Hank Williams

by Colin Escott

  The Wrights agreed to stay that night. Johnnie climbed into bed with Hank, and Audrey went looking for her tranquilizers. She found just one or two left, then realized that Hank had gobbled almost the entire bottle. Panicking, she called a doctor, who came and shook Hank, raising him up on the bed. “Hank,” he kept saying, “how many of those pills did you take?” Finally, Hank’s eyes half-opened. “You know too damn much,” he said, then slumped back again.

  The following week, Hank went out on tour with 125 businessmen from the Shreveport Chamber of Commerce. The city had hired a train to make a goodwill trip through Louisiana and into Texas. It was a three- or four-day junket, and everywhere Hank went people remarked on his scarred appearance. Audrey had wreaked her vengeance at some point. As they sat on the train, Clent Holmes watched Hank. The muscles in his face were tensing and slacking, and he was grinding his teeth. Finally, he slammed his fist on the table, and said, “Dammit, Clent, don’t be lookin’ at me. I ain’t gonna drink nuthin’. All my life, I got people watchin’ me.’” He stormed off up the corridor, and returned with a fifth.

  It didn’t take much to make Hank reach for the bottle. For a few months, he’d kept his drinking in check, but now the old pattern was returning. He was drinking, and now that he was going farther afield, he needed to beat the torpor that overcame him on the long hauls, so he began using a brand of nasal inhalers fortified with Benzedrine. He’d work his way through a sackful at a time, then tear them open and lick the lining. The band was disgusted.

  In endless gestures of appeasement toward Audrey, Hank bought jewelry and things for the home as she performed the sacred task of perpetuating his line. All the while, Audrey was more interested in perpetuating her career. She could truly see no reason why Hank’s applause should not be hers. After four years as a singer, she still had little grasp of how she really sounded. The pickers said that she sang “between the frets” (meaning she hit neither one note nor the other). If she screwed up onstage, she’d chew out the musicians. The pregnancy allowed Hank a reprieve from the problem of what to do about Audrey, but he knew it would return. He was trying to run a professional show and get out of Shreveport. If his guitar player screwed up, he’d fire him, but come July Audrey would demand to be reinstated on the show, and there was nothing Hank could do about it.

  Seven months pregnant, Audrey insisted on another “Hank and Audrey” session, and so, on March 1, 1949, she, Hank, and Clyde Baum drove to Nashville for a double session. Fred Rose was there with a new lineup of backing musicians led by Zeke Turner’s brother, Zeb, on electric guitar. First, they recorded two duets, “Jesus Remembered Me” and the maudlin “Dear Brother.” Just over three weeks later, Johnnie and Jack, again with Clyde Baum, cut “Jesus Remembered Me” and were the first to release it; Hank and Audrey’s version was held back until August 1950. “Dear Brother” was coupled with “Lost on the River” from the “Lovesick Blues” session, and shipped in MGM’s all-hillbilly After Planting release in May, when its chances were thought to be the brightest.

  Hank rounded out the first session with “Lost Highway” and “May You Never Be Alone.” In recent years, “Lost Highway” has been the title of several books, a stage show, a record label, and a television series. It’s seen as one of Hank’s defining records, if not a defining moment in country music history, which makes it ironic that it barely dented the charts on release and doubly ironic that it’s not even one of Hank’s songs. The writer was a blind east Texas honky-tonk singer, Leon Payne, otherwise best known for an altogether different song, “I Love You Because.” Payne’s original version of “Lost Highway” had been released on the Nashville-based Bullet label in October 1948. Hank changed a few lines ("Just a deck of cards and a jug of gin / Sent me down this road of sin…” became “Just a deck of cards and a jug of wine / And a woman’s lies make a life like mine…"), but the song’s combination of perdition and misogyny made it sound like pages torn from his diary.

  “May You Never Be Alone” trod the same ground. It was one of Hank’s first truly great songs. He was starting to experiment with imagery: “Like a bird that’s lost its mate in flight…” and “Like a piece of driftwood on the sea…” It was a song that had been kicking around a while (it dated back to a 1946 songbook, when it was called “I Loved No One but You"), and the fact that he resuscitated it seemed to underscore the fact that he’d run dry. Clyde Baum took the only mandolin solo ever heard on a Hank Williams record.

