by Colin Escott
It wasn’t coincidental that Kate Smith was on NBC-TV and the Grand Ole Opry was on NBC radio. The Opry management wanted to market the show nationwide via television, and to be first in the race to bring country music to network television. As a result, it was playing its aces, like Hank Williams, and calling in favors with the network. By the spring of 1952, there were fifteen country music television shows in Los Angeles alone, and western swing star Tex Williams was trying to find a network that would syndicate his Roundup Time at the Riverside Rancho show. The Opry didn’t want to lose the initiative to Tex Williams or anyone else, so it brought in the heavy guns.
WSM, which owned the Opry, had done as NBC had urged: secured channel space and picked up NBC’s television shows. WSM-TV had started in September 1950, but, like almost every television station, it was losing money because few people had sets, and, unlike WSM radio, WSM-TV’s signal barely reached the Kentucky state line. WSM-TV had a hillbilly show, Tennessee Jamboree, but the viewership was pitifully small. The Opry needed a network platform if it was to beat out the competition from California and elsewhere, and, with that in mind, Denny had not only arranged to showcase his acts on Kate Smith, but also made an agreement to rotate the Opry cast through the Astor Hotel’s rooftop ballroom. The Roof was one of the top venues in New York, and the Opry was committed to providing a house band and a featured artist every week for sixteen weeks. With the prestige accruing from the Roof and The Kate Smith Evening Hour, Denny believed that a network television offer was a foregone conclusion.
Country music, and the Opry in particular, was beginning its eternal quest for prime time. The timing seemed right: the “folk boom” was on everybody’s lips, Eddy Arnold was to be the summer replacement for Perry Como, Roy Acuff was to go on the cover of Newsweek in August, and Hank Williams had songs dotted over two charts. Even so, the plan failed. The Astor roof engagement was canceled by mutual consent after four weeks, and Hank, who had been scheduled to close the series with a grand finale on September 13, didn’t get to play. In fact, by September 13, his last appearance on the Grand Ole Opry was already a fairly distant memory.
As 1952 wore on, Hank was increasingly past caring what the Opry’s plans were, and whether or not he figured in them. Most of those who worked with him that year talk of his rapid disintegration, but the truth is a little more complex. He had been drinking and screwing up since the late 1930s, and his back had been troubling him for almost as long. His marriage and his other personal relationships had never been stable. The patterns that troubled everyone in 1952 had always been there; now they were magnified. The ever present problems were exacerbated by the fact that his career was entering uncharted territory. Three years earlier, Hank had been playing schoolhouses in Louisiana and eastern Texas; now he was expected to headline in New York and Vegas, act in motion pictures, perform on network television, and write songs that Bing Crosby could sing. Nothing prepared him for this, and, unlike Elvis Presley, who left the hillbilly market a few years later, Hank had no one like Presley’s Colonel Parker to at least give the semblance of knowing what to do. His reaction was to withdraw. “You could see Hank’s concern for his career decline,” says Don Helms. “He’d often say, ‘Aw, to hell with it.’ It reached a point where he didn’t really care.” A year or two earlier, he had been almost desperately eager to keep his hit streak alive; as soon as one record was out and in the charts, he was itching to repeat, or do even better than he had done before. Now those around him sensed that he didn’t care as much, and sometimes seemed not to care at all.
Chapter 14
The most chilling look is the look of an ambition realized.
Gordon Burn, “Alma Cogan”
BILLIE JEAN
ON July 10, 1952, Hank and Audrey Williams, who had been married by the Bible, were divorced by the law. The following day, Hank cut “You Win Again.” It was another quintessential Hank moment, one in which art and life appeared to be indivisible.
It might have been no more than coincidence, but, in the absence of hard evidence to the contrary, the songs cut the day after Hank’s divorce seem like pages torn from his diary. It took just two hours after lunch on July 11 for Hank to record four songs: two to be issued under his name, and two as Luke the Drifter. The first, “You Win Again,” is among the most perfectly realized recordings in country music. Its theme of betrayal had grown old years before Hank tackled it, but, drawing from his bottomless well of resentment, he gave it a freshness bordering on topicality. Apparently, Hank’s first draft was titled “I Lose Again,” but it was reversed at Rose’s insistence. Having just signed the divorce papers, lines like “You have no heart, you have no shame / You take true love and give the blame” must have been viscerally real for him. He certainly sang as if they were. Hank’s use of common English, tightened and focused by Fred Rose, was now the standard for country song craft: terse, resonant, exact.
