Hank Williams

by Colin Escott

  Audrey’s divorce settlement had given her half of Hank’s royalty income, leaving him the other half and all performance income. In death, of course, royalties made up almost all of the posthumous income. Half went to Audrey, and with Billie Jean out of the picture, the other half went to the estate, administered by Lilly on behalf of Hank Jr. No one foresaw what would happen to the value of Hank’s estate. Billie Jean didn’t foresee it when she signed the agreement, but neither did those who would profit from it.

  “Kaw-Liga” became the best-selling country record of 1953, and the flip side, “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” also became a top-seller. Joni James’ cover version of “Your Cheatin’ Heart” reached number two on the pop charts, and Frankie Laine’s version wasn’t far behind it. The next single, “Take These Chains from My Heart,” also reached number one. Hank’s entire catalog began moving in unprecedented quantities. Two albums were on the shelves by March, Memorial Album and Hank Williams as Luke the Drifter (the secret not a secret anymore). Within ten weeks of his death, Hank had as many albums on the market as he did all the years he lived; hundreds more would follow. The oil well that Hank Williams became in death was starting to gush. In 1952, his MGM royalties had been $13,869 and his Acuff-Rose royalties had been $55,044; in 1953, they had been $60,636 and $72,762, respectively.

  Lilly opened a shrine to Hank in his old bedroom and wrote a booklet, Life Story of Our Hank Williams, that she sold over the radio. She attended events in honor of her son and corresponded ceaselessly with her lawyer, Robert Stewart. Marie Glenn took on the raising of Cathy Yvone, but fell out with Lilly in 1954. For most of that year, they didn’t talk. The years of ceaseless work eventually took their toll on Lilly, and she died in her sleep on February 26, 1955. Her maid called Marie and told her that she couldn’t get Lilly up. Marie went next door and found Lilly slumped across the bed.

  Irene became the executor of the estate and thus the Alabama guardian of Hank Jr., but wouldn’t adopt Cathy, who was put up for readoption later in 1955. Marie made one last-ditch attempt to save Cathy from adoption. She tracked down Bobbie Jett, then living in California, and told her that Cathy would be put up for adoption if Bobbie didn’t reclaim her. Bobbie told Marie that she’d remarried and that her new husband didn’t know about Cathy, and she could therefore do nothing. Bobbie had married a man named John Tippins, and had six more children with him. Apparently, Pappy Neal McCormick visited Marie and offered to adopt the child, but Marie told him that they didn’t want anyone to have the child who “knowed anything about Hank.”

  In a meeting with the Department of Public Welfare, Robert Stewart gave an indication of Irene’s thinking on the matter. Irene would be in Montgomery for Hank Williams Day parades and the like, said Stewart, and “she could just hear the tongues wagging now when Cathy would ride down the street.” Lilly had divorced Bill Stone in April 1954, but he was still the adoptive father and was called upon to sign the papers necessary to put Cathy up for readoption. Social services reported that he cried that day. He was still living at Marie’s boardinghouse, as was Cathy, so if they cared for Cathy as much as they said, it seems strange that they apparently made no effort to prevent her being put up for adoption.

  In March 1955, Cathy went to Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Cook in Pine Level, Alabama, and then, in February 1956, to a middle-aged couple, Wayne and Mary Louise Deupree in Mobile. She became Cathy Louise Deupree. Irene wrote to Robert Stewart in January 1956 from her new home in Dallas and asked, “Has the baby been adopted?” The following month, a payment of $2,281.14 was made to a lawyer from Lilly’s estate with the instruction that it be paid to Cathy Stone / Deupree when she reached the age of twenty-one.

  After the boardinghouses had been sold and all of Lilly’s debts paid, just $6,504.38 remained in her estate. It wasn’t much to show for a terribly hard life. Lilly left nothing to Marie Glenn, but Irene gave her sufficient furnishings to start her own boardinghouse on North Decatur Street. Several more moves followed. In 1958, Marie married Ed Harvell, who had lived for years in Lilly’s boardinghouse, sharing the room next to Hank’s on the ground floor (Marie’s son, Butch, says that Marie and Ed were never married, although Marie took his name, and was buried as Marie Harvell).

