Hank Williams

by Colin Escott

  People were hollering for him. Horace Logan introduced him. Horace always wore guns and a cowboy hat, and worked out of a little three-sided booth. Hank came on at 10:30. Skinny as a rail. He had some telegrams. Cocked his hat back. He read out a request from a sergeant and his wife at Barksdale Air Force Base. He’d read a request, then toss it away, then another one and toss it away. I thought, “God, man, is this cool or what?” Then he said, “Let her go, boys.” He did nothing but “Lovesick Blues” until sign-off.

  Clent Holmes worked those last shows. “He’d get up and sing that ‘Lovesick Blues,’” he said, “and them girls would come from the back of that auditorium, run up there at the stage, and fall down on the floor and pass out and scream. And he’d just take his hat off, and say, ‘Ain’t this a shame, ain’t this a shame.’”

  Hank was on the KWKH schedule for June 11, but was almost certainly in Nashville that day for his Grand Ole Opry debut. Red Sovine, who’d been on Hank’s old station, WSFA in Montgomery, was hired to replace him. Hank’s family stayed in Shreveport until Lycrecia finished school and it was clear that there would be enough work to support them in Nashville. With a too vivid memory of the first few months in Shreveport, Hank and Audrey had no desire to move only to struggle as they’d struggled early in Shreveport.

  “He was the first real star we had,” said Horace Logan. “The last show he encored ‘Lovesick Blues’ seven times — he could have encored it ten times, and I never let anybody encore more than seven times to keep Hank’s record. Hank left saying he was coming back, and there was never any indication that he was not coming back — it was just a question of when.” It’s hard to know if Hank saw it in those terms, but he would indeed return.

  Chapter 8

  In 1950, I took a little nip Along with Mister Williams on the way to Mississipp Stacked eight deep in a Packard limousine We met Oscar Davis in the town of New Orleans Oscar told Hank that he liked how he looked Liked how he sang, liked how he shook He told us all that we’d soon be rich And we started believing that fat son of a bitch.

  “The Ballad of Hank Williams,” to the tune of “The Battle of New Orleans” (attributed to Don Helms)

  “TONIGHT, LIVE FROM NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE…”

  WITH “Lovesick Blues” and “Wedding Bells” delivering a one-two punch, the Grand Ole Opry simply could not afford to ignore Hank Williams much longer. Fred Rose and Oscar Davis were keeping up steady pressure on WSM and the Opry management team of Harry Stone, Jack Stapp, and Jim Denny. “I came to Jim Denny,” said Oscar Davis, “and Jim said, ‘No we won’t [have him]. We talked about him with Harry Stone and he’s got a bad reputation with drinking and missing shows.’ So I plead and plead with him, and finally he agrees to square it away.” Stone in particular was vehemently opposed to Hank’s joining the show.

  Among other things, Oscar Davis guaranteed that Hank would be sober for a year, and reports reaching Nashville from the Opry acts who worked with Hank spoke of his newfound sobriety. Stone, Stapp, and Denny had been around enough alcoholics to know that promises of sobriety were as good as a trailing incumbent’s election promises, but they also knew that they couldn’t afford to ignore Hank Williams if they wanted to remain preeminent. Within a year, the Louisiana Hayride had come from nowhere to mount a serious challenge, and there were rumors of a rival jamboree starting in Nashville. Hank Williams was a wild card, but the Opry figured that he was now a risk that had to be taken.

  To sweeten the pot, it’s almost certain that Fred Rose offered the composer credit on a song he’d written, “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy,” to Stapp and Stone (he hung on to the music publishing, though). Red Foley recorded it on November 7, 1949, and it became the second-best-charting country song of 1950, and then a big pop hit when Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra recorded it. WSM executive Irving Waugh remembers Stone and Stapp saying that Rose had given them the song as a token of gratitude for putting him on the air during the 1930s when he was broke, but the timing seems to suggest otherwise, and the fact that Stapp wasn’t at the station when Rose was broke in Nashville in the 1930s also makes this claim unlikely.

