Hank Williams

by Colin Escott

  Hank might have hoped for a fresh start in Shreveport, but the old patterns soon reappeared. When he was sober, he was riveting onstage; when drunk, he was boorish and occasionally lucky not to be lynched. He even turned up drunk for some of the Hayride shows. Horace Logan would announce him, and Hank would stand in the wings shaking his head, denying that he was Hank Williams. On a bus ride to a Hayride remote show in Brownwood, Texas, he wore out his welcome. “He decided he’d sing,” said Logan. “Kitty Wells was there, my wife was there, the Rowley Trio and other women, and Hank was singing,

  The dirty drawers that Maggie wore

  They was torn and they was split

  You could see where she had shit.

  “I said, ‘Hank, shut up!’ He’d apologize later.”

  In November, Hank headlined a package show composed of Claude King, Tommy Hill, Goldie Hill, and Red Sovine. Billie Jean went with them, and Hank introduced her as his new bride at every show. He had his guitar beside him in the touring sedan, and would sing for hour upon hour, then sing some more in the dressing room. “One night,” said Claude King, “we had an off night. I think it was in Beaumont. We’d stopped at some little place to get a drink and he wanted to get a beer. There was a guy in there playing a piano and singing, so we spent the whole night there. Hank singing, playing the piano, and singing with this guy. There wasn’t anybody in there when we first stopped by, but when we left it was packed. I guess word got out Hank Williams was there.” In diners along the way, he’d punch up Tommy Edwards’ record of “You Win Again” on the jukebox and play it repeatedly. When he had a little audience backstage, he’d talk about how Bob Hope couldn’t follow him on the Hadacol Caravan.

  The best dates that Clyde Perdue could get were now in smaller towns like Homer, Louisiana, and Orange, Texas. “He’d start a trip,” said Claude King, “and he’d say, ‘I ain’t gonna drink a drop,’ then his back would get worse and worse and he’d get right back into the drinking. He and I were the same age exactly, yet to me he was an old man.” (When Tillman Franks managed Claude King in the 1960s, he knocked ten years off King’s age, telling fan magazines that he was born in 1933; in fact, King was seven months older than Hank.)

  In Opelousas, Louisiana, everyone in the audience demanded their money back after Hank showed up drunk, and when light broke the following morning, there was a crowd around the hotel. Claude King went and brought Hank’s Cadillac round to a trade entrance, intending to make a dash for the county line. Hank needed a cigarette, though, and walked blithely out of the hotel carrying his valise. He saw the crowd and sat down on the sidewalk in his white western suit. He opened the case and dollar bills started blowing in the wind. Everybody started laughing, picking up the money, and Hank left promising to come back and do a make-good.

  On another night in Lafayette, Hank weaved up to the microphone. “You all paid to see ol’ Hank, didn’t ya?” he said. The crowd started roaring. Hank set down his guitar, said, “Well, you seen him.” And he walked off. Perhaps his attitude stemmed in part from the fact that he had records in the top ten, yet he was playing the high school gym in Lafayette, the type of gig he had worked so hard to escape. The interceding four years had ruined his health and wrecked his marriage, and now he was broke and back where he’d started. Money mattered most to Hank because it betokened success, and now, when he stuffed the takings into his valise at the close of a show, he knew it contained a fraction of what it did a year earlier.

  Claude King’s record “She Knows Why” had just been released by Los Angeles–based Specialty Records. Hank liked Claude and told him that he wanted to change it to “You Know Why” and record it at his next session. Specialty was an R&B label started by Art Rupe, who’d been one of the partners in Sterling Records. Hank called Rupe from somewhere on the road, offering ten thousand dollars for Claude’s contract, but Rupe told him that he was hanging on to it. “We were going to get coffee one morning,” said Claude. “There’s another guy with us, and we went over and was having a cup of coffee, and I guess Hank just felt like talking. He said he liked my singing and thought that I had a great future in the music business. This other guy said, ‘What about me, Hank?’ Hank said, ‘No, to be honest with you, you need to go back to doing whatever you was doing.’ And this guy was Tommy Hill.” Hank was dead right. Claude King was a natural singer, even though it would take another ten years before he topped the charts with “Wolverton Mountain.” Tommy Hill made several more records (a couple of them for Fred Rose’s Hickory Records) but eventually became a songwriter, producer, and record label owner.