  Immediately upon Lilly’s death, Audrey sought to have Irene removed as administrator of the estate. Irene not only refused to give up the job, for which she received 2.5 percent of Hank’s income, but also hung on to a large number of his artifacts. She justified her actions by saying that Audrey had squandered her half of Hank’s income, and would squander the other half if she were administering it. The Alabama estate had borne the total cost of all the judgments against Hank as well as the total cost of the settlement with Billie Jean. Audrey doggedly refused to share anything but the income.

  Fred Rose died three months before Lilly, on December 1, 1954. He had been much more than Hank’s music publisher and record producer; he had been his mentor and his quality-control department. In the last photos of him, some of them taken with Lilly and Audrey, he looked gaunt and sick, but still fearsomely intense. He’d developed heart disease, and had once suffered a heart attack in the recording studio, but his Christian Science beliefs prevented him from seeing a doctor. After his death, Wesley Rose assumed control. The accountant began to fancy himself a music man, but he could never have sat with Hank, as his father had done, helping him polish those diamonds in the rough. Even less could Wesley have helped Hank weather the upset triggered by rock ’n’ roll. Seven months after Fred Rose died, an Elvis Presley record nudged its way onto the country charts, heralding the revolution. The hard and fast borders between pop, country, and R&B began to dissolve, and rock ’n’ roll emerged. In perhaps the most ludicrous statement he ever made, Wesley Rose said that if Hank had lived “I don’t think we would have had a rock era.” His contention was that rock ’n’ roll filled the void left by Hank’s death.

  Every one of Hank’s contemporaries had to come to terms with rock ’n’ roll. Webb Pierce, Hank Snow, Carl Smith, Faron Young, Red Foley, and Eddy Arnold saw their careers take a precipitous nosedive in the mid- to late 1950s. Only Ray Price went from strength to strength as he finally escaped Hank’s long shadow to forge his own style. As rock ’n’ roll erupted and everyone was wondering what would happen next, Price took country music back to the barrooms, cutting classic beer hall shuffles, like “Crazy Arms” and “My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You.” Price was the only one from that generation to see his career surge during the birth of rock ’n’ roll by making music true to country music’s roots.

  Hank Williams was elected to the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, but scarcely belonged there. His music was for adults, whereas rock ’n’ roll was for, by, and about teenagers. The exaggeration and overstatement of rock ’n’ roll had no place in his music, and its sledgehammer beat was the opposite of the Drifting Cowboys’ sweet, mellow swing. Had he lived, there would have been no place for Hank Williams in rock ’n’ roll or in Nashville. His thinning hair, his incorrigibly rural ways, and his “Pitchers from Life’s Other Side” were the antithesis of nearly everything recorded in Nashville from 1955 onward.

  With the exception of Ray Price, the new era’s most successful artists, like Jim Reeves, Johnny Cash, and Marty Robbins, blurred the line between pop and country, whereas Hank’s music always needed to be reinterpreted for the mass audience. Some of his records, like “Hey, Good Lookin’” or “Settin’ the Woods on Fire,” almost prefigured rock ’n’ roll’s giddiness, but Hank himself was inalienably country.

  Rhythm ’n’ blues singer Wynonie Harris had much of what became rock ’n’ roll swagger on his late 1940s and early ‘50s hits like “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” but that didn’t help him score one hit after rock ’n’ roll erupted. He was too old and too black. Hank was probably too old and too hillbilly, but by dying prematurely, he avoided the indignity of having to answer the question of what he would have done. For its part, MGM tried to imagine the sound by graft
ing drums, electric guitar, and piano solos onto his records and bathing the results in echo, beginning a long, sorry history of reinventing Hank’s music according to the season.

  As early as 1955, the ongoing success of Hank’s catalog was surprising everyone. The emerging LP market was a godsend. MGM could endlessly repackage Hank’s recordings, and Acuff-Rose could pitch his songs to other artists as LP filler. When Hank had signed his contract renewal with MGM in 1951, the LP royalty rate was artificially low, and the estate renegotiated the rate to the standard 5 percent, but not without squawking from Frank Walker. On October 20, 1955, Walker wrote to the estate: “We in the record business know that interest pretty much ceases in a record artist the day after his funeral,” he said. “The flowers dry very quickly, so do eyes, and so do royalties.” Walker reminded the estate that, in his view, the ongoing success was because of his ceaseless work. With Acuff-Rose’s assistance, he had at least overcome the problem that Hank left so few recordings. Aside from “Kaw-Liga” / “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” just five studio recordings remained unissued, and two of those were hymns that Audrey rendered unlistenable. Acuff-Rose retrieved vocal-guitar demos for overdub. The Drifting Cowboys were still around Nashville, most of them working with Ray Price, and the results of their overdub sessions were surprisingly convincing. A few of the overdubs, notably “Weary Blues from Waitin’,” became hits.