  The Grand Ole Opry is the most famous radio barn dance, but it wasn’t the first. At some point during the evening of January 4, 1923, WBAP in Fort Worth, Texas, programmed ninety minutes of Captain M. J. Bonner, a Confederate war veteran, sawing away at his fiddle to the accompaniment of a Hawaiian band. No other performer in WBAP’s short history elicited as many telegrams and letters, so the station came up with the idea of a radio barn dance. Much the same thing happened in Nashville. On November 28, 1925, Uncle Jimmy Thompson, then age seventy-seven, came to newly launched WSM with his niece and his fiddle. He played a program of fiddle tunes, and the station was deluged with calls, letters, and telegrams. WSM’s owner, the National Life Insurance Company, was keen to reach rural areas and immediately okayed a radio barn dance. Dubbed the WSM Barn Dance, it was juggled around various time slots until 1927, when it became a fixture on Saturday night. Uncle Jimmy was a bit of a problem. He turned up drunk every now and again, and soon found what other performers on the show would find: he could make much more money just about anywhere else on Saturday night.

  WSM wasn’t a country station. Affiliated with NBC from 1927, its broadcast day was a mosaic of society doings, drama, news, and music. Some of the music came from network feeds, and some was generated locally. One night, WSM manager George D. Hay was segueing from an opera on the network feed to the WSM Barn Dance, and told the listeners to get ready for some “grand old op’ra.” The name stuck, but just as WSM was not an all-country station, so the Opry was not an all-country show. There were comedians (some of them in blackface), pop and sacred quartets, dancers, and a black harmonica player named DeFord Bailey. It was a fast-paced vaudeville revue, and its success spurred WSM to begin programming country musicians “live” on air during the early morning hours.

  By the mid-1940s, there were countless radio jamborees on stations great and small, but the Opry slowly achieved preeminence. It began reaching a much wider audience when WSM was boosted to fifty thousand watts in 1932, then edged ahead of the pack after the 8:30–9:00 p.m. portion of the show was picked up by the NBC radio network in October 1939. The networked portion was sponsored by R. J. Reynolds’ Prince Albert Tobacco, and by July 1940, the Prince Albert Opry (as it was called) was heard coast to coast on more than 150 stations, and attracted around ten million listeners. The entire show, which ran from 7:30 p.m. until midnight, had an almost biblical importance when Hank joined. Up in the hills and down in the hollers, neighbors would gather on Saturday night. Someone would hook the car battery to the radio, light the coal-oil lamps, and tune in WSM at 650 on the AM dial. Up north, exiled southerners would listen and dream of home. During the late 1940s, photographer Ed Clark came to the Opry and realized that the real story was the crowd. He photographed farm trucks, many with out-of-state plates, lined up outside the auditorium. Grandma and grandpa climbed from the tailgate, where chickens had been the day before. Clark photographed a mother breastfeeding her child up in the highest seats, and kids hanging over the balcony. The Grand Ole Opry was an institution that not only defined country music, but just about defined the South.

  Since 1943, the Opry had been held in the Ryman Auditorium. The story goes that the Ryman was built in 1891 by a riverboat tycoon, Tom Ryman, who had come onshore to heckle an evangelist, Sam Jones, holding a tent meeting. But the Reverend Jones chose “mother” as his subject that night — the one subject capable of reducing Captain Ryman to tears. Ryman apparently rushed back to his riverboats, tore out the gambling fixtures, dumped them overboard, and declared that a great preacher like the Reverend Jones should not have to preach in a tent, so he built the Ryman Auditorium for him. Seating was still on wooden pews when the Ryman became home to the Grand Ole Opry.

  By 1949, when Hank moved to Nashville, the Opry had become WSM’s principal money-spinner, accounting for two-thirds of the station’s advertising re
venue. The eighty cents scooped up at the door from the three thousand admissions more than covered the hall rental, talent, and backstage staff. Sponsors were lined up five deep, and WSM would soon start a Friday night jamboree (the Friday Night Frolics) and pre-Opry shows in WSM’s auditorium to increase the sponsorship opportunities. The hokiness, in which the Opry took a great deal of inverted pride, disguised ruthlessly aggressive management and shrewd organization. Harry Stone had taken over from Judge Hay in 1930, leaving Hay as the Opry’s chief announcer. Stone hired an out-of-work concert violinist, Vito Pelletieri, to work on scheduling, and they divided the show into sponsored time slots, giving each time slot its own star. The structure ensured that no artist would become more popular than the show. The Prince Albert Opry made its host, Roy Acuff, into a star, but the entire show could be picked up over a huge listening area, and made stars of Bill Monroe (who joined in 1938), Eddy Arnold (1942), and Ernest Tubb (1943). When Acuff tested his commercial clout by quitting the Prince Albert Opry in 1946, the Opry replaced him with Red Foley, who had already headlined shows on WLS in Chicago and WLW in Cincinnati. In hiring Foley, Harry Stone and Jack Stapp served notice that they would keep the Opry preeminent, but wouldn’t let any star eclipse the show.

