Hank Williams

by Colin Escott

  Hank’s draft of “Cold, Cold Heart” (titled “Your Cold Cold Heart") was dated November 23, 1950. If that was indeed the day he wrote it, it was some two months after Audrey’s abortion, so perhaps his upset festered longer than supposed. It was recorded during an evening session on December 21. Hank sang with palpable hurt, never once sinking to mawkishness. His restraint only heightened the record’s impact, and left the listener in no doubt that he was living every word. It was the first song recorded that night, but from the outset Fred Rose saw it as a B side because it now seemed to be an immutable law that the faster numbers sold best. The A side — the fast side -would be “Dear John,” a song that Acuff-Rose didn’t even publish. It was unthinkable that Rose would have wasted another company’s song on a B side. B sides were known in the business as “free rides” because the record company paid the publisher of the B side as much as they paid the publisher of the A side. From the paperwork submitted to MGM, it seemed clear that Rose intended “Cold, Cold Heart” to get a free ride on the back of “Dear John.”

  “Dear John” was written by a hard-luck Texas honky-tonk singer, Aubrey Gass. It was the only hit he ever wrote. The first version was by Jim Boyd, younger brother of Dallas-based western swing artist Bill Boyd. Gass apparently knew Jim Boyd and offered him “Dear John,” and Boyd recorded it on March 11, 1949. Soon after, Tex Ritter got his finger in the pie. Ritter probably promised to get the song cut by a big name (himself perhaps), or get Gass a contract with his label, Capitol, if he got a piece of the song. The fact that Gass recorded “Dear John” for Capitol some six months after Boyd suggests that Ritter lived up to his half of the bargain. When MGM filed for a license for Hank’s version in January 1951, the application went to Tex Ritter Music in New York.

  For all his tales of life in the bunkhouse, Tex (or Maurice Woodward Ritter, to give him his full name) had spent longer at law school than on the trail, and knew the angles when it came to the business end of the music business. If Tex hadn’t beaten him to it, Hank could have bought the song from Aubrey Gass and no one would have known that “Dear John” wasn’t a Hank Williams song. Clent Holmes, who’d worked with Hank in Shreveport, remembers him singing it there, so Hank had probably acquired Jim Boyd’s record and carried the song around in the back of his mind for a year and a half. Needing a fast song for the jukeboxes, he remembered “Dear John.” When Hank and the band hollered the tag line, “Dear John, I’ve sent your saddle home,” it invited everyone in the bar, the auditorium, or even the car to holler right along. Once again, the upfront rhythm guitar carried the recording. Hank cruised at the brisk tempo, never once straining.

  The last two sides recorded at the “Cold, Cold Heart” session were for another Luke the Drifter single, the fourth that year. “Just Waitin’” was a lusterless talking blues that Hank had adapted from an idea by a Texas songwriter, Bob Gazzaway, but it did little credit to either of them. Gazzaway wrote a few more songs that got recorded, including several by Little Jimmy Dickens, but never wrote a hit. “Just Waitin’” promised more than it delivered. Everyone is “just waitin’” for something. It was a good premise, but a bad song. The other side of the record, “Men with Broken Hearts,” was Hank at his absolute bleakest. Later, Montgomery journalist Allen Rankin recalled Hank playing him the song. “Ain’t that the awfulest, morbidest song you ever heard in your life?” Rankin remembered Hank saying. The lines about “eyes staring in defeat,” “hearts pray[ing] for death,” and “know[ing] pain with every breath” were from the darker side of life that drew the poetry out of Hank. “Don’t know why I happen to of wrote that thing,” he told Rankin, “except somebody that fell, he’s the same man as before he fell, ain’t he? Got the same blood in his veins. How can he be such a nice guy when he’s got it and such a bad guy when he ain’t got nothin’? Can you tell me?” It was a theme that Hank harped upon often in his conversation, as he sensed that those claiming to be his new best friends would one day disown him. If those were indeed his thoughts, they were a chillingly accurate premonition.

  The year 1951 began with no hint of the changes in store. Hank closed out a hugely successful New Year’s weekend bash in Indianapolis when more than sixteen thousand people had paid to see him, and as he looked into the new year, he probably saw the road stretching forever. There was a swing out west, followed by a short tour through the Southeast, both for A. V. Bamford.

  During rare days off in Nashville, Hank prerecorded seventy fifteen-minute radio shows for Mother’s Best flour, hosting the show with WSM announcer Louie Buck. The format was almost invariably the same. Hank would kick off with “Lovesick Blues” (he was still “that ‘Lovesick Blues’ boy"), and Cousin Louie would come in over the instrumental backing with a pitch for Mother’s Best. There was a secular song, a “Come to Jesus” number, an instrumental, and finally a long closing pitch for Mother’s Best. Sometimes a guest would drop in and do a number in place of the instrumental. Most if not all of the Mother’s Best shows survived, and they include more than forty songs that Hank never otherwise recorded. He’s very unguarded, believing that no one aside from early morning listeners in and around Nashville and mid-Alabama would ever hear him. He laughs a lot, sometimes almost giggles, reminding us that he was only twenty-seven. The jokes are usually self-deprecating and the hymns are riveting.

  Some of the hymns were extraordinarily long, but Hank sings them entirely from memory. Most had a dark undercurrent. “The Great Judgment Morning” was possibly the best. It talks of the day when everyone will be equal. Money won’t matter; neither will debt. The widow and the orphan will be on an equal footing with the famous as they gather before the “great throne.” Roy Acuff had recorded it, but he hadn’t included one verse that Hank found especially compelling:

  The gambler was there and the drunkard

  And they who had sold him the drink

  The people who gave them the license

  Together in Hell they did sink

  And oh the weeping, the wailing

  As the lost were told of their fate

  They cried for the rocks and the mountains

  They prayed, but their prayers were too late

  There were a few surprises, too. The Weavers were in the pop charts with an old folk song, “On Top of Old Smoky,” and Hank was clearly amazed that a song his grandmother used to sing was in the charts, so he decided on the spur of the moment to sing it as his grandmother had sung it. The Weavers’ record is insufferably jolly, but Hank’s rendition is very melancholy. The Drifting Cowboys join him on the chorus to haunting effect. It could have been a hit.

  Hank featured both “Cold, Cold Heart” and “Dear John” on his Mother’s Best shows, promoting what was then his latest release. The single was shipped on February 2, 1951, and “Dear John” showed up in the charts one month later. Within two weeks, though, “Cold, Cold Heart” overtook it. This left Rose gnashing his teeth because “Dear John” was now getting a free ride on the back of “Cold, Cold Heart.” Still, it was good to know that a slow song would sell. “Cold, Cold Heart” eventually peaked at number one for a week in May, then hung around on the charts for the rest of the year. “Dear John” was off the charts in four weeks.

  “Cold, Cold Heart” lingered because it acquired a new, and unexpected, lease on life. It’s part of Acuff-Rose mythology that, against all odds and against the deeply ingrained resistance of the pop music establishment, Wesley Rose went to New York and persuaded Mitch Miller to record “Cold, Cold Heart” with Tony Bennett. Wesley loved to tell of how he beat on every record company door in New York with the song. “That’s a hillbilly song,” he was told everywhere, “and there’s no use kidding yourself otherwise.” Finally, he persuaded Miller, the goateed head of pop music A&R at Columbia Records, to take a listen. The rest, Wesley was fond of saying, is history.

  In truth, Wesley took “Cold, Cold Heart” to New York at a time when the market for country songs had never been better. Every pop A&R man in town should ha
ve been beating a path to his hotel room. The idea of covering country records for the pop charts gathered steam after Jimmie Davis’ “You Are My Sunshine” and Al Dexter’s “Pistol Packin’ Mama” became huge wartime hits for Bing Crosby. Acuff-Rose’s first taste of pop action came several years later with “Jealous Heart.” Written by Red Foley’s sister-in-law, Jenny Lou Carson, it was a hit for Tex Ritter in 1945, then languished for four years before a Chicago pianist and singer, Al “Mr. Flying Fingers” Morgan, recorded it for a small local label. Morgan’s record was picked up by London Records, and it became a top five pop record in 1949. Acuff-Rose had nothing to do with Morgan’s picking up the song, but if the Roses ever needed a reminder that pop sales comfortably exceeded country sales, Al “Mr. Flying Fingers” Morgan was it. Later in 1949, Acuff-Rose had another pop hit when Frank Sinatra and others covered Red Foley’s “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy.”

