Hank Williams

by Colin Escott

  Born Weldon E. Lister in Karnes County, south of San Antonio, on January 5, 1923, Big Bill grew up in the hill country around Brady and had been performing since 1938. By the late 1940s, he had been a staple of San Antonio-area radio for almost a decade. Like Roger Miller’s “Kansas City Star,” he was well known in and around his hometown. He got stopped in parking lots and his barber told him jokes. He’d even made a few records for small labels, but knew that the future held nothing for him unless he got out of town. Shortly after Christmas 1950, he and his wife, Lila, locked up the house, packed his Nudie suits and his Gibson into their car, and headed for Nashville.

  During Lister’s first week in Nashville he met Joe Allison, who’d been a deejay in San Antonio before moving to Nashville’s WMAK. Allison brought Lister backstage at the Opry to meet Hank and Jim Denny. Hank was sitting quietly by himself on one of the pews reserved for performers. He and Lister chitchatted and went out to the alley to smoke a cigarette. Hank clearly didn’t tell Lister much about Jim Denny before the two met. Lister recalled:

  Show how naive I was, I didn’t know who Denny was. He asked what I was doing, and I told him I’d come to Nashville to get on the Opry. I said, “I hear there are auditions over at WSM and some joker’s supposed to listen to me over there.” He kinda chuckled and said, “I wish you good luck.” Joe had set up an audition for me the following week in Studio B at WSM, and I was sitting there with my guitar, and Jim come waltzing in. I said, “Jim, what’re you doing here?” He said, “I’m the joker you gotta audition for.”

  Lister was caught in the hillbilly catch-22. The Opry wasn’t interested because he didn’t have a record contract, and record companies weren’t interested because he wasn’t on the Opry. Tex Ritter, who’d worked shows with Lister in San Antonio, took care of the record contract. “Tex came to town,” says Lister, “and he asked if I’d talked to Dee Kilpatrick [at Capitol], and I said he’d turned me down. Tex said, ‘Meet me at the office in thirty minutes,’ and he told Dee, ‘Sign this guy.’ As soon as I got that contract I went back to WSM and showed it to Jim Denny. I said, ‘I come to find out if you’re a man of your word. I’ve got a Capitol contract, now what you gonna do?’”

  Denny placed Lister on a Hank Williams tour, and persuaded Hank to let him guest a few times on his Mother’s Best early morning show. Lister didn’t have any inkling of it at the time, but he came to believe that Denny was helping Hank ease Audrey out of his radio schedule by giving him a supporting act that needed to be featured. It was rare now for Audrey to join the group on a tour. Occasionally she would fly to do a show, then drive with the group for a few days before flying home, but as 1951 wore on, her appearances grew fewer and fewer. As much as this improved the shows, it did nothing for those moments when Hank would try to hold Audrey close.

  This was Lister’s big chance. He soon found that life wasn’t easy for a six-foot-seven-inch singing cowboy in the back of a touring sedan, but the memory of the discomfort later faded, leaving much fonder memories of the camaraderie, the hijinks, and the impromptu baseball games in the middle of nowhere. Travel was usually at night because it was cooler and there was less traffic, but there were often long distances between shows which would involve driving through the day, right up to show time. Before interstates and orbital freeways, the highways went straight through the center of town. “We’d stop to get gas,” says Lister, “and at the same time, we’d get a gallon of milk and a dozen doughnuts or cupcakes. We didn’t even have time to order hamburgers a lot of time. There were many weeks that we’d maybe check into a hotel twice. The rest of the time you’re driving.”

  When Lister joined, Hank bought a second touring sedan. The biggest item of baggage was the string bass, which sat on top when it wasn’t raining. The trunk was usually full of clothes, photos, and song-books. The one amplifier was shared by Don Helms and Sammy Pruett. Summer months were hell, especially in heavy traffic. For a while, Hank had an air cooler fitted to his limo. The technology wasn’t very complicated; a water tank was attached to the roof and a bat of gauze was fitted into the open window. Water was released from the tank by means of a cord, and leached into the gauze. The breeze then blew through the water-filled gauze and supposedly cooled the interior. It seemed to work for a while, but Audrey was pressuring Hank to wear a toupee, which made him hotter still. He shaved off what hair he had on the crown of his head and the toupee was fixed in place with spirit gum. Somewhere in Louisiana, with the temperature inside the car around a hundred degrees, Hank pulled the cord to flush more water into the cooler and the entire contents of the tank disgorged onto his head. He pulled off the toupee, threw it out the window, and told everyone it was the last time he was going to wear the damn thing. Then he junked the air cooler.