  Hank was eased onto the Opry through a guest shot on the non-networked portion. It was the back door, but a door nonetheless. His first appearance was on June 11, 1949, during the 9:00–9:30 Warren Paint segment hosted by Ernest Tubb. Hank sang “Lovesick Blues” and made another appearance on the 11:00–11:15 Allen Manufacturing segment when he sang “Mind Your Own Business.” His reception that night guaranteed that he would be offered a spot on the Prince Albert section the following week. He probably remained in Nashville all that week. On June 15, he signed a two-year contract extension with MGM Records. MGM paid him a nonrecoupable bonus of one thousand dollars.

  The structure of the thirty-minute Prince Albert Opry was much tighter than the non-networked portion. The cast held a rehearsal on Saturday morning to do a complete dry run, with commercials, jokes, and music timed out to the second. Every word, every wordless gooberism was scripted. For his debut, Hank worked with the house band that included Grady Martin on fiddle or guitar, Zeb Turner and Jimmy Selph on guitars, Billy Robinson on steel guitar, and bassist Ernie Newton. The Prince Albert host, Red Foley, introduced him.

  “Well, sir, tonight’s big-name guest is making his first appearance on Prince Albert Grand Ole Opry. He’s a Montgomery, Alabama, boy, been pickin’ and singin’ about twelve years, but it’s been about the last year he’s really come into his own…and we’re proud to give a rousing Prince Albert welcome to the ‘Lovesick Blues’ boy, Hank Williams.”

  Hank walked out to fairly muted applause. Foley stepped back up to the microphone.

  “Well, sir, we hope you’ll be here for a good long time, buddy.”

  “Well, Red,” said Hank, coming in right on cue, “it looks like I’ll be doing just that, and I’ll be looking forward to it.”

  The band kicked off “Lovesick Blues,” and the audience buzz rose noticeably during the song; the crowd may not have known the name, but it certainly knew the song. Contrary to myth, there were no encores, but as Hank indicated to Foley, he had now been accepted for membership in the most exclusive club in country music. When they played acetates of the show at the usual postmortem in Jack Stapp’s office on Monday morning, everyone was well pleased. Hank’s quick acceptance was such that less than a year later, Easter 1950, when Foley was off for what was called some “much-needed rest,” Hank emceed the Opry‘s flagship Prince Albert show.

  After the June 18 show, Hank prepared to go back to Shreveport to mop up some engagements and see his family. He was staying at Nashville’s toniest hotel, the Hermitage, when Bob McKinnon, a deejay from Hank’s part of the world, came to see him. McKinnon offered a drink while Hank got dressed. “No, I quit,” said Hank. “I can’t handle it. I don’t ever expect to take another drop.” And he truly, truly meant it. With the world falling into his lap and a healthy boy child less than three weeks old, he must have thought that he would never again feel the need to take to the bottle.

  Soon after he became a fixture on the Opry, Hank set about assembling another band. He called Bob McNett in Pennsylvania and asked him to rejoin. Then he tried to find Don Helms. When Helms had turned down Hank’s Hayride offer, he had been making good money playing at a skating rink that he and Boots Harris’ brothers leased in Andalusia. Then one night someone was shot and a local preacher got up a petition to close the rink. This left Helms and the Harrises with two thousand pairs of skates and nowhere to play. The Harrises went off to Mississippi, and Helms went up to Richmond, Virginia, where his wife’s sister lived. He’d heard that Buddy Wheeler, the steel guitarist on the WRVA’s Old Dominion Barn Dance was moving to Phoenix, and Helms hoped to take his place, but by the time he got there, Wheeler had decided to stay. Four or five days later, Helms’ wife called and told him that Hank Williams was trying to reach him. Helms called Hank. “You remember when I was going to Shreveport, you told me that if I ever got to the Grand Ole Opry you’d go with me,” said Hank. “Well, have your ass here next Friday night.” Helms said, “You got it, chief.”

