by Colin Escott
It was an imposing house, by far the finest dwelling Lilly, Irene, or Hank had ever been inside. These days, it’s numbered 127 Rose Street, the street that Thaddeus B. Rose named for himself. He excavated the soil from beneath the house for another project, and ordered that the house be built on stilts, raising it six feet off the ground. Rose was one of Georgiana’s grandees, a bachelor who lived away from the tracks. He later founded the Georgiana library, and local wisdom has it that he got the idea for the house on stilts from traveling in the swampland around New Orleans. A long hallway ran through the center of the house, the toilet was in an outhouse, and there was one faucet.
Lilly’s possessions were few when she moved in. She stuffed feed sacks with corn shucks for beds, used apple boxes for her dresser, and cooked in the fireplace. Local families gave her what they could spare, but Lilly was determined that she would accept charity no longer than she had to. The Simses lived across the street, and Lilly gave them the impression that Lon was dead. “They had no money,” said Harold Sims, who was four years older than Hank. “Most Sundays after church, my mother would ask me to take a platter of roast chicken, pork chops, rice and gravy, pie to them. They acted like they were counting on it.”
Shortly after the Williamses moved into Rose’s house, Lilly took on two more charges, her nieces Marie and Bernice McNeil, the daughters of her sister Annie Skipper and Annie’s husband, Grover McNeil. After Annie died of typhoid fever, Grover paid for Lilly to care for Marie and Bernice, and they all became part of Hank’s extended family. From time to time, Lilly looked after her mother too, all the while working as a practical nurse at what was called Tippins Hospital. The hospital was a large house that looked like a convalescent home, run by Dr. H. K. Tippins and his brother. Overnight care was offered, and Lilly was on night duty. She later prevailed upon Dr. Tippins to sign Hank’s birth certificate. To supplement her income, she lobbied a local politician to collect Lon’s full disability pension, and took in a couple of boarders, which gave her the idea of getting into the rooming house business.
Lilly fostered Hank’s interest in singing, but she was determined that if he was to sing, it would be in praise of the Lord. She scraped together a few dollars and sent him to a shape-note singing school in Avant, near Georgiana. The hymns Hank learned there and in church every Sunday colored his approach to music as nothing else ever would. Black church music entered his life, too. “Wednesday evenings, me and Hiram would sit on a board fence around their house and listen to the Negro church,” said his neighbor Harold Sims. “It was about a mile away. It was prayer meetin’ night. The most beautiful music in the world. The breeze came from the south and it would undulate the sound. One minute soft, next minute loud, like it was orchestrated. One night, Hiram looked up at me and said, ‘One day, I’m gonna write songs like that.’” Years later, Hank told his first wife, Audrey, that his favorite song was “Death Is Only a Dream"; its morbidity and superstition resonated within him in a way that the era’s popular songs never did.
Sadly we sing and with tremulous breath
As we stand by the mystical stream,
In the valley and by the dark river of death,
And yet ‘tis no more than a dream.
Much else informed Hank Williams’ music, but the essence of it is there. From the holy songs, Hank learned how to express profound sentiments in words that an unlettered farmer could understand, and he came to appreciate music’s spiritual component. He also loved the warm glow of recognition that the simple melodies elicited, and their effect was so profound that his own melodies would rarely be more complicated than the hymns and folk songs he heard as a child. On his radio shows later in life, he would almost always sing an old hymn, remembering every line of every verse. Hank was a believer, but not, in later life, a churchgoer. Perhaps he felt unworthy, perhaps his schedule didn’t permit it, but even in beer joints he would sometimes throw everyone off guard with a hymn. Knowing himself to be a backslider, and knowing that he had been weighed in the balance and found wanting in so many ways, he seemed to find rare peace in the hymns of his childhood.