  Then, in 1955, MGM acquired the Johnnie Fair Syrup shows. Between January and May 1949, Hank had prerecorded early morning radio shows for Johnnie Fair, and many of the shows survived on acetate. An engineer at KWKH reportedly found them and sold them to Leonard Chess, boss of Chess Records. Chess realized that he couldn’t issue them and sold them on to MGM. With few hits of his own at the time, Hank had generally performed other artists’ songs, and did so without a band. The results were artlessly affecting. At the dawn of the rock ’n’ roll era, MGM began issuing these very spare vocal-guitar recordings as singles, and they sold respectably well. The faux folk ballad “At the First Fall of Snow” was released in September 1955 and had sold thirty thousand copies by the end of February 1956.

  Hank’s royalty income, which had peaked in 1953 at $132,000, was still at a very healthy $74,000 in 1958, despite the fact that his singles were no longer hitting the charts. In 1959 and 1960, MGM overdubbed the Johnnie Fair shows for LP release, and by 1960 the royalties once again topped $130,000. In 1961, the Health and Happiness shows were acquired, providing the basis for a couple of spurious live albums. Then, in 1962, Ray Charles included two of Hank’s songs on his chart-topping Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, and Hank’s Acuff-Rose royalties jumped from $45,626 in 1961 to $71,049 the following year.

  Acuff-Rose had become hugely successful by 1960, managing and publishing the Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison, but Hank Williams was still the jewel of the catalog, and Wesley Rose wanted to preserve it at all costs. As early as 1960, Rose began to talk to the Alabama estate about copyright renewal. Copyright law back then stated that copyrights must be renewed every twenty-eight years. At the time of renewal, the copyright can be reassigned to another music publisher, and that prospect had Wesley Rose running scared. Hank Jr. would reach the age of majority in 1970, and might well reassign his father’s copyrights when they began coming up for renewal in 1974.

  With that in mind, Wesley Rose offered a deal to Irene, who was still Hank Jr.’s guardian in Alabama and executor of the estate. The estate would receive a one-time, nonrecoupable payment of twenty-five thousand dollars and Irene would receive a one-time, nonrecoupable payment of five thousand dollars. In return, the estate preagreed to renew the copyrights with Acuff-Rose. The ostensible reason for this was that the long-debated movie was on the point of being made, and Acuff-Rose needed to know that they had the copyrights for another term in order to offer synchronization rights.

  The estate had a reason for wanting to get the matter resolved, too. In a handwritten memo to himself, Irene’s attorney, Robert Stewart, said, “Renewal rights vest in the twenty-eighth year in both legitimate and illegitimate children.” In other words, the problem of Cathy that they thought they’d solved in 1956 might come back to haunt them. In fact, Acuff-Rose almost ensured that it would. Acuff-Rose’s attorney, Maury Smith, didn’t have an especially good case when Audrey sued to gain control of the entire estate and have the renewal deal reversed. Trying to explain why Acuff-Rose had paid so little for the renewal rights, Smith mentioned Hank’s October 1952 contract with Bobbie Jett and stated that the child covered by that agreement might come forth with a claim that would diminish the value of the rights under discussion. In a December 1966 decision, an Alabama judge left the administration of the estate with Irene, and refused permission for the renewal deal to be undone. At some point, an attorney contacted Cathy’s adoptive parents, probably asking if they wanted to pursue a claim on her behalf. They said that they didn’t, not realizing the amount of money at stake.