  Helms had probably figured out that the steel guitar was the crucial instrument for Hank; its notes were the wordless cry that completed his vocal lines. The steel guitar sustained the mood and took most of the solos. Nearly all of the great country singers had a steel guitarist who functioned as their musical alter ego. Technically, Jerry Byrd might have been a better player than Don Helms, but Byrd’s tone was rooted in the cloying sweetness of Hawaiian music and his melodic invention was sometimes a little too intricate for Hank’s liking. Helms had precision, economy, and a bluesy tone that echoed his master’s voice. He liked to use the high E6 tuning on one neck of his lap steel, and the notes he found there and juggled into Hank’s rudimentary chord changes were simple, direct phrases that precisely complemented Hank’s songs.

  Fiddle player Jerry Rivers was born in Miami in 1928, the son of a dentist, but grew up in Nashville and started playing semiprofessionally in 1945. Three years later, he quit his job as an electronic parts salesman to become a road musician with the Short Brothers, a breakaway unit from Ernest Tubb’s Texas Troubadours. When the Shorts decided to stay in Houston, Rivers returned to Nashville to work with Big Jeff Bess. Big Jeff was a Nashville legend, and his band became known as Big Jeff’s Finishing School for the number of top-flight musicians that started there. These days, though, Jeff is chiefly famous for marrying Tootsie, founder of Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, the legendary drinking hole near the Opry. Rivers says that Hank had phoned from Shreveport offering him a job at the time the Shreveport band was being put together, but he’d turned him down. Hank was offering fifty dollars a week then, and Rivers was making that much closer to home.

  Rivers was still kicking himself for not going with Hank when he heard through Jack Boles, who worked with Little Jimmy Dickens, that Hank was looking for a fiddle player. Rivers headed straight for WSM, looked around, and found Hank at the shoe-shine stand. Hank listened in silence while Rivers made his pitch, then beckoned him into unoccupied Studio C. Rivers opened his fiddle case and was surprised when Hank reached in, grabbed the fiddle and started sawing away at “Sally Goodin.” When he finished, he said, “Kin you play ‘Sally Goodin,’ boy?” Rivers lit into it, and Hank picked up his guitar. “He was stompin’ that foot, flailin’ on the guitar,” says Rivers. “We must have played it for five minutes, then he set down his guitar and I set down the fiddle, and he said, ‘Well, anyone can play “Sally Goodin” better ’n me is a darn good fiddle player. You’re hired.’” Or, as Hank said, “harr’d.”

  Rivers found out that Hank still needed a bass player, so he called his friend Hillous Butrum. From rural Tennessee, Butrum had also been raised in Nashville, and he had played with Rivers when they were growing up. He graduated from tent shows with the blackface duo Jamup and Hone
y to the Opry staff band, and by 1949 he was working with Benny Martin and Big Jeff Bess on WLAC. Just after Hank arrived in town, Butrum headed out to North Carolina to work on a tent show, but he starved out a few weeks later and came back to Nashville. When Rivers called asking if he’d like a job with Hank, Butrum told him he’d like a job with anyone. Butrum met Don Helms and Hank Williams at eleven o’clock one morning at WSM. They ran through a few tunes, and Butrum was hired. He went straightaway to see Big Jeff and bought a western suit for twenty bucks to look the part of a Drifting Cowboy.

  Hank rehearsed the band in an empty WSM studio, then brought in Jim Denny, who was in the position to let them play on the Opry or insist that Hank use staff musicians. Denny said, “They sound good to me,” and Hank settled their wages at fifteen dollars a show, five dollars over union scale. They could make much more selling songbooks and photos during the intermission. Hank was grossing around $250 a show (from which the Opry deducted its 15 percent commission), but his asking price soon increased.

  The Grand Ole Opry formally hired Hank on Monday, July 11, 1949, and Jerry Rivers reckons that the new Drifting Cowboys first worked together the following Thursday. They played the Opry the following Saturday, then rolled out of town in Hank’s Packard en route for Cincinnati. “In those few moments on the stage of the Opry watching Hank perform, and watching the audience respond,” Rivers wrote later, “I regained a humility I had lost somewhere along the line.” The really great musicians evince that kind of respect. “God is in the house,” a jazz musician once said when Art Tatum stepped up to the piano stool. Hank had his fellow performers watching from the wings. He was good and he knew it. With the applause of the Opry crowd still echoing in his ears, Rivers knew he had met the man who would change his life. Helms and McNett were less in awe of Hank because they had known him earlier, but Helms was overwhelmed at finally playing the Opry and meeting all the artists he had heard about all those years.