  The tour ended badly. Hank’s back hurt terribly. Claude King remembers:

  I was driving, and he was down on the floorboard in the back. Billie Jean was in the backseat and he was down on the floorboard and he was crying, his back was hurting him so bad. He wanted me to drive faster, to try to hurry up and get to Shreveport. It was nighttime, and we was going along pretty fast and all of a sudden we came over this hill, and there was a whole herd of cows going across the highway. I couldn’t stop, but kind of zigzagged amongst them and didn’t hit any of them. It still didn’t faze him. He wanted to get back to the doctor ’cause his back was killing him.

  In late November, Hank made a tour of Florida and Georgia for A. V. Bamford, then worked some dates in Georgia. Bamford assembled the supporting cast, which included Ray Edenton, later the premier rhythm guitarist in Nashville, and Radio Dot and Smokey (Swan). The trip had a rough start. Hank and Billie flew to Pensacola on a chartered airplane piloted by James Hutchins of Perry Sanders Aircraft. Hutchins later testified that Billie Jean told Hank that she was pregnant. Hank was overjoyed and vowed to remain sober. As he and Billie flew over the Gulf of Mexico, Hank took the controls for a while, but the plane began running low on fuel while they were still over water. It was touch and go whether they would make it to Pensacola, and Billie panicked. The next morning in the hotel, she awoke in a pool of blood. She had either miscarried or the shock had started her period. Hank was sent out to buy Kotex, but he stopped off in the hotel bar and it was several hours before he reappeared.

  On Tuesday, November 18, Hank visited his sister Irene in Jacksonville. As he left, Irene says she was convinced that she would never see her brother again. If that was indeed her premonition, it was correct.

  Hank was more or less sober for the entire trip, and talking positively, but during a 1975 trial, Hank’s cousin Marie Glenn mentioned that Hank had a heart attack in Florida. As usual, she didn’t elaborate. Bamford also remembered Hank complaining of chest pains, but was sufficiently encouraged by his performance to offer him two engagements, New Year’s Eve in Charleston, West Virginia, and New Year’s Day in Canton, Ohio. Hank accepted.

  Later on that road trip, Hank took Billie Jean to see Pappy McCormick in Pensacola. They went out to the Diamond Horseshoe; Pappy Neal played steel guitar, Hank sang a few songs — and got jealous when he saw Billie Jean with another man on the dance floor. That night, Hank and Billie stayed at the San Carlos Hotel, where Hank had holed up ten years earlier when he was drinking and trying to escape from Lilly. Memories were everywhere. He asked McCormick to come to Shreveport to lead his band in January; it was an almost blanket invitation he extended to his old pals. McCormick said he would.

  The Nashville deejays convention was on Friday, November 21, and Hank was scheduled to attend, but it’s unclear if he did. Two days later, he was in Montgomery with Billie Jean and Sonny Jones. It was, in all likelihood, the first time that Billie had met her new mother-in-law, and the occasion did not go well. Lilly had already bought an adjoining house and converted it into a rooming house, and was now asking Hank for money to buy yet another house. Billie Jean says that she vetoed the deal, thereby earning Lilly’s undying enmity. Wesley Rose later said that he and his father drove to Montgomery to meet Hank and prepare for another recording session. Wesley insists that Fred told Hank that he would be back on the Opry in February, but there is no corroboration of t
his. Back in Shreveport, Hank went on a tear, and was committed once again to the North Louisiana Sanatorium.

  The early days of December 1952 remain a blank. Perhaps Hank was still in the sanatorium; perhaps he worked a short tour. On Saturday, December 6, he worked the Big D Jamboree in Dallas, then played a few dates along the Mississippi gulf. Back in Shreveport on December 10, he had a big fight with Billie Jean. She took him back to the North Louisiana Sanatorium on December 11, but he got out early in the afternoon and found his way downtown and resumed his binge. At 4:30, he was arrested after a complaint from a restaurant owner about a “drunk in front of my place.” The arresting officer said that Hank had insisted that he shouldn’t have to go to jail, but he was hauled off on charges of being drunk and disorderly. He was dressed that afternoon in a blue serge suit and a green hat with a big feather, and he was carrying a .38 revolver. Billie Jean and Sonny came to get him out of jail at 9:45 in the evening and took him back to the North Louisiana Sanatorium.