  The lawsuit proved that Audrey had spent everything that she’d taken in from Hank’s estate, and that there was nothing left for Hank Jr. There wasn’t much more left in Alabama. In 1968, Irene settled sixty thousand dollars in bills that Junior and Audrey had run up. By then, the estate’s total earnings since Hank’s death were in excess of $1.6 million. Half of that amount had gone to Audrey, and she had spent it all, and of the remaining $830,000, just $203,592 was left. Irene, meanwhile, was turning to other sources of income, and in July 1969 was arrested at the U.S.-Mexican border with seven million dollars’ worth of cocaine concealed under the rear seat of her Cadillac. Her next few years were spent in a federal penitentiary in West Virginia, quite close to where Hank was pronounced dead. After her incarceration, the Alabama guardianship was taken over by Robert Stewart. In 1979, Irene wrote one of the last of many letters to Stewart on the occasion of Jay Caress’ biography of Hank Williams. Stewart replied, “When it comes to airing the real facts about the Williams family, just think what you and I together could tell.” Neither, though, ever told. Stewart died in January 1985, and Irene died impoverished and alone in Dallas on March 24, 1995. In an act of great magnanimity, Hank Jr. sang “I Saw the Light” at her funeral. Shortly before she died, she sold a storage locker full of Hank’s stage outfits, photos, contracts, and ephemera to country star Marty Stuart for thirty thousand dollars.

  While Irene was in jail, her father, Lon, died. The only person to remain above the squabbles with a modicum of dignity, he had continued to live in McWilliams, Alabama. He ran a store for a while, fixed fences and spliced cable, and told stories that sometimes stretched credibility. He died at age seventy-eight, on October 22, 1970, and wasn’t buried in the same Williams family plot as Hank and Lilly, but in another family plot that bore his name.

  In 1974, Hank Williams’ copyrights, which no one thought would be worth anything past the end of 1954, started coming up for renewal. By then Billie Jean was a widow once more. Johnny Horton had died in a car wreck on November 5, 1960. His last paying gig had been at the Skyline Club in Austin, the site of Hank’s last paying gig.

  By the early 1960s, Billie Jean realized the enormity of the mistake she’d made in settling for thirty thousand dollars. She sued first over the manner of her portrayal in MGM’s biopic, Your Cheatin’ Heart, but a United States district court in Atlanta determined that although she and Hank had been legally married, the movie hadn’t maliciously defamed her, and so damages were not payable. Billie Jean then took the decision that she and Hank had been legally married and sued for half of the copyright renewals. Someone, quite possibly a music business entrepreneur named Ernest D. Brookings, put the word in her ear that she hadn’t signed away the renewals because she couldn’t have signed away what she didn’t have. On October 9, 1968, she gave Brookings permission to shop her as-yet-unproven claim on the renewals. On May 28, 1969, Brookings assigned them to Acuff-Rose’s archrival, Hill & Range, which in turn funded her lawsuit on the understanding that they would handle her share of the music pub
lishing should she win. The case came to trial in March 1975, and judgment in Billie Jean’s favor was rendered on October 22 of that year.

  On November 4, 1975, Audrey died, ostensibly of heart failure. She had lived her last years in a pharmaceutical and alcoholic daze as if in fulfillment of the prophecy Hank had made: “You’ll walk the floor the way I do.…” A year before her death, she’d held a garage sale. Local news media reported it as if she were selling off Hank’s possessions, but in fact she was selling off the detritus of her own life at hugely inflated prices, charging two dollars admission. She sat out front, a sadly diminished figure, looking much older than her fifty-one years. Seated in front of a huge cardboard cutout of Hank, she hid behind oversized dark glasses, and had extreme difficulty getting up.

  On January 6, 1974, Cathy Yvone Stone turned twenty-one. The twenty-two hundred dollars left to her in the settlement of Lilly’s estate hadn’t been placed in an interest-bearing account, but the return on it would be greater than anyone could have imagined. Days before she turned twenty-one, Cathy’s adoptive mother told her about a Dickensian inheritance awaiting her, and hinted that her birth father might have been none other than Hank Williams, but Cathy’s visit to the Montgomery County Courthouse to pick up the check yielded no further clues. Three months later, on April 17, 1974, Bobbie Jett died in California, leaving only the vaguest intimations that she had once been involved with Hank Williams.

  Just two days before Bobbie’s death, attorney Richard Frank had written to fellow attorney Robert Stewart in connection with Billie Jean’s lawsuit. “I am much afraid,” Frank wrote, “that if Baby Jett has personally come up with a lawyer to get the money from Mrs. Stone, her ancestry may well be reasonably obvious to her, and further trouble may ensue.”