The up-tempo song, “I Won’t Be Home No More,” worked the same theme from a more belligerent perspective. Hank seemed to have one finger raised at Audrey, rather than pointed accusingly at her. Even though it’s supposed to be a lighthearted song, Hank seems vindictive, even spiteful.
Then it was Luke the Drifter’s turn. Fred Rose had found a song he thought suitable: Bonnie Dodd’s “Be Careful of Stones That You Throw.” Dodd was a steel guitar player who had been recording on and off since 1937. She had written Tex Ritter’s 1945 hit “You Will Have to Pay,” and had worked a spell with him. Little Jimmy Dickens had recorded “Be Careful of Stones That You Throw” in October 1949, but it hadn’t done much business, so Rose probably wanted to find another home for it. Another cautionary tale, it was the story of a hypocritical neighbor saved by the “bad girl” down the street. Even cutting a song that wasn’t his own, Hank seemed to be drawing parallels to his own life. The tide of criticism was mounting, but “unless you’ve made no mistakes in your life,” he seemed to be saying to the detractors now ranged against him, “be careful of stones that you throw.” Rose saw the song as the top side of the next Luke the Drifter single, but with hindsight it paled in comparison with the other side.
“Please Make Up Your Mind,” also known as “Why Don’t You Make Up Your Mind?” was the most rivetingly vengeful song Hank ever wrote or recorded. Over a slow blues backing and with bleak humor, Hank cataloged his grievances against Audrey: her tantrums, her attempts to belittle him, her ungovernable temper.
If a poor little rabbit had you on his side
Every hound in the county would haul off and hide
The rough draft revealed an even more direct shot:
Whoever said women was the weaker sex
Baby never had you on his neck
The next-to-last line of every verse was “The good Lord only knows what I go through,” and Audrey’s feelings as she heard it can only be guessed at. Not until Bob Dylan’s “Positively Fourth Street” was there a song so bitter and demeaning. “Why Don’t You Make Up Your Mind?” had been written at least five or six months before the separation. Hank recorded it as a laconic talking blues, but Little Jimmy Dickens had recorded it in July 1951 as an up-tempo song. Dickens’ version was called “I Wish You Didn’t Love Me So Much,” and was scheduled for release, then canceled at the last minute. It was issued in Canada, prob- ably because someone forgot to tell the Canadian branch to pull the plug. Hank’s version omits one of the couplets given to Dickens:
The preacher man said, “For better or worse”
But lately I’ve been lookin’ for that big black hearse.
It’s tempting to read Hank’s intimation of his own mortality into his omission of those lines; he had twenty-five weeks to live. No one touched the song again until 1968 when Hank Jr., who then empathized almost as deeply with the lyrics as his father had once done, recorded it for his Luke the Drifter Jr. album (one of the last stops on a long, sorry journey that saw Audrey try to make Junior’s career into a movable tribute to his father).
One of the son
gs Hank had hoped to record in July was “Back Street Affair.” During the presession discussions, Hank had pitched the idea to Rose, but Rose balked, partly because he sincerely believed that type of song didn’t belong on a country record, and partly because he didn’t own the publishing. Hank had sung it on one of his early morning radio shows, and Webb Pierce, who was in town to guest on the Opry, had heard it. Pierce collared Hank after the Opry. He said, “Hank, I sure like your new record, that ‘Back Street Affair,’” and Hank said, “It ain’t my new record. Fred Rose won’t let me record it. Too risky. I think anyone’s got guts enough to record it has got themselves a number one hit.” Suggestive songs brought Rose’s puritanical streak to the surface. He had immutable ideas about what was, and wasn’t, a “Song for Home Folks.” Writing to Tillman Franks a few years earlier, he had dismissed a song Tillman was pitching as a poor man’s “Slippin’ Around.” “The folks who buy real country records do not like ‘Slippin’ Around’,” he wrote. Several million others did, though. Billy Wallace, the writer of “Back Street Affair,” already had it out, but Webb Pierce recorded it on July 9, two days before Hank’s session. It gave Pierce, then the Hayride’s top act, his third number one hit in a row, a track record just long enough to ensure that, within a few weeks, he earned an invitation to join the Opry. His acquisition showed that the Opry was still bringing in any artist who might act as a focal point for a rival jamboree.
