by Colin Escott
Chapter 17
Darkling I listen; and for many a time I have been half in love with easeful death Called him soft names in many a muséd rhyme To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever it seems rich to die To cease upon the midnight with no pain.
John Keats, “Song”
WUTHERING DEPTHS
THERE’S no way to describe how it feels when they tell you,” says Billie Jean. “There was a person-to-person call to my dad from [West] Virginia. I thought Hank was in some kind of trouble. My daddy said, ‘Oh Lord,’ and asked the driver some questions, then hung up. I was sitting up by that point. He held me and said that Hank was dead, and I was screaming and crying. I said, ‘Don’t let them touch him. He often pretends he’s asleep.’ I thought they were going to bury him alive.”
Billie had flown in from Montgomery on New Year’s Eve, and was asleep by the time her father, Captain John A. Jones, arrived home from his afternoon shift with the Bossier City police department. The call from West Virginia came before daylight. Now there was a race to Hank’s remains.
Charles Carr had already phoned Lilly to give her the news. At 7:01 a.m., Lilly sent a telegram to Irene, “Come at once. Hank is dead,” then called her attorney, Robert Stewart, who made arrangements to charter a plane from Montgomery Aviation to take her and Daniel Carr to West Virginia. They landed at Beckley, and drove on to Oak Hill in a taxi. Lilly’s first stop was the police station, where she was briefed on the situation. Clearly prepared by Robert Stewart, she’d brought along papers identifying herself as the next of kin.
Billie Jean, together with her father and brother, took commercial flights from Shreveport to Birmingham, Alabama, and from Birmingham on to Charlotte. They arrived late on New Year’s Day and met Lilly and Daniel Carr the following morning. Lilly had chosen the suit in which Hank was to be buried and the casket in which he was to be carried back to Montgomery. She had also taken possession of his jewelry and other items from the car.
On hearing of Hank’s death, Toby Marshall caught a Greyhound bus to Charleston, then got a ride to Oak Hill. He should have been worried because his “patient” had died, but he seems to have convinced himself that he really was a doctor, and was preparing his final bill of $736.39.
Charles Carr was taken to the police station for questioning, then released. Joe Tyree put him up in the employees’ quarters of his funeral home, and then in the afternoon of January 1, Carr went to the house of magistrate Virgil Lyons. Television was still a novelty, so he watched some football games on Lyons’ TV. After his father and Lilly arrived, they all took rooms at the Hotel Hill in Oak Hill. Don Surface was questioned and let go, but was asked to stay around Oak Hill for a day or so. He had some friends and relatives nearby, so he stayed with them. Then, on being told he was free to leave, he caught a bus back to Bluefield. The car was impounded in a bay at Burdette’s Pure Oil station, then moved to N&W Motors, the local Ford dealership, where it was cleaned out by one of Burdette’s employees. Beer cans littered the floor, and among them was one verse of a song. It might have been written on an earlier trip, but, in light of the circumstances around its discovery, it seemed a final valentine to Audrey or Billlie Jean. A shoe or boot print stained the bottom left-hand corner, and the handwriting was almost illegible.
We met, we lived
And dear we loved
Then came that fatal day
The love that felt so dear fades fast away
Tonight we both are all alone
And here’s all that I can say
I love you still and always will
But that’s the price we have to pay
One item missing from the car was Hank’s felt hat, apparently stolen by Pete Burdette. An alcoholic, Burdette had contracted jungle rot, a fungal disease that attacks skin tissue, while serving in Asia during the war. His hair fell out after he started wearing Hank’s hat, and it was assumed locally to be a curse. Burdette later killed himself around the back of his filling station, and the hat continued to change hands. A pearl-handled gun was also taken. Lilly, who had fought hard for every one of her possessions, developed an obsession with the car and its contents, and according to Carr, phoned him every few weeks until she died inquiring about various items she was convinced Hank had taken with him.
Lilly, Daniel Carr, Charles Carr, and Toby Marshall drove back to Montgomery in Hank’s car. Daniel drove most of the way, although Charles relieved him occasionally. They probably drove through the night of January 2–3, because Irene remembers them pulling up around breakfast time on January 3. The hearse was just in front of them.