  Two days later, December 13, Hank played the Louisiana Hayride. Right after the show, he and his personal retinue, together with Tommy and Goldie Hill and Billy Walker, started out for Houston to begin a one-week swing through eastern Texas. Hank had hired a cowboy singer, Al Rogers, to work the first few dates with him, and Charlie Adams, who recorded for 4-Star Records, was scheduled to work a few dates. Billie Jean had probably had enough Hank Williams for a while, and opted to stay home.

  Hank was due to play Cook’s Hoedown club on Sunday night. Tommy and Goldie Hill were going on to San Antonio and arranged to drop Hank at the Rice Hotel. On the way down, they heard a strange groan from the back and they saw Hank slumped forward, his head between his legs. He had stopped breathing. “He turned black,” said Tommy. “Goldie hollered at me, ‘Hank can’t get his breath.’ He was just smothering himself. Goldie was just screaming. I stopped the car, pulled him out, and started hauling him around on my shoulders. We got to Houston about daylight Sunday. I pulled into the Rice Hotel, asked for four porters and a stretcher, and got Hank up to his room. He wouldn’t go to no doctor.” Toby Marshall wrote a letter to Lilly from the Rice Hotel detailing Hank’s condition. Lilly was sufficiently concerned to fly to Texas to meet the tour in San Antonio.

  Cook’s Hoedown was sold out by Sunday night, but Hank was nowhere to be seen. Around five in the afternoon, Cook phoned the booker, Warren Stark, in Austin and told him to get his ass down to Houston and find Hank. Stark told Cook that he couldn’t get down to Houston in time to find Hank, but they should check the jail, then the hotels. They eventually found Hank at the Rice, got some of Toby Marshall’s shots in him, and hauled him onstage.

  Sergeant F. D. McMurry, who had booked Hank into the police benefit show in Beaumont at the end of September, was in the audience. “They booed him off,” said McMurry. “I met him backstage. He said, ‘Man, they’re killin’ me, they killin’ me. They’re workin’ me to death.’ He was all hopped up on those durn things. I said, ‘Hank, they booed you offstage. Let’s get you straight.’ I put four cups of coffee in him, and he tried it again and they booed him off again. It just broke my heart.” According to Marshall, Hank played two of his three scheduled sets. Some distant cousins of Hank’s were there that night. He was suffering ungodly back pain, they said, and drinking heavily. They tried to get him to rest up at their house, but he insisted that he had to carry on. Hank called Billie Jean and told her that he had never been sicker. Marshall was giving him shots every hour, she said.

  Tommy Hill saw the lethal combination of barbiturates and alcohol with which Hank was dosing himself. He also saw how Perdue and Marshall had worked out a procedure that would enable their meal ticket to make the show, but at a terrible cost. Hank was allowed a few beers after he woke up, then Marshall injected him with a drug that made him vomit up the beer. Then they would pour black coffee down him, hand him some Dexedrine tablets and point him toward the stage. After the show, he’d be allowed some more beers and put back to bed with some downers.

  Hank was scheduled to work in Victoria on Monday, San Antonio on Tuesday, Dallas on Wednesday, Snook on Thursday, and Austin on Friday. On Monday, he overdosed or had a heart attack, and couldn’t make the show in Victoria. Marshall noted only that he was “too goofed up” to perform, so the troupe moved on to San Antonio. Hank called Big Bill Lister’s house, but Big Bill was out working a show date. He then called Ernest Tubb, although Tubb never mentioned the substance of their talk. Still in a mood to talk, he called Jimmie Rodgers’ widow, Carrie, who lived nearby, and poured his heart out to her. He said his “last marriage” (presumably to Billie Jean) hadn’t worked out, and he said, “Mrs. Rodgers, I’d like to be one of your boys.” He told her that he’d come out to see her the next day, but never called back. Writing to Ernest Tubb a few weeks later, Mrs. Rodgers said, “The circumstances were so similar to Jimmie in many ways.” Tubb had been one of her “boys,” in that she’d taken a deep, unselfish interest in his career. Perhaps Hank felt in need of that kind of mentor.