  Pee Wee King’s “Tennessee Waltz” provided another vast, unanticipated windfall for Acuff-Rose. Again, no one there had any role in its success, which probably increased Wesley’s need to cement himself to the success of “Cold, Cold Heart.” His training as an accountant led him to downplay dumb luck, which has always counted for so much in the music business. King had written and recorded “Tennessee Waltz” in 1947 and released it in January 1948 back-to-back with his version of Fred Rose’s “Rootie Tootie.” It became a fair-sized country hit. King and Cowboy Copas sold roughly 380,000 copies combined, but the song was dead in the water by the time jazz band leader Erskine Hawkins recorded it in September 1950. Jerry Wexler, then a Billboard columnist, heard Hawkins’ record and suggested to Patti Page’s manager that she put it on the flip side of her 1950 Christmas single. By early 1951, it had become one of those inexplicable, uncontainable smashes. By May, Page’s record had sold 4.8 million copies and cover versions had probably sold half as many again. Sheet music sales had topped 1.1 million, and it was the highest-grossing song that BMI had ever represented. So, when Wesley Rose went to New York in early 1951 with “Cold, Cold Heart” in his briefcase, he shouldn’t have had to twist anybody’s arm into recording it.

  Mitch Miller downplays Wesley’s role in getting “Cold, Cold Heart” to him. He says it was Jerry Wexler who alerted him to “Cold, Cold Heart,” but confirms that Tony Bennett had to be coerced into recording it. “When I heard the song, I thought it was made to order for Tony,” says Miller. “I thought the last four lines were particularly poetic, and so I played Hank Williams’ record for Tony, with the scratchy fiddle and everything, and Tony said, ‘Don’t make me do cowboy songs!’ I said, ‘Tony, listen to the words. It’s only a record. If it doesn’t work out, I won’t put it out. I’m not here to hurt you.’”

  Bennett had yet to see a chart entry when he recorded “Cold, Cold Heart” on May 31, 1951, so he wasn’t the prize catch that Wesley might have been hoping for, but three weeks after the session, his version of “Because of You” shot straight to number one. This gave “Cold, Cold Heart” a head start, and proved again how important dumb luck could be. If “Because of You” had flopped, would “Cold, Cold Heart” have done as well? Would it even have shown up at all? As it was, “Cold, Cold Heart” jumped to the top of the pop charts, and every record label had to have at least one cover version. The Fontane Sisters and Perry Como did it for RCA, Louis Armstrong and Eileen Wilson for Decca, Tony Fontane and Dinah Washington for Mercury, and so on. It wasn’t half the phenomenon that “Tennessee Waltz” had been, but “Cold, Cold Heart” served notice that Hank Williams’ songs now had a potential that was unthinkable when he sent up his acetate of God, Mother, and Death songs for Molly O’Day just five years earlier. Mitch Miller, always the unabashed populist, came to appreciate Hank’s artistry. “He had a way of reaching your guts and your head at the same time,” he said later. “The language hit home. Nobody I know could use basic English so effectively.” Tony Bennett never really understood what Hank was doing, but in January 1956, he sang “Cold, Cold Heart” on an ABC-TV Opry broadcast, while Ernest Tubb stared at him with stunned, icy disbelief.

  Hank was tickled. He had always made a policy of spinning his own records on the jukebox in any restaurant he ate in; now he spun Tony Bennett’s record as well. The first couple of times, he would slap the table, grin his shiteating grin and say “Hot damn!” Now when he looked in Billboard every week he had a reason to check out the pop listings instead of heading straight for the “Folk Talent and Tunes” section. Miller’s success with “Cold, Cold Heart” earned him a promise from Acuff-Rose that he would get prerelease demos of any songs that Wesley or Fred considered to have pop potential. “That way,” says Miller, “I wouldn’t have to scramble, but I agreed with Fred and Wesley that I wouldn’t release my record until the original had got going on the country chart.” It was an arrangement that would be mutually profitable for Acuff-Rose and Columbia over the next few years. When Rose spoke to the Wall Street Journal in late 1951, he stated that Acuff-Rose’s gross for that year would be 40 or 50 percent up on 1950, which had in turn been 150 percent better than 1949. Mitch Miller made a substantial contribution to that.

  Looked at in a broader context, the success of hillbilly songs refashioned for the pop market and the success of R&B reconfigured as pop a couple of years later meant that the music of the black and white underclasses was entering the pop mainstream through the back door. That in turn meant that the pop market was being prepped for rock ’n’ roll. The “folk tunes boom,” as it was termed at the time, caught the attention not only of the Wall Street Journal but of virtually every other periodical. The Collier’s approach was typical in its mixture of surprise and condescension; “There’s Gold in Them Thar Hillbilly Tunes” was the headline. Hank was often singled out in the press’ musings. Much of the comment focused upon his ability to write hits in half an hour, and Hank played the role of the intuitive folk artist to the hilt, never once mentioning the rigid application of commercial logic that took place in Rose’s home studio before every session.

  Not only were cover versions of hillbilly tunes selling well, but the original versions were doing unprecedentedly good business as well. Decca Records had tried without success to sign Hank Williams, but had Red Foley, Ernest Tubb, and Kitty Wells under contract. Decca estimated that 50 percent of its sales derived from country music. Even Columbia Records estimated that 40 percent of its gross came from country. The bottom line looked even rosier. A typical pop session of the day used as many as thirty or forty instrumentalists at $41.25 for three hours. Before the session, an army of copyists was required to write out the arrange- ments, and a contractor had to be engaged to call everyone in. Then, typically, only one or two songs would be recorded during a session. In Nashville, most sessions used no more than six or seven instrumentalists, arrangements were cooked up on the spot, no contractor was needed, and three or four songs were cut in three hours.

  Hank was happy to cash the checks as the palm court orchestras played his songs, but on a far deeper level he was suspicious of the trend, seeing it as a dilution of his music. “These pop bands,” he told an interviewer in Charleston, South Carolina, “will play our hillbilly songs when they cain’t eat any other way.” If he saw the trade advertisement for Bennett’s “Cold, Cold Heart,” it must have confirmed his darkest suspicions. The headline was “Popcorn! A Top Corn Tune Gone Pop.” Tony Bennett was caricatured in a policeman’s uniform holding up traffic while a witless hillbilly leads a pig and a mule across a busy city street. In terms of denigrating hillbilly music, this was no better than the Sterling ads four years earlier.

  For all its success, “Cold, Cold Heart” did little to change Hank’s routine. After the Opry on Saturday night, he headed out of town on a four- or five-day junket. The crowds were getting bigger as his reputation grew, but otherwise it was all much as before. There was the backstage meet ’n’ greet, and no one was more concerned than Hank to sign every autograph. There were deejays to be stroked — the phrases now tripped
like a litany off Hank’s tongue. If there was time and if he had the energy, there might be a quick dive into a motel with a woman. Sometimes, the band would sit out in the car with the motor running while Hank took care of business. Then there was more wriggling inside that damned old car trying to find a position in which his back didn’t hurt so bad, and more grief when he got home. It was a routine that was beginning to pall, but for the present it beat anything Hank had ever known, and he was still happy to be out there.

  Hank had been without a manager since he and Oscar Davis parted company, and he tried to bring some order to his business affairs by hiring William R. “Bill” England. Rather than look around Nashville, Hank once again pulled someone from Montgomery. England had been a time salesman on WSFA before coming to Nashville. He moved up in January 1951 and worked from his home at 1950 Richard Jones Road. England’s first priority was to assemble a catalog of promotional items that could be sent out in advance of a show. The promoter could pick and choose from an array of predesigned one- or two-column advertisements for “The Sensational Radio-Recording Star Mr. Lovesick Blues Hank Williams with his Entire Grand Ole Opry Show.” If Hank was paying to use the Grand Ole Opry trademark, he might as well get all the mileage he could out of it. England also wrote some prepackaged stories that could run in newspapers just before the show, and printed up huge stocks of 8 × 10 inch photos for store windows, giveaways, and intermission sales. It wasn’t long, though, before England found that Hank really wanted a gofer, not a manager.