, “This guy will be number one on the Grand Ole Opry one of these days.” I had that feeling very strongly. Anyway, after the show was over, Hank and these other people were going around selling herbs. Little vials. He came up to the car. I’ll never forget how country he talked. He said, “Ma’am, don’t you think you need some of these herbs?” then he quickly looked back, and he said, “No, I don’t believe you do.” My aunt asked him what he was gonna do after the show, and he said, “Well, I have no plans.” She said, “Well, would you like to go with us?” So he went with us after the show that night, and we went to a little club. I just seemed to be with him from then on. I just wanted to help him. Though I had no experience in the business, I felt this guy had a tremendous talent.

  I’m kinda psychic. I had a brother who was ten years old and I was twelve. He was disgustingly healthy, but I knew for months he was gonna die. Then he went hunting with my dad one afternoon and came in and took double pneumonia. They were bringing in doctors and nurses, and I was thinking to myself, “You can bring Jesus Christ himself, and he will not live.” That’s how strong I believed it. That’s how strong I believed in Hank. He was lucky with a God-given talent, and I was lucky with a few brains, so I used to go out and book shows. I was on the door. I took up money on the door, then I’d go up onstage with him. He used to do a blackface act that was just outasight. He’d sing a little bit, then do a few funnies.

  Audrey Mae Sheppard was born near Banks, Alabama, on February 28, 1923, some seven months before Hank. She was a prize; surely the loveliest woman in Pike County. Fine clothes sat well upon her. She once said that her family owned half of Pike County, and true or not, she thought she belonged with the old-money crowd. She characterized herself as independent, although her family probably had another word for it. As early as age eleven or twelve she had learned how to drive and was taking herself off on trips. “I knew what I wanted and I went after it,” she said. Her independent streak led her to run off one day with a neighbor’s son, James Erskine Guy. She was seventeen years old. They lived in Gadsden for a while, but a year or so later Guy went to work one day and didn’t return. Audrey returned to Banks, heavy with Guy’s child. Lycrecia Ann Guy was born on August 13, 1941. When Audrey met Hank in the late summer of 1943, she was working in Brundidge as a drugstore clerk, and looking for a way out.

  After their date, Hank asked Audrey to meet him the next day. It would be the first of his Bloody Mary mornings in store for her. He was unshaven, and he greeted her in the doorway of his trailer with no shirt on his back and the stench of last night’s whiskey on his breath. They went for a drive that afternoon. Hank told Audrey a little about himself, confessed that his drinking had got him kicked off WSFA, and then, after the show that night, he asked her to marry him. “I told my aunt, ‘This boy’s crazy,’” said Audrey.

  What did Audrey see in Hank? The only rung on the show business ladder lower than south Alabama hillbilly music was itinerant blues singing, but Hank and his music still had a vestige of glamour that the Brundidge Drug Store didn’t. Audr
ey also had her gift. She couldn’t see her own lack of talent, believing herself to be a singer until the day she died, but she could see talent in others. Early on, she saw something in Hank Williams, something that Hank probably had trouble seeing in himself. What did Hank see in Audrey? She was lovely, and that was enough to secure his interest. But it was more than that. His two wives were feisty, sharp-tongued, and ambitious. Lilly, of course, was precisely that, so the pop-Freudian conclusion is obvious.