Audrey had spent New Year’s Eve with A. V. Bamford’s wife, Maxine, at the tony Plantation Club in Nashville. Maxine pointedly remembered that Audrey said nothing about Hank coming back to Nashville, or to her. Bamford had sucked up his losses on the Charleston show, then driven to Canton late on New Year’s Eve. He checked into the hotel where he’d arranged to meet Hank, then went to bed. Don Helms and Autry Inman drove to Canton a few hours behind him, checking into the hotel around 5:00 a.m. “Bam got up early,” said Helms, “and Autry and I got up and went down to the auditorium. Bam met me at the dressing room door. He said, ‘Brace yourself: Hank died on the way here.’”
The Canton show was staged by a local company, Harry Lashinsky and Lew Platt’s LCL Presentations. Platt (who later managed rock ’n’ roll deejay Alan Freed) and Lashinsky decided that the show should go on. Hank would have wanted it that way, they were sure. One of Platt’s associates found Eddie Wayne, a singing deejay on WCUE, Akron, to fill out the program, and the remainder of the cast was there. Everyone on the show gathered backstage before the matinee. Akron deejay Cliff Rodgers from WHKK went out and took the microphone to make the announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I’ve been in show business almost twenty years, and I’ve been called upon to do many difficult things in front of an audience, but today I’m about to perform the most difficult task I have ever done.” Rodgers heard some laughter from somewhere in the crowd. “This morning on his way to Canton to do this show, Hank Williams died in his car.” There were a few more laughs from people who thought it was a joke of some kind. “Ladies and gentlemen,” continued Rodgers, “this is no joke. Hank Williams is dead.”
Backstage, the cast could hear some weeping. Some of the cast was crying too. A single spotlight was directed at the empty stage as the band, still behind the curtain, played “I Saw the Light.” A few people in the audience sang along. Then the curtain was opened and the show went on. Hawkshaw Hawkins gave the performance of his life, possibly sensing that there was an opening at the top. Within the year, he would be in Nashville, but ten years later he perished in the plane crash that took the lives of Patsy Cline and Cowboy Copas.
There are a few strange codas to the Canton show. Southwest of Canton, in Dayton, Ohio, there was a Grand Ole Opry show slated for January 1, 1953, and several in and around Dayton swear that Hank Williams was scheduled to appear, although this seems highly unlikely in light of the fact that he was no longer a member of the Opry. Surviving advertisements show a lineup that included Carl Smith and the Carter Sisters, although it’s just possible that Hank was slated to appear before his dismissal. At some point in the 1960s, Jim Denny’s family acquired control of the Hatch Show Print company, found some Hank Williams plates, and faked a poster for the Canton show. According to Denny’s poster, Hank was a Grand Ole Opry artist at the last, and the fake poster is still widely circulated, typifying the culture of misinformation that bedevils Hank Williams. Then, in 1964, when Audrey was managing Hank Jr., she scheduled a promotional tour to coincide with his first record. The first show was on January 1, 1964; the location, of course, was Canton. Eleven years later, the story was to be continued. That same year, the execrable biopic Your Cheatin’ Heart premiered. In it, Audrey placed herself backstage in Canton for the fateful 1953 New Year’s Day show. She stood stoically, fighting back tears. “You have no heart,” Hank had once sun
g, “you have no shame.”
Joe Tyree and his assistant Alex Childers had set out for Montgomery with Hank’s remains at 4:00 p.m. on Friday, January 2. They’d taken turns at the wheel, driving nonstop. “It was raining all the way down,” said Tyree, “and when we got into Alabama and we’d pull into a filling station and they’d see the West Virginia plates, they’d want to know if we was carrying Hank back. They’d start peeping in the windows.”