Another craft that Hank learned early in life was hawking. Lilly and Irene would roast peanuts and Hank would go out onto the streets of Georgiana and sell them. “The first day,” wrote Lilly in a booklet not always given to accuracy, “he made thirty cents, and I remember how proud he was when he brought home the thirty cents’ worth of stew meat, tomatoes and rice he bought with it. ‘Mama,’ he shouted, ‘fix us some gumbo stew. We’re gonna eat tonight!’” A more believable coda to the story came from Oscar Vickery, a neighbor of the Williamses after they moved to Greenville. He remembered Lilly counting the bags of peanuts before Hank left the house and counting the nickels that came back in. Even then, she didn’t trust him, but even then Hank was outwitting her by taking a few peanuts from every bag and making up another bag and keeping a nickel for himself. Low cunning to get the better of a grasping woman was a skill that Hank would use the rest of his life.
At the beginning of the September 1933 school year, Hank moved to Fountain, Alabama, to live with his cousins, the McNeils. There was a high school in Georgiana, but not in Fountain, and the McNeils’ daughter, Opal, was high school age. Hank was going to grammar school then, so he lived with the McNeils while Opal lived with Lilly and went to high school. For twenty-one years, Hank’s uncle, Walter McNeil, was an engineer with W. T. Smith, moving the family from settlement to settlement. In Fountain, they lived in three boxcars, and Hank attended the single-room schoolhouse. His aunt Alice taught him some of the rudiments of music, and his cousin J.C. showed him what growing up in the woods was all about. “We’d fish, hunt,” said J.C. “Hell, there was nothin’ else to do. Every dog we’d find, we’d try and make it into a hunting dog. We hunted squirrels, rabbits.” In interviews and in song, Hank would rhapsodize about rural life, but the year he spent with the McNeils was the last time he lived it. From the time he returned to Georgiana, he was a city boy, and the cities kept getting bigger.
The year with the McNeils also marked the beginning of Hank’s drinking. He was eleven at the time. J.C.’s father, Walter, hid his liquor under his mattress, and Hank and J.C. would pour some out, then fill up Walter’s bottle with water. Later, Hank and J.C. would watch to see where the loggers hid their hooch when they went to a social, then they’d sneak over, steal it, and make off into the woods. They’d drink, as the saying went around there, ’til they could have laid on the ground and fallen off it.
Hank returned to Georgiana in 1934. By now, he was performing on the streets and at the railroad station, taking requests and learning how to hold an audience. He pestered the town’s old-time fiddlers to show him what they knew. Cade Durham was a cobbler who walked with a stick, smoking a stogie jammed into a cigar holder; Jim Warren owned a jewelry and instruments store. Both showed Hank the rudiments of hoe-down fiddling and some major chords on the guitar. Late in life, Hank would play the fiddle only when he was in his cups, but throughout his early career he was a half-proficient hoedown fiddler. Where and when he got his first guitar has long been a matter of conjecture; he could have lined a wall with all the first guitars people claimed to have given him. Talking to Ralph Gleason, though, Hank said the first one came from his mother when he was eight, which more or less backs up what Lilly always said. Several people remember him practicing under the house on Rose Street. He would sit on an old car seat, pick out his chords, and sing. Lilly, who was trying to catch some sleep above, would lean out of the window and yell, “Harm, hush up that fuss.”
It was probably in Georgiana that Hank met his first acknowledged musical influence, a black street musician, Rufus Payne. Because Payne was rarely found without a home-brewed mix of alcohol and tea, Payne’s nickname was “Tee-Tot,” a pun on teetotaler. Details about him are not only sketchy, but contradictory as well. According to researcher Alice Harp, Rufus was born in 1884 on the Payne Plantation in Sandy Ridge, Lowndes County, Alabama. His parents
had been slaves there, but they moved to New Orleans around 1890, giving Rufus a front-row seat for the birth of jazz. After his parents died, Rufus settled in Greenville, Alabama. Harp insists that Payne became a society musician, playing white functions, learning all the pop hits of the day. The musician that Hank’s cousins J. C. and Walter McNeil Jr. remembered was quite different. Payne, said J. C. McNeil, lived down by the tracks in Greenville and worked part-time at Peagler’s Drug Store as a cleaner and delivery person. Both McNeils remember that he had a hunched back and long arms that extended almost to his knees. “He would play the guitar and the cymbals,” said Walter McNeil. “He had the cymbals tied between his legs, and he had this thing around his neck with the jazz horn, I think he called it, and the Jew’s harp. And he could play all those things with the guitar and called himself a one-man band. He had a cigar box in front of him where you’d throw the money.” Tee-Tot, sometimes in the company of other musicians, went out into the surrounding towns to play on the sidewalks. Although Hank probably met him on the streets of Georgiana, he later told one of his band members, Lum York, that Tee-Tot was a janitor at the school in Greenville, implying that Hank met Tee-Tot after the Williamses moved to Greenville.