  Audrey’s daughter, Lycrecia, was around two years old when Hank entered their lives, but throughout the years there have been persistent rumors that Hank and Audrey were both parents when they met. Hank’s cousin, Marie, was some two years older than Hank, born in Garland on May 8, 1921. She’d lived with Lilly’s family since she was twelve. Her father had never let her go to school because she had a withered arm and a prominent strawberry birthmark. The other kids, he thought, would make fun of her. Marie helped Lilly at the boardinghouses, cooking and cleaning, and, by some accounts, running the girls. The two women argued often, and Marie would sometimes pack her bags and move in with Hank’s cousins, the McNeils. In 1942, she became pregnant, and at some point the following year, she married a serviceman named Conrad Fitzgerald but, by all accounts, never lived with him. Dr. Stokes at St. Margaret’s Hospital delivered the boy child on June 24, 1943. Hank nicknamed him Butch. “[From what I’m told],” said Butch, “when I come home from the hospital, he come in and he said, ‘There’s my Butch.’” And the nickname stuck. What has never been resolved is whether Hank imparted more than a nickname. From the time Butch, or Lewis, as he was christened, could first remember, he insists that people put the word in his ear that Hank was in fact his father. “When you get a little older in life, you kind of see the light,” said Butch. “A lot of people walk up, and start telling you this, that, and the other. Momma had told a lot of people, [and] she hinted to me a lot of times, but she never would just come out and say it. She’d say little things like, ‘You such like your daddy, and you walk like him…and you got a dropped shoulder like him.’” Butch asserts that Lilly caught Hank and Marie in bed together on more than one occasion, although no one else saw them together in that way.

  The musicians who lived with Lilly heard the rumors, but Hank neither confirmed nor denied them. He acted in a caring, paternal way toward Butch, which could of course mean no more than the fact that he was looking out for a fatherless child. There were toys and trips to the movies. Hank, thought Butch, seemed overprotective. Some say that Hank had all the women he wanted and would not have fooled around with Marie, but that was less true in 1942 than later.

  Hank almost certainly met Audrey within weeks of Butch’s birth. He probably worked in music throughout most of 1943. In all likelihood, the medicine show fell victim to gasoline rationing, but by Labor Day 1943, Hank was back in Montgomery, appearing as a supporting act on a show hosted by Birmingham-based hillbilly singer Hardrock Gunter. The show’s headliners were to be Pete Cassell, the Sunshine Boys, and Gunter himself. Gunter remembers Hank hanging around backstage drinking. Someone figured it would be a good idea if Hank introduced Gunter, so Hank grabbed Gunter’s guitar, went out, and started singing. The crowd apparently recognized him and he went over well. When he got off, Gunter bawled him out, but Hank took no notice and sauntered off out the door, still with Gunter’s guitar slung around his neck. “The guitar’s neck and body hit the doorway,” remembered Gunter. “He tried twice more to get through the door before I pulled him round. He was belligerent and said, ‘You just don’t want me to play your guitar.’”

  Later that year, Hank played some dates as a local added attraction on a tour led by Grand Ole Opry star Pee Wee King. Born Frank Kuczynski in Wisconsin, Pee Wee was leading a polka band in Green Bay when Gene Autry came to town in 1934, trying to replace a couple of his band members who had been injured in a car wreck. Kuczynski signed on, quickly changing his name to Pee Wee King ("Pee Wee” because he was short, and “King” in emulation of another Polish band leader, Wayne King). A few years later, Pee Wee lit out on his own, taking his western-and-polka band to the Opry in 1937. He brought drums to the Opry stage for the first time, and joined Roy Acuff and Bill Monroe among the show’s new headliners.

  Another Grand Ole Opry headliner, Minnie Pearl, was on that tour. She later said:

  I met Hank in Dothan, Alabama. Always, when we went into a town, we’d go to the radio station to plug the show. Well, in the lobby of the radio station, we saw this man and woman sitting there. The man had on a disheleved suit, a cowboy suit but no sequins. And a very dirty cowboy hat, which showed a lot of wear and a lot of use. He was sort of crumpled up, like a stick man, on the sofa. The girl was very, very pretty. We were introduced to them as Hank Williams and his wife, Audrey. They were obviously in very straitened circumstances.