  Hank’s show would usually start at 8:00 p.m. Lister and the Drifting Cowboys warmed up the crowd. Bass player Howard Watts, who had replaced Hillous Butrum, did a little baggy-pants comedy as “Cedric Rainwater,” then the band played a few tunes before Hank did the first half of his show. There’d be a short intermission when the Drifting Cowboys would work the crowd, selling photos and songbooks, and then Hank would play again until around 10:00 p.m. Hank would sometimes work three or four days in major centers with other Opry acts, but his drawing power was so strong that he didn’t need costars to fill a hall. Eddy Arnold might have sold more records nationwide, but Hank was king in the South and Southwest. His only serious challenge came from Lefty Frizzell, so it was a surprise when A. V. Bamford placed the two on tour together in April 1951. Either of them could have filled the halls, so this would be, as writer Dan Cooper put it, “honky tonk’s apex, the instant that symbolized the genre’s zenith.”

  The rivalry between Hank and Lefty had simmered for a few months after Lefty broke through at the end of 1950. Hank could see little good in Lefty’s style. Once, when he was holed up on a drinking spree with Johnnie Wright and Jack and Jim Anglin, Hank’s guard slipped and he took aim at Lefty’s singing. It was whiny and no good, he said, ranting on until the others grew sick of it and told him to shut up. Lefty wouldn’t sustain a note or let it trail bluesily like Hank. He worried words and vowels, glissing up or down on a syllable. It was a style that shaped latter-day country singing. It was also a style that required a microphone, whereas Hank’s full-throated delivery had been forged out of necessity when he sang without amplification.

  Hank and Lefty met for the first time in Nashville shortly after Hank had done a radio interview with deejay Hugh Cherry. Hank and Cherry were sitting in Eddie DuBois’ Key Club in Printer’s Alley. As Cherry recalled to researcher Charles Wolfe:

  Lefty came in by himself a little greased and sat down with us. Hank decided to feign displeasure and he started out by saying, “Here, boy, why don’t you just stay down in Texas, this is my territory up here.” Lefty got that great big smile on his face, and said, “Hank, the whole damn country is the back yard of both of us, can’t you realize there’s enough room for all of us?” Hank kinda smiled and said, “Well, I was just kidding. It’s good to have a little competition. Makes me realize I gotta work harder than ever, and boy you’re the best competition I ever had.”

  The Hank and Lefty road show started in Little Rock on April 1, 1951, and headed south through Monroe, Lousiana; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Corpus Christi, Texas; finishing in New Orleans. It came just as Lefty was considering an offer from the Opry. Talking about the tour in 1974, he said:

  [Hank] had a way of influencing you. He could talk you into anything. We was on the road. I had “Always Late” and “Mom and Dad’s Waltz” and “I Want to Be With You Always” on the charts. Hank said, “Lefty, what you need is the Grand Ole Opry.” I said, “Hell, I just got a telegram from [music publisher] Hill & Range on having number one and number two, and I got maybe two more in there, and you say I need the Grand Ole Opry?” He said, “You got a hell of an argument.”

  Lefty briefly joined the Opry that July, but didn’t stay.

 
Lefty said in an MGM Records documentary that Hank was stone cold sober throughout the tour:

  I come in to Corpus Christi [April 5, 1951], and I brought in a bottle of bourbon and set it down in there. Hank and me was settin’ around getting ready to do the show. I said, “Hey, I’m gonna have a shot. How about you?” He said, “If I was to have what you’re fixin’ to drink, I’d want another and first thing you know I’d be gone.” I thought he was kidding, teasin’ me. Found out later that he would have. When I saw that movie [Your Cheatin’ Heart] it really made me feel bad, ’cause he was always late and always drunk, and I worked two weeks with him and he never sounded better. He was in good shape. But he didn’t take a drink — and he put on a show. We flipped coins to see who would go on first. Dad [Naamon Frizzell] was still driving for us, and there’s enough stories to fill a book there.