Hank’s body arrived back in Montgomery at 7:00 a.m. on Saturday, January 3. The funeral was scheduled for the following afternoon. A. V. Bamford had flown from Canton to Nashville, then driven down to Montgomery with Audrey to organize the funeral. Before leaving Montgomery, Lilly had called Leaborne Eads, who’d helped her promote some of Hank’s shows back in the late 1930s and early ’40s. Eads worked for the Henley Monument company, and sang with the Henley Harmony Boys on one of Hank’s old WSFA spots. Lilly was very calm, Eads remembered, and gave the impression that she’d half expected Hank’s death. While she was away, Eads made arrangements for Dr. Henry Lyon to preach the funeral service and for Reverend Talmadge Smith to assist. He also secured a burial plot in Oakwood Cemetery Annex, next to the grave of Irene’s first child. On Lilly’s instructions, Eads ordered a top-of-the-line Wilbert Continental copper-lined hermetically sealable casket from Atlanta. The original plan had been for a church service, but it soon became apparent that no church could accommodate all those who wanted to attend. Robert Stewart’s idea was to rent Crempton Bowl, but the weather looked unpromising, so either Stewart or Bamford persuaded the city of Montgomery to make the Municipal Auditorium available. The police and fire department would then escort the cortege on its way to Oakwood Annex. Bamford chartered a plane to bring the Grand Ole Opry cast down for the funeral program. No one seemed to question why Opry rather than Louisiana Hayride artists were invited.
Billie Jean and her father and brother flew from West Virginia back to Shreveport, then returned to Montgomery late on Friday, January 2. They were staying at the boardinghouse when Lilly arrived early the following morning. Lilly immediately hid the car.
Irene had flown in. She wrote to her attorney, Robert Stewart:
The morning Mother returned, Billie refused to speak to her. Mother went into her bedroom and sat down on the bed. Billie came out of the bedroom where she had spent the night, picked up the telephone which was on the wall in the hall and placed a long-distance call to her attorney in Shreveport. Her words to him were, “Get up here. This old gray-haired bitch is trying to steal all of Hank’s stuff from me.” She hung up the telephone and returned to her room. Mother told me that if I did not get her out of the house, she would kill her.
Lilly and Audrey, discovering a commonality of interest they’d never had while Hank was alive, began looking for a sheaf of lyrics as if they were maps to buried treasure. They found them in the bedroom that Hank and Billie Jean had shared. Lilly grabbed them while Billie was in the bathroom, and handed them to Bamford, who put them in the trunk of his car. Bamford then handed them to Fred Rose when he appeared the following day. Nobody realized that without Hank singing them, the scribblings were fool’s gold.
Lilly then sat with Irene, blaming Billie for the concussion marks on Hank’s head. Irene later wrote:
Mother told me that Billie did not like the suit that had been put on Hank at the funeral home in West Virginia. She [Lilly] wanted me to take [Billie] to a men’s shop on Dexter Avenue where Hank traded and pick out a new suit and tie. I went into the bathroom where Billie, her father and brother were talking as she finished putting on her makeup. I told her what my mother had said and told her I would be ready in a few minutes to go with her. Her words were, “This is your mother’s show. Let her run it.” My words, “This is no show, this is my brother’s funeral.” By this time I was so mad, guess I could have killed her myself. I just said, “Billie, I have tried to love you and treat you good because I figured Hank loved you or he would not have married you, but let me say something to you here and now.…I will go through this funeral by your side. I will go with you to pick out the suit and tie. I realize that you think you are the meanest woman alive, but honey you have now met on [sic] much meaner than you. Now come on, we have a job to do. When it is over, don’t ever cross my path again.” At this time, my mother comes into the bathroom and starts for Billie. I made her go back to her room, took Billie by the arm, very calmly walked out the front door with she and her father and brother, went to the clothing shop where she again changed her mind. Hank was buried in the suit that was picked out in the first place.
Billie’s mother arrived from Shreveport and it was decided that they would be more comfortable in a hotel. The night before the funeral, Doctor Toby Marshall showed up. Billie comes strolling in, in of all things, red slacks, going from one group of people to another telling them what the ole gray-haired bitch has done to her or was trying to do to her cars and possessions. Billie and Doctor Marshall got into a pretty good discussion, and he told her very frankly what he thought about her attire and her conduct.
On Saturday evening, Lon Williams hitched a ride to Montgomery. He had five dollars in his pocket when he arrived at the boardinghouse. Hank was lying in state by then, and Braxton Schuffert was on the door screening entrants. Lon told Braxton that he wanted some flowers, so Braxton took him to Rosemont Gardens, where everyone was working late preparing floral arrangements. “I got Hank Williams’ daddy out here with me, and he wants y’all to make him a bouquet of flowers for his son,” said Braxton. “They let us in. The old man said, ‘I’m a poor man. I just want a five-dollar bouquet of flowers for my son.’ They made him a big bouquet. His voice right then was just like Hank’s.”