MGM put the Luke the Drifter single into production immediately, scheduling it for release on August 29. “You Win Again” was slotted onto the flip side of “Settin’ the Woods on Fire” and was released two weeks later. Like most of Hank’s flip sides, “You Win Again” got a little play, but only enough to get it onto the charts for one week. The first hit with the song went to the black pop singer Tommy Edwards, best known for “It’s All in the Game.” Edwards cut it for MGM on August 12, one month before Hank’s version was released. Frank Walker had Edwards’ record rolling off the presses on the same day as Hank’s. It climbed to number thirteen in the pop charts in the fall of 1952, but didn’t become a country hit until country deejays found it on the flip side of Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire” in 1958. It didn’t become a hit in its own right until Charley Pride recorded it in 1980. By then it was already a standard.
Hank still seemed to be in good shape the day after the recording session. He introduced “Jambalaya” on the Opry on July 12. “I got a brand-new song ain’t never been aired,” he told Red Foley. “Ain’t never been aired?” said Foley, playing the straight man. “No, and it might need airin’,” said Hank. Foley said he had the song title in front of him and couldn’t pronounce it. “It’s Jam-bal-eye-oo on the By-oo,” said Hank, as the band kicked it off. A month later, it was on the charts, and by September 6 it was number one, where it remained until December.
Hank didn’t hold up for long. Ray Price says that the divorce was a watershed in Hank’s life, and it was the last straw for Price himself. After Hank spent several days drinking relentlessly, Price called Jim Denny and Don Helms, asking what he should do. “Jim Denny said, ‘Take him over to the doctor. The doctor’s gonna give him a shot and knock him out, then I want you all to take him to Madison where they’ll dry him out.’ Don Helms and I, we took him to the doctor and he knocked him out all right, and we carried him out, and he woke up just as we was taking him into that place. He sat up and said, ‘Oh, hell no, not this time, you’re not gonna get me this time.’ But we put him in there anyway.” Both Helms and Price thought that Hank would literally drink himself to death if they didn’t intervene. Hank ordered Price to move out of the house, and Price did just that, probably with some relief. He found another place, and called Mac McGee, who ran Hank and Audrey’s Corral, to verify that he was taking none of Hank’s possessions. As he was loading the truck, Hank drove up wearing his hospital robe, chauffered by someone from the hospital. He said, “You know I didn’t mean it, Ray. You don’t have to go,” but Price went anyway. He told Hank he couldn’t take it anymore.
After bottoming out, Hank turned himself around once again. Afraid of being alone, he brought a rotating cast of pickers and hangers-on into the house. The party continued, Hank often sitting in the middle of the floor scribbling away on his notepad. By the time the divorce was finalized, it seems as though Bobbie Jett was out of the picture, but Hank had met another woman who came to love him and tried to help him.
Billie Jean Jones was born on June 6, 1933, on a farm twenty miles out of Shreveport. “I knew when I was five years old draggin’ a cotton sack, if I ever got off that son of a bitch, I’d never be back,” she says. Soon after the Second World War, her father became a policeman in Bossier City, Louisiana, and it was there that Billie Jean grew up with her two brothers, Alton and Sonny.
Hank Williams drove by the Jones’ house on Modica Street every day in early 1949. Billie Jean says that she told her mother she was going to marry him, but when she married that year it was to Harrison Eshliman, a corporal in the air force police. Eshliman worked alongside Billie Jean’s father, and she became his wife on her sixteenth birthday, June 6, 1949, just as Hank was leaving Shreveport. She became pregnant during her first week of marriage without ever really understanding how, and her first daughter, Jeri Lynn, was born on March 11, 1950. By the time Jeri Lynn was born, Eshliman was history, and by 1951, Mrs. Jones was baby-sitting while Billie Jean stepped out. With long, flaming ginger hair, Billie Jean was, as she says herself, “something to behold.” The party crowd seemed to gravitate to her.