  But he never told them.

  “All Hank thought about,” Lefty said later, “was writing. He recorded a number he wrote because I was having trouble with my better half called ‘I’m Sorry For You, My Friend.’ We’d swap songs we’d written.” It seems very likely that the song Hank acquired from Lefty was “I Ain’t Got Nothing but Time.” Lefty listed a song of that title on a Hill & Range contract a few days before the tour began, and Hank logged it with Acuff-Rose on June 6, 1951. It’s unclear what, if anything, Hank gave to Lefty. Between the show in Baton Rouge on April 3 and another show with Lefty in Corpus Christi two days later, Hank shot north by himself to revisit the scene of his first triumph, the Municipal Auditorium in Shreveport. Bluegrass star Mac Wiseman, then a Hayride regular, supported him. The atmosphere throughout the short tour was convivial. Hank, Lefty, and Big Bill Lister would get together in hotel rooms to play Jimmie Rodgers songs. Hank would stand in the wings while Lefty performed, and vice versa. It was the ultimate mark of respect.

  After a short break, Hank went north on a tour of Canada. They played Ottawa on May 8, but a day or two later the wheels started to come off. Hank started drinking somewhere in Ontario, and reportedly fell offstage, aggravating the already serious problem with his back. Jim Denny rushed Carl Smith up to complete the tour, and Bill Lister was given the unenviable task of hauling Hank and a suitcase full of money back to Nashville. It was the first time he’d seen his boss disabled in that way. Says Lister,

  Coming back, we stopped one morning just after daylight, and I said, “Hank, you gotta have something to eat, son.” He said, “Big un, I just cain’t do this.” I could understand. His eyes looked like watery fried eggs when he was in that shape, but I knew better than to let him wait in the car, so I just jumped up and paid the bill, and by the time I was outside, he was nowhere to be seen. In the middle of the next block, a big sign said “Cocktails” and I just broke into a dead run, and by the time I got there, he’d already had him one. I paid his bill and drug him back to the car. It just broke your heart, but I knew I had to get him home.

  Lister carried on driving and got to the outskirts of Nashville around five in the morning. He stopped to call Audrey, to tell her to expect them shortly.

  I said, “I’m at the edge of town, and I got Hank with me and he’s in pretty bad shape. I just wanted you to be expecting us.” She said, “I don’t care what you do with the son of a bitch, just don’t bring him out here,” so I called Jim Denny, and Jim told me where to take him — the hospital out in Madison. Then I went by the studio and put the money in the safe, then around nine o’clock Audrey called me and wanted to know where her money was at. I said, “Lady, as far as I know you ain’t got no damn money. I gave Hank’s money to Jim.”

  From Madison, Hank probably went home but continued to mess up and was quickly transferred to the North Louisiana Sanatorium in Shreveport on May 21, 1951. When he was admitted he was complaining of acute back pain and mental worries, and had apparently been drinking for several days. Complete physical examinations under the direction of Dr. G. H. Cassity revealed the extent and nature of the degeneration of his spine, and arrangements were made to fit a lumbrosacral brace. Hank was discharged three days later, sober but still in pain, a pain that would — from this point on — scarcely ever leave him. The brace was uncomfortable. It was made of stainless steel and leather, and it made road travel unbearable, so increasingly and whenever feasible, Hank would fly to the starting point of a tour in a private plane, often a Beechcraft Bonanza piloted by Minnie Pearl’s husband, Henry Cannon.

  After his discharge from Shreveport, Hank appears to have rested up in Nashville for a few days before preparing for a Luke the Drifter session on the evening of Friday, June 1. The lead-off cut, “Ramblin’ Man,” was one of Hank’s few minor-key compositions. A taut, edgy performance, it was sung rather than spoken, which made it more like a Hank Williams record (a judgment MGM came to share immediately after Hank’s death when they reissued it under his name). Hank’s keening falsetto was used to particularly good effect, and Harold Bradley’s prominently mic’d acoustic guitar punctuated by Don Helms’ steel guitar gave the record a folky flavor that wasn’t entirely accidental. The Weavers’ hit version of Leadbelly’s “Goodnight Irene” had sparked a short-lived folk music craze, and it’s possible that Hank saw the folk craze as an opportunity for Luke the Drifter.