  To ease the strain on his back, Hank arranged to fly into Dallas with Toby Marshall while Clyde Perdue stayed behind to pick up Lilly. Shortly before they landed, Marshall told Hank that Lilly was joining them, and said later that Hank was very unhappy about it. The Wednesday night show in Dallas was scheduled for the Sportatorium. Hank ran into Ray Price on the street outside the stadium. Price’s version of “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes” was showing up in several markets, and Hank started singing it as he walked toward him. Price invited Hank to spend Christmas with himself and his mother, but Hank said he wasn’t certain what he was doing. They agreed to meet in Ohio right after their New Year’s dates. Whenever he met someone in the business, particu- larly someone from Nashville, Hank tried to be upbeat. “I’ll be back with you before you know it,” he told Price. After the show at the Sportatorium, Hank, Toby Marshall, and Warren Stark went out to see Bob Wills play. That day, Hank received an Air Express package from Acuff-Rose with a check for four thousand dollars.

  Hank and Warren Stark drove from Dallas to Austin, then Stark drove Hank to his Thursday night gig at a small theater in Snook, Texas. Marshall said that Hank “did okay” in both Dallas and Snook. The last date on the tour was on Friday, December 19, at Stark’s Skyline Club in Austin. Lilly sat with Stark during the show and asked him to take over Hank’s bookings after Christmas. Stark said he would. On the drive to Snook, Stark had been griping to Hank about showing up drunk, and Hank had told him what he told everyone else. People hadn’t come to see him, he said — knowing it to be false. The crowd had just showed up for a night out, and if anyone wanted their money back they should get it back and he’d make it good to the promoter. Stark told him he couldn’t do business like that.

  Hank had first appeared at the Skyline as a young Hayride hopeful. Horace Logan had called in a few favors to get him on the bill. Four years later, he was a pitiful sight. He was disheveled, his nose ran constantly from a cold or flu he couldn’t shake, and he was sweating profusely. He’d lost all pride in his appearance, and, from what was unsaid as much as what was said, he gave the impression that he simply didn’t care anymore.

  His show was no sad last hurrah, though. Without much advertising, the Starks had sold out the date, then oversold it. Usually, the Skyline’s maximum capacity was around eight hundred, but people were lining the walls and the Starks were hoping that the fire marshal wasn’t one of them. Tommy Hill remembered the show vividly:

  I went out and did a fiddle tune, then I brought Charlie Adams on, and Charlie did two tunes and Hank asked me to get him off. I didn’t know why. He said, “It’s time to get Goldie on.” I put Goldie on, and he just wanted Goldie to sing two songs, and then I brought Billy Walker out, and Billy did four songs, then Hank said he wanted him off. Then Hank wanted to go on. The show started at eight o’clock, so now it was about nine, and Hank would usually do thirty or forty-five minutes, but that night he was still singing at one o’clock. He di
d not quit. He put on one of the best shows I ever saw. He didn’t falter a bit. He done some songs over and over. Me and Goldie have talked about it since. He sung everything he knew, even a bunch of gospel songs.

  Hank did two sets, backed by Tommy Hill, steel guitarist Jimmy Day, and the Skyline house band led by Leon Carter, a distant relative of the Carter Family. After the first set, Hank went back into the office to get some shots, then did another set. He was running a high temperature; sweat was running off his fingers onto the floor. Right after the show, refusing to check into a hotel, he began the long haul back to Shreveport. Paul Howard’s wife, Marie, remembered that immediately after arriving back in Shreveport Hank went to the Highland Hospital to be treated for pneumonia.

  On Saturday morning, Lilly went to see Horace Logan and told him that Hank was missing the Hayride that night because he was sick and she was taking him back to Montgomery. “I never gave him a release,” insists Logan, “because he had a three-year contract, but I gave him a leave of absence on the proviso that he would only make [the] personal appearances that A. V. Bamford had booked for him. Hank also agreed to fly in for the Hayride, because I was paying him two hundred a week, and he could afford to fly in on that easy — and bring Billie Jean with him.” Later in court testimony, Logan said, “He was ill. Very obviously physically ill. I gave him indefinite leave.”