  While Hank toured south Alabama with Pee Wee King and his Golden West Cowboys, he sold him one of his original songs, “(I’m Praying for the Day That) Peace Will Come.” King said that Hank first pitched the song to him in Montgomery when the band’s girl singer, Becky Barfield, said she needed a patriotic number. Hank was hanging around the dressing room between shows and made his pitch. “Hey, King,” he said, “listen to this.” Hank ran it down, but Pee Wee was dubious, so Hank suggested that he try the song onstage. “He got a pretty good hand with a brand-new song, which is hard to do,” said Pee Wee. “He said, ‘Now, what do you think?’ I said, ‘Let’s wait.’” On December 13, 1943, the transaction was completed. Hank received twenty-five dollars, and although his name was to appear on the composer credit, he signed away all rights. The agreement was witnessed by Honey Wilds, half of the Opry’s blackface comedy act, Jamup and Honey. When King got back to Nashville, he placed the song with Acuff-Rose Publications, which registered it with the Library of Congress on December 20, 1943. As it turned out, the few dollars Hank got for the song was the most anyone made off it. By the time King landed his first recording contract with the Nashville-based Bullet label in 1945, peace had come, and the song languished until the Korean War, when Esco Hankins (recording as Roscoe Hankins) cut it without much success for Mercury.

  Hank seems to have returned to the Mobile shipyards immediately after the tour, but, as before, didn’t make a significant contribution to the war effort. The McNeils had moved to Mobile in 1943, and Hank’s aunt Alice and his cousins Opal and J.C. helped build Liberty Ships. Hank was a welder by day and hung out with musicians at night. “He would hit the joints,” said J. C. McNeil. “He tried to get a band together when he was in the shipyards. It was in his blood. I would venture to say that he didn’t work more than two or three months all told. He probably slept on the job more than anything else. It was encouraged by the foreman so that he could stretch the hours he could bill.”

  Audrey always insisted that she joined Hank in Mobile:

  We worked side by side in these pit things [with a blowtorch]. I had never seen [them] before. We’d go back to the little old hotel room, which was terrible, in the evening. I’d wash out our clothes. We didn’t do this too long — but we did do it. I knew he had something, and me or someone had to get it out of him. One day I said, “This is just not it, Hank. I want to go back to Montgomery, get a band together for you, and get you back on the radio station and start working shows.” And that’s exactly what I did.

  If true, Audrey had come to Hank’s rescue, just as Lilly had done a year earlier.

  We know very little of what Hank was up to in 1944. He probably spent part of the year in Mobile before settling back in Montgomery around August. He assembled another group of Drifting Cowboys, this one including Don Helms and Sammy Pruett, who would later work with him in Nashville. Helms was eighteen years old when he joined Hank. He was from a farming family in New Brockton, Alabama. In 1943, he went to Panama City, Florida, to work in the shipyards. He had an aunt in Montgomery who had studied music and had a Hawaiian guitar, and his father played fiddle, but even after his aunt had giv
en him the steel guitar he still had no thought of a career in music. Pappy Neal McCormick was the one who finally sold Helms on the idea of becoming a steel guitar player. “I saw him in a vocational building,” said Helms. “He was playing that thing, and I thought, ‘Man what a way to have fun. What a way to make a living.’” The only steel guitarist to teach Helms some licks was Boots Harris. When Harris would come back to Opp from Nashville, where he still worked with Curley Williams, Helms would go see him and learn Curley’s steel guitar parts.

  Very quickly, the steel guitar became the driving force in Helms’ life. Every Sunday he tuned in a short-wave program called Hawaii Calls, and he listened to all the steel and slide guitar players on the Opry. And there were some great ones. Bashful Brother Oswald worked with Roy Acuff and Little Roy Wiggins with Eddy Arnold. The tremulousness in Oswald’s playing complemented Acuff, and Wiggins’ dulcet tone complemented Arnold. Don Helms’ simple, hard-edged, bluesy playing would soon complement Hank Williams. Helms bought his first electric steel guitar, a Silvertone, from Sears, but, because he had no electricity on the farm, he had to play it on an upended washtub, which resonated just enough for him to practice. Eventually, he took over the steel guitar chair in McCormick’s band when McCormick felt like taking some time off.