  The second Luke the Drifter cut, “Pictures from Life’s Other Side,” was a Victorian morality fable. The arrangement was credited to Hank, but it was a much earlier song. Some researchers date it to around 1880, and credit it to John B. Vaughan, a composer and singing-school teacher from Athens, Georgia; others credit it to a gospel songwriter named Charles E. Baer. It was first recorded as a country song in 1926, and it’s hard to know which of the twenty or so earlier versions was the one Hank heard. His recitation showed that constant travel had done nothing to change his pronunciation. “Poor” was still “purr,” just as it had been on his first session, and “picture” was still “pitcher.”

  “I’ve Been Down That Road Before” was another dose of the sage advice that Luke the Drifter seemed endlessly capable of dispensing — and Hank Williams seemed just as capable of ignoring. It was perhaps the most directly biographical song Hank ever wrote, and leaves us guessing at the incidents that inspired it.

  The last cut, “I Dreamed about Mama Last Night,” was a recitation that Fred Rose credited to himself, although it was actually a poem, “The Mother Watch,” by British-born poet Edgar Guest, who worked for years at the Detroit Free Press. It came from Guest’s 1925 anthology, Mother, and it was especially ironic that Rose chose it because it was rooted in an idyllic childhood that was nowhere close to his own experience.

  After the session, Hank eased himself back into his public appearance schedule. His July 4 date for 1951 was at a park in Huntingdon, West Virginia. Then, on Sunday, July 15, he was the star of the Hank Williams Homecoming in Montgomery, sponsored by the Jaycees. There was an early afternoon show at the Veterans Hospital, a parade, then a 3:00 p.m. show at the Montgomery Agricultural Coliseum, known as the Cow Coliseum. It was the first music event staged there, so there were inevitable problems with the public address system. Hank headed a cast that included Hank Snow, Chet Atkins (billed that day as a “Teenage Tantalizer"), the Carter Family, and Braxton Schuffert.

  For some reason, Hank didn’t have a guitar, so just before the first show his cousin Walter McNeil drove him to French’s Music store to borrow one for the afternoon. He came back out to the car, sat in the front seat quietly for a while, then said, “You know, I tried to buy a guitar on credit there once when I was comin’ up and they wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with me. Now they want to give me one.” It could have been a moment to savor, but Hank always saw the darker side. The city, which had once treated him as a worthless drunk, was now extending its embrace, but Hank knew well that it could be as quickly withdrawn.

  Before the show, Hank took the band to eat at his favorite barbecue stand, run by a black couple, and treated everyone to barbecue sandwiches. Bill Lister remembered:

  Just as we wer
e leaving, Hank was fixing to get back in the car, the lady come out and said, “Oh, Mr. Williams, Mr. Williams, you dropped this.” He said, “Oh my goodness.” It was his bill clip. He told her, “Well, I appreciate that,” and he took the money clip off, put it in his hand, put that money back in that lady’s hand and said, “Thank you,” and left. Hank didn’t drop it accidentally. That was his way to give them old people a little bit of what he had. Hank helped a lot of people like that and gets very little credit for it. He was just thinking back to when he’d be hard up for a fifteen-cent sandwich.

  At Hank’s insistence, Lilly was presented with a gold watch by the Jaycees. Her smile, as she posed for the cameras, was exactly like Hank’s. It was a chance for him to acknowledge in front of nine thousand paying attendees the role she had played in getting his career started. Hank could also celebrate a partial family truce held in his honor. Audrey didn’t squabble with Lilly, and Lilly didn’t squabble with Lon, who’d come from McWilliams for the occasion, but when Lon tried to hold his grandson, Audrey snatched him back.

  Braxton remembered sitting backstage at the Coliseum when a kid with a guitar strode up to Hank and asked if he could sing a couple of numbers to the crowd. At first Hank declined, but then, recognizing shades of himself fifteen years earlier, agreed. “This guy said, ‘All I do is sing your songs, just let me sing one of your songs,’” said Braxton. “Hank said, ‘Well, what d’you want to do?’ This guy said, ‘I want to do “Hey, Good Lookin’.” Hank said, ‘Well, that’s my current song.’ This guy said, Aw, Hank, let me sing it.’ Hank said, ’Go ‘head, I’ll sing something else.’”