Early in 1951, Billie Jean started dating Webb Pierce’s understudy Faron Young. At that point, Young was just about to quit Pierce’s band and strike out on his own. In June 1952, he received a summons to Nashville to guest on the Opry. Billie Jean rode up with him. “He was wild as a bear cat,” she says. “Oh God! He knew he could sing and he was about halfway wise, but nothing could ever have worked out between us. I was dating him and about a hundred others, but my dad cosigned a note on a car to get us up there. I was just gonna go up and back.”
The night before Faron Young came to Nashville, he was on a show date in Memphis with Hank Snow. Jerry Rivers worked the date with Snow, and remembered Faron squiring Billie Jean around backstage. Early the following morning, Rivers and Helms were at WSM to work with Hank when Faron walked in. Rivers asked him where Billie Jean was, and Faron told him that she was asleep in the car outside. As Faron played his first guest spot on the Opry, Billie Jean sat in the glassed-in visitors’ box. She was wearing an off-the-shoulder dress, black and figure-hugging, with white lace at the top. It caught the wandering eye of the show’s star, Hank Williams. Billie Jean recalls:
He saw me and hunkered down, and looked at me through the glass. He came in, sat down beside me. Just sat there and looked at me. I tried to ignore him. Finally, he said, “Girl, who you up here with?” I said, “Faron Young.” He said, “Is that the kid that’s guesting up here from Shreveport?” I said, “Yes sir.” About that time, Minnie Pearl came up to the glass, and he motioned to her, he said, “Minnie, find Faron Young, tell him ol’ Hank wants to see him.” So here comes Faron. Hank said, “Faron, you gonna marry this girl?” Faron said, “No-o-o, Hank. She’s too mean and too fast. She’s got too many boyfriends, I can’t keep up with her.’” Hank said, “Well, if you ain’t gonna marry her, ol’ Hank’s gonna marry her.” He said, ‘Faron, go out there. You see that ol’ black-haired gal in the front row with the red dress on. She flew down here from Pennsylvania to see me. After we get through working tonight, let’s you and me go out ’n’ party. That gal, she’s gonna be your gal, and Billie’s gonna be my gal.”
With the Opry in his sights, Faron Young had no intention of crossing the show’s star. Billie Jean continues:
When they got through that night, we went out to Faron’s convertible. [Hank] said, “Boy, you drive.” He told his girlfriend to sit in the front seat with Faron. We got out to some joint; I said I had a headache and I wasn’t going in
. He said, “Faron, you go in and have a good time. I’m gonna stay out here and talk with Billie.” We moved up to the front seat. Me on the right-hand side with the door open, and him crouched down outside. We started shooting the bull about him living on the same street as me in Bossier. He was telling me about his problems with Audrey and so on. After a while, he said, “Why don’t we go in, listen to the music and drink some coffee.” I said, “Okay, if you’ll drink coffee,” ’cause I’d already heard about his clowning. I didn’t care if he was King Farouk, because I was Queen Farouk.
Faron Young later insisted that any notions he might have had of another fling with Billie Jean were dispelled when Hank pulled a gun on him. Billie took a room in a girls’ boardinghouse on Shelby Avenue. “It cost ten dollars a week,” she says, “but I was sending money back to Louisiana to look after my kid and I needed the trolley fare. Hank looked so funny walking across my floor, ’cause it was on an angle, but I wouldn’t let him pay my rent. He had hundred-dollar bills falling out of his pocket.” She transferred from the Shreveport phone company to the Nashville phone company.
In testimony given in conjunction with a 1975 lawsuit over copyright renewals, Faron Young omitted the incident with the gun, concentrating instead on the good times. WSM had given him a fifteen-minute show at 5:00 a.m., so he took a room at Mom Upchurch’s boardinghouse, one floor above Carl Smith. Hank would pick him up and they’d go bowling at Melrose Lanes. Young remembered one day in particular:
