by Colin Escott
At roughly the same time, a power play was unfolding at the Opry. In August 1950, Harry Stone quit as WSM manager to become a consultant, eventually working for KPHO in Phoenix, Arizona, where he discovered Marty Robbins. He was replaced by Jack DeWitt Jr., who was already president of WSM. DeWitt’s background was in the technical end of radio. He had designed equipment that could bounce radar signals off the moon, and had spent the Second World War working on radar technology, but had little or no feel for hillbilly music. DeWitt had the sense to place Jim Denny in the newly created post of manager of the Grand Ole Opry, despite the fact that he and Denny rarely got along. This left Denny the uneasy victor in a protracted campaign against Stone, a campaign waged on the personal and professional front. Although both men were married, they had competed for the affections of Dollie Dearman, a dancer in the Opry troupe, and that too was a battle that Denny won. The bitter pill for Denny was that he had to surrender the lucrative concession businesses he had built up.
Jim Denny liked Hank, and had a grudging respect for him. Hank, though, had a deep-seated suspicion of everybody. He would never invest enough trust in either Denny or Bill England for them to act on his behalf. Hank’s idea of calculating his net worth was to empty his pockets, and England soon grew frustrated. “We never had a contract because to me a contract represents a lack of trust,” he said, “but managing Hank was like a company asking a management consultant to come in and look at their business, make recommendations and so forth, then ignoring everything the management consultant says and going right back to operating the way they did before. I had the title of manager, but did not manage.” England maintains that he was paid low and slow, and says that Hank, even at the height of his fame, couldn’t cover a ten-dollar check.
Part of the problem was that Audrey was still buying everything that caught her eye, although England asserts that she and Hank were equally bad. “That went back to the early thirties,” he says. “They’d never had anything, then the money came rolling in, and anything they saw, they wanted.” Automobiles, of course. His-and-hers Cadillacs. Audrey bought a four-thousand-dollar convertible against Hank’s wishes — he thought a married woman had no business riding around in one. He bought a Cadillac Coupe for himself, and a six-thousand-dollar seven-passenger Cadillac touring sedan. Audrey shopped at the most expensive couturiers, bought overpriced furniture, and treated herself to jewelry. As Hank sang “Dear John,” the words must have rung truer than any from his own pen:
I went down to the bank this morning, the cashier said with a grin,
I feel so sorry for you, Hank, but your wife has done been in.
Hank later claimed that Audrey spent fifty thousand dollars during 1951 alone, much of it remodeling and refurbishing the Franklin Road house in what would become the Graceland school of interior decor. Soon after Hank came to the Opry, he boasted to a band member that he was now making money faster than even Audrey could spend it, but she somehow caught up. If Audrey were to defend herself, she would probably say that Hank matched her dollar for dollar. Hank had simple tastes, but indulged them to excess. He had partied away the fifteen dollars he had won at the Empire Theater in 1937, and now he was buying guns, riding tackle, or anything else that caught his eye. He left huge tips on a whim, and would sometimes simply lose money, or send it to people who mailed him a hard-luck story. After he came to Nashville, he started banking with John Clay, the brother of KWKH manager Henry Clay, at the Third National Bank. He would often return from a trip with a suitcase full of money that he would simply dump on a cashier’s desk. When asked how much was there, he would say that it was his business to make it and theirs to count it.
Hank’s fascination with guns was particularly costly. Jerry Rivers remembered that Hank, like Elvis, would befriend members of the police so that they would help him locate guns and even girls. One night, a member of the vice squad in El Paso took Hank and the Drifting Cowboys on a late-night excursion into Juarez in search of exotic firearms. Members of the troupe that accompanied Hank to Oklahoma City in 1951 remember him buying a gross of expensive cufflinks with pistol motifs. He bought a Tennessee walking horse, figuring that its smooth gait would enhance his cowboy image with minimal damage to his back. And then, on September 1, 1951, he bought 507 acres of land with a derelict antebellum farmhouse south of Nashville in Williamson County. The purchase price was sixty thousand dollars, but Hank put up just fifteen thousand, and then proceeded to dig a deeper hole for himself by stocking the farm with whiteface cattle. So if Audrey was the thrusting arriviste, using Hank’s money to buy social credibility, Hank was spending like a lottery winner with a month to live.
Some of Hank’s income went into a forlorn retail venture, Hank and Audrey’s Corral. Back in 1947, Ernest Tubb had opened his famous Record Shop close to the Opry. He mailed records across the nation, and bought up WSM’s airtime after the Opry went off the air on Saturday night to host his Midnight Jamboree from the store. Hank tried to replicate Tubb’s formula by opening Hank and Audrey’s Corral at 724 Commerce Street, next door to Tubb. The Corral opened in June 1951, and Hank took out a five-year lease on the property at $160 a month, then stocked it with seven thousand dollars’ worth of inventory, with furnishings like the western-wear stores he’d seen out west. The walls were covered with barn board, wagon wheels, and hurricane lamps. In addition to the western gear, there were Hank and Audrey dolls, fans, and knicknacks for the Saturday night crowd. The gala opening was broadcast over WSM between 5:00 and 5:30 p.m. on June 16, 1951, and Hank planned to broadcast every week in that time slot, much as Ernest Tubb did after midnight, but the Corral show had to be relocated to the WSM studios after three months because crowds blocked the sidewalk. Hank placed the store in the hands of Mac McGee, but it was too often a refuge for out-of-work musicians waiting for Hank to drop in and buy everyone Krystal burgers. He usually showed up on Saturday morning to sign the paychecks, and Audrey would come by most days to scoop the cash register.
As Hank’s success reached its zenith in 1951, the situation deteriorated at home. “Cold, Cold Heart” turned into what he liked to call “a little prophecy in song.” Audrey, now shut out from everything to do with Hank’s career except the cash flow, closed off her heart. The Hank Williams she got was either dog tired or shipped home early from a tour because he was drinking. The good times hadn’t all passed and gone, but they were fewer now. Two years of almost constant touring had taken their toll on Hank’s health, while the career pressures in the wake of “Cold, Cold Heart” were placing an additional strain on his ever less stable psyche.
Through it all, Hank never messed up in the recording studio. At 1:30 on the afternoon of Friday, March 16, 1951, just as “Cold, Cold Heart” and “Dear John” were breaking, he went back into the studio with four songs, four remarkably strong songs even by the standards he had set for himself. They were “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love with You),” “Howlin’ at the Moon,” “Hey, Good Lookin’,” and “My Heart Would Know.” It took half an hour of studio overtime on top of the three-hour session to get all four down, but Rose’s glee must have been uncontained as he made his myopic way back home that afternoon.
Don Helms’ opening notes on “I Can’t Help It” held fast to Rose’s credo that he must play high if Hank was to sing low. If Helms had played any higher, only dogs would have heard him. Jerry Rivers always said that Hank wrote the song in the touring sedan. He came up with the first line, “Today I passed you on the street,” and then asked for suggestions. “What’s a good line?” he said. Don Helms answered, “And I smelled your rotten feet.” Everyone in the car broke up laughing, but Hank soldiered on. The hand of Fred Rose is clearly at work in some of the lines; the grammatical forms and scansion are unlike pure Hank, but the content and the prevailing mood are identifiably Hank Williams.
In complete contrast, “Howlin’ at the Moon” captures the giddiness of new love. Much of its humor was rooted in Hank’s passion for hunting. The perfor
mance tears along, punctuated by Jerry Rivers’ hound dog yodels. It was but a short step from there to rockabilly. Hank had already written another set of words to the same melody, and called it “Countryfied.” He pitched “Countryfied” to his opening act, Big Bill Lister, a month later.
“Hey, Good Lookin’” seemed to demand the same breezy treatment as “Howlin’ at the Moon.” On one level, it seemed to point toward rock ’n’ roll (hot rods, dancing sprees, goin’ steady, and soda pop), but the rhythm plodded along with a steppity-step piano, and Hank sounded almost dour. If Audrey felt a twinge of guilt over her affairs, she must have wondered if she or another had inspired “Hey, Good Lookin’” and “Howlin’ at the Moon.” Hank’s Opry costar, Little Jimmy Dickens, says that Hank wrote both songs on a plane taking them to a date in Wichita Falls, Texas. Dickens also insists that Hank promised him “Hey, Good Lookin’.” “He said he wanted me to record it,” said Dickens, “and I was delighted, I thought it would be a good song for me. Then I met him in the hall of WSM, and he said, ‘Tater [Hank called Dickens “Tater” after his first hit, “Take an Old Cold Tater (and Wait)"], I cut your song today. It’s too good a song for you, anyway’” Dickens says he laughed it off, but it wasn’t the first time Hank had pulled a stunt like that, and it wouldn’t be the last.
Typically, Hank would offer a song around, and if enough artists seemed interested, he would record it himself. “Listen here what I wrote,” he would say, “ain’t that a good un?” Chet Atkins remembers that Hank would “get right up close to you in your face and he’d sing. If you raved over it, he’d love that. He was pitching songs to the hot acts of that time, and they’d say, ‘That’s a great song, Hank. I want to do that on my next session.’ If he got enough people to say that, he’d say, ‘No, it’s too damn good for you, I’m gonna do it myself.’” The humility that all country performers were, and are, supposed to wear like a crown of thorns often drops in private, but Hank’s hubris alienated many of his peers. He placed a surprising number of songs with other artists, but none of them ever amounted to anything. Many, like “There’s Nothing As Sweet As My Baby,” given to young and struggling Carl Smith, were inconsequential songs, and Hank probably knew he was doing no one a favor in bestowing them. All evidence points to the fact that he knew exactly which ones to keep for himself.
The four songs recorded on March 16, 1951, were released in two couplings. “I Can’t Help It” and “Howlin’ at the Moon” were released on April 27, and “Hey, Good Lookin’” and “My Heart Would Know” were released on June 22. Together, those two singles kept “Cold, Cold Heart” company in the charts for the rest of the year. “Hey, Good Lookin’” spent most of August and September at number one. Adhering to their agreement with Mitch Miller, the Roses offered him these new songs, and Miller scored pop hits with Guy Mitchell’s version of “I Can’t Help It” and Frankie Laine’s duet on “Hey, Good Lookin’” with Jo Stafford. Laine and Stafford’s record had much of the zest that Hank’s lacked, thanks to six guitars comping in unison underpinned by a jazz bassist and drum- mer, all punctuated by Speedy West’s steel guitar. The record peaked at number nine on the pop charts at the tail end of 1951.
Hank was back in the studio for another session on March 23, a week after he’d recorded “Hey, Good Lookin.’” Decca Records had jettisoned Miss Audrey, and Hank had persuaded Fred Rose to record her for MGM as a solo act and to cut some more religious duets. The sacred songs they chose were “The Pale Horse and His Rider” and “A Home in Heaven.” Hank had probably learned “The Pale Horse and His Rider” from its cowriter, Johnny Bailes, when he worked with the Bailes Brothers in Shreveport, but the song dated back to 1939, when Bailes was working with Molly O’Day and the song’s other writer, Ervin Staggs, at WCHS in Charleston, West Virginia. Full of images as spectral and haunting as any Hank ever wrote, it is nonetheless undermined by Audrey, who is strident and often woefully off-key.
“A Home in Heaven” was a song that Hank had kicked around in one guise or another for five years. A version was included on a set of demos sent to Columbia’s Art Satherley in 1946, and it would later resurface as “Are You Building a Temple in Heaven?” Once again, Hank and Audrey’s domestic disharmony seemed to find its extension on disc as she tried for supremacy on every note. Rose refused to okay the recordings for release, and it would be almost four years after Hank’s death, when MGM believed it was staring at the bottom of the barrel, before “Home in Heaven” and “The Pale Horse and His Rider” were shipped.
Part of the appeal of Hank’s records was that they gave an inkling of the gulf that existed between the public mask and the inner disquiet. He was now one of the most successful artists in country music. Eddy Arnold might be selling more records, but he couldn’t equal Hank’s overall achievement as a writer and performer. Most of those who punched up a Hank Williams record on the jukebox probably felt that the mood swing on every record between the bouncy up-tempo song and the slower “heart” song was more than a commercial formula; it was an echo of his life, and many other people’s lives. He could josh around with the guys in the limo, bathe in the applause onstage, find a girl and head off to a motel, see his records plastered all over the charts, perform a gratuitous act of charity for someone who was as poor as he had once been…but still he seemed to find no peace or real contentment in it.
Everyone who says they were close to Hank usually has to admit that — on some level — they really didn’t know him at all. “I never knew anybody I liked better than Hank,” Jim Denny said after Hank’s death, “but I don’t think I ever really got close to him. I don’t know if anyone really could. He was so bitter…. He thought everybody had some sort of angle on him.” The mistrust and secretiveness weren’t traits that developed in the wake of success. “This guy was afraid for anyone to get close to him, even to the point of being cold,” said Doyle Turner, who had worked with Hank in 1945. “He was never the type of person to be close. Bernice and I were closer to him than any of the group, and it was as though we were a hundred miles away from him.” Working the street corners with Tee-Tot, Hank had acquired a cheery mask that led people to believe they were his confidantes, and led many to claim that Hank had befriended them and poured his heart out to them. In fact, they’d heard one of his set pieces, every bit as well rehearsed and sincere as his songs. Audrey’s betrayals probably hurt him all the more because she was one of the few to whom he had truly opened up.
Hank craved success until he found it, then wanted less tangible things, like a centered home life. Success alone didn’t widen the gap between Hank and Audrey, but it financed their aspirations, which in turn made it clear how different those aspirations were. Audrey wanted to integrate herself into the old-money Belle Meade country club set, while Hank’s idea of recreation was to go fishing on Kentucky Lake. He is generally reckoned to have been happiest out on the lake with a cane pole. He didn’t even want to go hunting and fishing with the old-money crowd, who took their blinds, their servants, and all manner of expensive tackle and hardware. Several times, Hank apparently embarrassed Audrey at her dinner parties, and even if the stories are exaggerated, they nonetheless show how divergent their paths had become.
Much as Hank blamed Audrey for his poor family life, he knew his own conduct, particularly his drinking bouts, drove a wedge between them. Guilt over his drinking, his inability to spend more time with his wife and son, and his little flings almost certainly gnawed at him. Chiefly, it was the binges, now coming more frequently, that frustrated those who dealt with him. Everyone tried to make him feel guilty about the boozing — and he probably felt the guilt even as he covered it up with truculence. “I tried to shame him,” said Oscar Davis. “I said, ‘Look, you got your son and your wife,’ [but] you can’t shake an alcoholic.” Bob McNett says, “Some of the lonesomeness you found in Hank was guilt because he knew in his heart he wasn’t living up to what he knew was morally right.” The caricature of Hank Williams, with the Bible in one hand a
nd Billboard in the other, has its grain of truth. He knew right from wrong, and knew he had been weighed in the balance and found wanting.
The year 1951 would be the last good one, the last of only three. Hank spent the greater part of it on the road. Once in a while, one of his fellow performers told him his pace was killing him. He would shrug to hide the fact that he probably knew it, and say he had to strike while the iron was hot.
Chapter 11
We need applause. That’s how we live. When you don’t have a lot of noise around you, the noise inside you becomes overwhelming.
Judy Garland
FOLK AND WESTERN MUSIC TO SELL
THE year 1951 was Hank Williams’ career year. Bigger crowds; city reporters taking an interest in ol’ Hank and his songs; the admiration — sometimes grudging, sometimes not — of his peers. “Everywhere we were fixin’ to go was a higher level,” said Don Helms. Hank appeared to be cocky, but on another level the success made him deeply uneasy. Just a few years earlier, he had been refused jobs and turned away from radio stations as a damn drunk. He knew in his heart he was still the same person, and deeply mistrusted the embrace of the business. At some moments, the mistrust generalized to everybody, because everyone seemed to want a piece of him; everyone that is, except the person to whom he wanted to give a piece of himself.
After eighteen months on the Opry, Hank had sufficient drawing power to tour as a single attraction. He no longer needed to be part of a package show. This gave him the opportunity to assemble his own show, and in February 1951 he hired Big Bill Lister as a warm-up act and rhythm guitarist. Lister stood out in just about any crowd except basketball players. He was gauntly thin, six feet seven inches tall, and billed himself as the World’s Tallest Singing Cowboy. He loved hunting and fishing, so he fit right in with the Drifting Cowboys, and his bluntness and directness endeared him to Hank.