  After a half-hour break, Hank and the band resumed, working until two o’clock the following morning. They took a second stab at “Honky Tonk Blues,” but Hank broke meter, so Rose set it aside. This version had a light, jazzy feel. Zeb Turner took a solo that was probably too intricate for Hank’s taste, and there was a bass solo that would have been inaudible on most car radios. The song had to be attempted a fourth time in December 1951 before Rose heard something he wanted to release. Hank also took a first stab at Jewell House’s maudlin “My Son Calls Another Man Daddy,” but it too was put on hold. House, who died in 1971, ran Jewell’s Record Shop and Fun House in Texarkana, Arkansas, and doubled as host of the Hayloft Jamboree. The only usable cuts from the double session were “You’re Gonna Change (Or I’m Gonna Leave)” and “Mind Your Own Business,” both clearly born of the dissent on Charles Street. Hank had bought the genesis of “Mind Your Own Business” from a Montgomery musician, Smokey Metcalfe, but refashioned it and adapted it to the melody of “Move It on Over.” His delivery was measured, laconic, and dry. Introducing it in October 1949, he told his radio audience that it was a “little prophecy in song,” and indeed it would prove to be.

  Right after the session, Hank, Audrey, and Clyde Baum got back in the Packard and headed for Shreveport. It was a bright moonlit night. Hank told Baum to drive fast and not to stop suddenly for dogs because the jolt might make Audrey miscarry. Six months after the session, Zeb Turner recorded one of Hank’s least distinguished songs, “Never Been So Lonesome,” so Hank might have used the session to pitch songs.

  All the songs from the double session were held back. The follow-up to “Lovesick Blues” was of paramount importance and none of the songs just recorded seemed to hold the magic. Seventeen days later, on March 19, 1949, Hank took his first-ever flight, to record a split session the following day with Red Sovine. “It’s the only way to travel,” he later enthused to the Shreveport Times, but was considerably more cautious when he telegrammed Rose just before take-off: “Flight 58 will arrive 5:45. I hope.” Hank had two songs by other writers on the slate. “I’ve Just Told Mama Goodbye” was a dirge by two Hayride performers, “Sunshine” Slim Sweet and Curley Kinsey. Sweet’s version for Mercury Records had just been released, and Hank wanted to get his own record on the market by Mother’s Day. It was as close as he would ever come to the Acuff sound. Don Davis’ steel guitar mimicked Acuff’s tremulous Dobro. It would be tempting to impute some significance to the fact that in three weeks Hank had recorded two songs that had killed off his mother ("Dear Brother” was the other), but dying mothers were to hillbilly music what fair maidens walking through the dingly dell were to English folk song.

  The other side of the record was “Wedding Bells,” an apparently undistinguished song that had been passed over by many other artists. To that point, the only version to hit the streets was by Knoxville radio veteran Bill Carlisle, who’d recorded it for King Records in 1947. The name in the composer credit was Claude Boone, a guitarist with Knoxville bluegrass star Carl Story. Boone, though, had bought it from a local drunk, James Arthur Pritchett, who performed locally as “Arthur Q. Smith.” According to Carlisle, Smith offered to sell him “Wedding Bells,” but Carlisle told him that he should hang on to it. For Arthur Q., hanging on to a song was never an option, and Claude Boone appeared with the all-important twenty-five dollars.

  Piecing together Smith’s story isn’t easy. He left the Army in 1943 and joined Johnnie Wright and Kitty Wells as their business agent, all the while writing and se
lling songs. He’s reckoned to have written the wartime classic “Rainbow at Midnight” (later a number one country hit for Ernest Tubb) as well as “If Teardrops Were Pennies” (a hit for Rosemary Clooney in 1951), “I Wouldn’t Change You If I Could” (a hit for Ricky Skaggs), and “I Overlooked an Orchid” (first recorded by Carl Smith, and later an Urban Cowboy–era hit for Mickey Gilley). Smith would stand outside the studios at WNOX in Knoxville with a little box of songs, priced between ten and twenty-five dollars. Anyone buying them knew they’d better hightail it to the studio before Arthur Q. sold the same song to someone else.