By this point it was clear that Hank hadn’t left a will, so, in the normal course of events, Lon would have been the administrator of his estate. Hank’s lawyer, Robert Stewart, notified him of this and Lon apparently agreed to be the administrator or executor, but Lilly confronted him and told him that she would fight a lawsuit in hell before she would see him have it. He said he’d fought her on earth all these years and when he died he hoped to be rid of her, and she could take it. He hired a lawyer but eventually relinquished all claims. There are many crowd photos from the funeral, but Lon is not among the official mourners.
On Sunday morning, lines formed once more outside the boarding-house to view the body. “In comes a couple of Hank’s friends bringing Myrna Fay [Myrna Faye Kelley], the Indian girl that fainted at the funeral,” wrote Irene to attorney Robert Stewart in 1972:
She goes over to the coffin and starts screaming. Billie comes up and says “Francis.” She thinks she is Francis Williams from WSM [Irene means Frances Williams Preston, later president of BMI]. Billie says, “Thank you for forwarding our mail to us in Shreveport.” Turns one upshook Indian. “I am not Francis. I’m not anybody you ever heard of, I am just a person that loved Hank with all my heart, not a tramp like you that married him for his money.” By this time I have come out of shock and I am breaking up a fistfight between the two of them over Hank’s coffin. By some miracle I was able to get Myrna Fay out the front door, Billie calmed down, and return to my mother who was trying to keep Audrey [and] Audrey’s family and various other people from hearing what was going on.
In a 1969 letter connected with Billie Jean’s subsequent lawsuit, Robert Stewart also remembered her getting into a fistfight with “some Indian girl” at the casket.
On Sunday afternoon, January 4, 1953, Hank was buried. Crowds estimated at between 15,000 and 20,000 were outside the city auditorium; 2,750 were inside. The balcony was set aside for black mourners, of whom there were around two hundred. The casket was brought in at 1:00 p.m. and opened at 1:15. Hundreds filed past. The Drifting Cowboys, now reunited, stood by in a guard of honor. The casket was framed by two guitar-shaped floral arrangements, one with silver strings. Two purple lamps glowed in the background. A tiny white Bible was placed in Hank’s frozen hand. Backstage, Roy Acuff was att
empting to organize the musical program. In addition to the Opry artists, there was a Montgomeryarea black gospel quartet, the Southwind Singers, and a white quartet, the Statesmen, who would later sing at Elvis’ funeral. “Roy Acuff was in charge,” said the Statesmen’s lead tenor, Jake Hess, “and he asked us to sing ‘I Saw the Light.’ That was before gospel singers knew that song, and he was upset when we said no. He cussed us out, but couldn’t do much because Hank’s mother had invited us.”
At 2:30, the doors were closed. “My friends,” said Dr. Lyon, “as we begin this service this afternoon, Ernest Tubb will bring us closer to the Lord as he sings ‘Beyond the Sunset.’” The Southwind Singers (possibly the only black quartet to perform at a prominent white funeral in Alabama prior to the civil rights era) sang “My Record Will Be There” before Dr. Lyon read from the Bible. Lyon had told Bamford that he needed half an hour, but Bamford had told him that he had only ten minutes. Roy Acuff made a confused announcement before leading the singing on “I Saw the Light.” Other Opry performers there that day included Jimmy Dickens, Carl Smith, Lew Childre, Webb Pierce, Bill Monroe, Ray Price, June Carter, and Johnnie and Jack, as well as Eddie Hill from WSM’s on-air staff. Tears were on their faces, but the task was harder yet for Don Helms, who led the Drifting Cowboys. “It was the eeriest thing I ever had to do in my life,” he says. “I had to stand up there and play with Hank’s coffin right below me. I can never explain how I felt playing his songs for somebody else the way I played for him with him laying in his coffin.”
Billie Jean was seated in the front row, uncomfortably close to Audrey, before deciding to move her family one row back. “Everybody ignored me,” she said. “Money begets money. They thought they were gonna have all the money. When Hank was alive it was a different story. None of them crossed him. Ernest Tubb, who was pretty close to Hank when he was alive, wouldn’t speak to me. He looked at me kinda stupid. I stopped to speak to him, and he looked at me like he didn’t even know me.”