  Hank loved the soap-opera bathos of “Wedding Bells,” although he knew nothing of its provenance. “He told me it was the prettiest song he’d ever heard,” said Boone. Surprisingly, for someone who rarely lapsed into cheap Victorian sentimentality, Hank seemed to be a sucker for such lines as “a blossom from an orange tree in your hair.” Tillman Franks’ wife, Virginia, logged the songs played on the Hayride, and Hank was singing it as early as February 5, 1949, some six weeks before he recorded it. Around the same time, he worked a show date in Houston and called some local musicians, including Claude King, over to his hotel. He sang “Wedding Bells” for them, and asked what they thought of it.

  “Wedding Bells” backed with “I’ve Just Told Mama Goodbye” was released at the beginning of May 1949. Both were shipped a couple of weeks before “Lovesick Blues” began its stint at number one. “Wedding Bells” broke into the charts on May 14, peaked at number two, and spent the rest of the year on the Billboard listings. That alone would have stocked Boone’s refrigerator for years, but the song had an even bigger payday when the pop-western duo of Margaret Whiting and Jimmy Wakely placed it on the flip side of their chart-topping pop and country hit “Slippin’ Around.” By 1951, Boone had made more than forty thousand dollars from his twenty-five-dollar investment, but had the misfortune to live in the same city as Arthur Q. Smith, thus becoming Smith’s first port of call for a loan.

  In February 1950, MGM made out its royalty statements for the preceding six months. “Lovesick Blues” and “Wedding Bells” were just finishing their run on the charts, and during that period “Lovesick Blues” had sold 148,242 copies and “Wedding Bells” had sold 81,813 copies. Hank and Audrey’s “Dear Brother” had sold 739 copies. Altogether, Hank received a check for a shade over ten thousand dollars, his biggest payday to that point.

  The success of “Wedding Bells” coming on top of “Lovesick Blues” compounded Hank’s sense of isolation on the schoolhouse circuit in Louisiana and eastern Texas. Before he left Montgomery, he’d met a promoter, Oscar Davis, who booked Roy Acuff, Pee Wee King, and other Opry acts. In testimony given at a 1975 court case, Davis said that he’d met Hank as far back as 1940. He managed a show called the Garrett Snuff Varieties in Memphis, and several people at WSFA had told him about Hank. “I set up a meeting with him, but he didn’t show,” said Davis. “Then he finally showed up and worked for me for some time.” Davis didn’t clarify his point, but presumably he was talking about the war years. Known as “The Baron,” he was originally from Rhode Island, where he was born in 1902. He had drifted into country music promotion in 1936 after a spell in vaudeville and motion picture promotion, and was chiefly famous as the man who had promoted the 1947 Carnegie Hall concerts that brought country music to New York. Davis did his own radio ads, shouting “Don’t you dare miss it!” and wasn’t afraid to spend money promoting a show. In Nashville, the joke was that Oscar would still be promoting a concert two weeks after it had happened. If you were a performer, you might not make any money on an Oscar Davis show, but you’d get a full house.

  Hank called Davis before he recorded “Lovesick Blues.” “Now I’m ready for you. Now you’ll want me,” he told him. Hank went on to talk about the reception he was getting with “Lovesick Blues.” Remembered Oscar, “Hank said, ‘I do this number, Oscar, so help me God, I get fourteen, fifteen encores.’ He played me ‘Lovesick Blues,’ and in my mind I said, ‘This is the most horrible goddamn thing I heard in my life.’” Oscar told Hank to let him know when “Lovesick Blues” was on disc and, like everyone else, was stupefied when it ruled the charts. According to Oscar, Hank promised him 25 percent of his booking fees for life if he could get him on the Opry.

  Hank was getting too big for the Hayride. On the morning of April 12, 1949, Felton Pruett got married. That night, he worked two show dates with Hank at the high school in Many, Louisiana. Pruett remembered turnaway crowds for both shows. A few days later, Oscar Davis signed Hank to a personal management contract and placed him on an Opry tour with Ernest Tubb, Red Foley, Cowboy Copas, and two comedians, Minnie Pearl and Rod Brasfield. This was Hank’s first tour as a star, and probably the first to take him more than a day from home. They started in Houston, swung out to Amarillo and Oklahoma City, then headed down to Dallas and on to New Orleans. In six days, the unit grossed forty-one thousand dollars, and although Hank didn’t see very much of that and would probably have earned more on the schoolhouse circuit, recognition counts for something. He renewed his acquaintance with Tubb and Minnie Pearl, and got to know the others. His idols, he soon found out, had feet of clay, too. Foley, Tubb, and Brasfield could match anyone drink for drink, although Tubb and Foley had mastered the art of staying drunk for weeks while still making shows, something Hank could never do.

  In later interviews, Minnie Pearl could never quite get her places and dates right, but she remembered that tour, contrasting the broke and disheveled Hank Williams she’d met with Pee Wee King back in 1943 with the Hank Williams of early 1949. She recalled:

  I’d never been to the Louisiana Hayride, so I’d never seen him perform. They had me closing the show because I was what you call some kind of star. We walked in backstage, and I saw an entirely different Hank Williams. He had a wonderful wardrobe and a clean hat, and shiny boots. He looked great. He went on right before me, and that’s the last time he ever went on before me. I told the promoter that night, ‘"Never again will I follow or try to follow Hank Williams.” I knew he was gonna be a star.

  In the middle of all the uncertainty, Audrey gave birth to Randall Hank on May 26, 1949. She had been in the hospital several times with false labor pains, and when Hank Jr. was born he weighed ten pounds two ounces, and, as Audrey later said, “practically killed the both of us.” Hank and Clent Holmes’ wife were at the hospital when Audrey finally gave birth. “It was really a bad scene for Hank,” said Audrey. “They couldn’t get him away from the door of the delivery room, ’cause he heard me inside screaming.”

  At 3:51 a.m., Hank excitedly telegrammed Fred and Lorene Rose: “10 lb boy borned this morning at 145. Both doeing fine.” The big paychecks were still in the distance, so Hank had to borrow one hundred dollars from Murrell Stancil, owner of the Bantam Grill, to pay the hospital bill. “I can’t tell you how happy he was,” said Audrey. Frail and gauntly thin all his life, Hank was uncontrollably proud that his son was the biggest in the nursery. Technically, Hank Jr. was born out of wedlock because Audrey had been granted a divorce in Montgomery exactly one year to the day before Hank Jr. was born, but he was legitimized on August 9, 1949, when Hank and Audrey had their first divorce annulled. With Oscar Davis’ promises ringing in his ears, Hank disbanded his group in Shreveport just before he left for Texas to join the Opry stars on tour. “He said, ‘I’m going to Texas tomorrow,’” remembered Bob McNett. “ ‘If I call you, you have a job. If I don’t, you don’t.’” He didn’t, and the band was offered a job by the Hayride’s new hire, Hank Snow. After a few weeks, Snow starved out as Hank had initially done, so Hank’s band went its separate ways. Lum York hung around Shreveport for a while, then moved to Baton Rouge. Tony Francini went off to work with Paul Howard. Two years later, Bob McNett ran into him in a hotel in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Francini was destitute, trying to make his way back to New York. Clent Holmes stayed on the Hayride. McNett went back to Pennsylvania. Hank later offered Felton Pruett a twenty-five-dollar-a-
week raise to seventy-five dollars if he went to the Opry with him, but Pruett was ready to quit the business:

  I wasn’t really interested in moving up to Nashville. Hank couldn’t guarantee the work up there that we were getting, and I thought, “I’m playing with the top man in the nation, and I’m making a whoppin’ fifty dollars a week, and I’m gone from home all the time.” You git in that doggone car and you drive and drive, gas up, git you a Coke, drink it halfway down, pour a packet of peanuts in it and you was gone again. You’d make it to the next gig, see if they had a dressing room — if they didn’t, you’d have to dress outside. We’d play, pack, get back in that durn car, and what sleep you got you got in that ol’ car. I knew there had to be a better way of making a living.

  The Texas and Pacific Railroad offered Pruett nine dollars for a regular eight-hour day, and he was pleased to accept.

  At the time Hank left his band, Fred Rose and Oscar Davis were angling to get Hank on the Opry. Clent Holmes says that Rose didn’t want the band to accompany him because he wasn’t sure that Hank would hold up under the stress, and didn’t want the band unemployed far from home. After working the Opry tour, Hank went back to Shreveport and played out his remaining commitments with Holmes, picking up a band everywhere they played. As he worked his final Hayride dates, Hank told Holmes that he was “fadin’ out” of Shreveport, and that is more or less what happened.

  The last Hayride shows were riotous. Mitchell Torok, who would later write Jim Reeves’ breakthrough hit “Mexican Joe,” drove up from Nacogdoches just to see him. “Hank was on last,” remembered Torok.