A crowd of kids followed Tee-Tot around, but Hank was the only one who wanted to do more than listen. He wanted to learn. Exactly what passed between Hank Williams and Rufus Payne will never be known. If, as has often been said, Payne gave Hank lessons, it’s hard to know what he imparted. Hank probably already knew most of the chords that Payne knew, so perhaps the lessons involved broader strokes. J. C. McNeil, who insisted he also took lessons from Payne, said that Payne always stressed the importance of keeping time and getting a good rhythm going. Later, one of the elements that would set Hank apart from his contemporaries was the irresistible drive to his music. He was never an accomplished guitarist, but his bands would always take their cue from his forceful rhythm guitar playing. He whanged the E chord in a way that any blues singer would recognize. Rufus Payne almost certainly taught Hank some songs, and while Hank probably forgot most of them, he never lost the lazy swing and sock rhythm. The blues feel that permeates all but the goofiest of Hank’s songs is another thing that Rufus Payne probably brought out.
Lilly says she fed Payne in exchange for Hank’s lessons, but memories of him are otherwise vague. Some say he played the blues alone, others say that he led a little combo that played pop songs and hokum numbers. Irene said that Payne once came to Lilly’s house and told her that Hank was going to get both of them into trouble by following him around, which seems to imply that Hank was quite determined in his pursuit. “More than anything,” said Walter McNeil, “I think Tee-Tot helped Hank get beyond his shyness, and helped him project himself a little, little more, ’cause Hank was a shy person really. He had to lose that somehow, and I think Tee-Tot was a big help to him in doing that.”
As unfashionable as it was to acknowledge the influence of black musicians, Hank later went out of his way to give Payne full credit. “All the music training I ever had was from him,” he told the Montgomery Advertiser at the time of his 1951 Homecoming. Talking to jazz journalist Ralph J. Gleason the following year, he said, “I learned to play the gitar from an old colored man…. He…played in a colored street band.…I was shinin’ shoes, sellin’ newspapers and followin’ this old Nigrah around to get him to teach me to play the guitar. I’d give him fifteen cents, or whatever I could get a hold of for the lesson.” Hank acknowledged Payne again during his Greenville Homecoming and apparently searched for him, but Payne had died in a charity hospital in Montgomery on March 17, 1939. He was on relief at the time, and his trade or profession was marked “unknown” on the death certificate.
Local musicians like Payne would have made a much bigger impression on Hank when he was growing up than the stars of the day. Lilly didn’t have a radio or phonograph, although Hank would try to listen to the radio at the Simses’ house or in the local stores. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Hank was barely influenced by country music’s first superstar, Jimmie Rodgers, who succumbed to tuberculosis in 1933. Rodgers was the original kid with a guitar. Raised in Mississippi, he didn’t draw on folk ballads so much as jazz, blues, Hawaiian music, and vaudeville. Like Hank, he turned to music in part because of a physical affliction. In place of Appalachian music’s piety and grim resignation, Rodgers’ music was populated by good-time pals one step ahead of the law, but still ready to shed a tear for mother and home. He sang with an insouciant, almost insolent drawl, and his sentimental parlor ballads were offset by rowdier songs, such as “In the Jailhouse Now,” “Waiting for a Train,” “Travelin’ Blues,” and “T for Texas.” Many of the biggest country stars of the 1940s and 1950s, notably Gene Autry, Ernest Tubb, Floyd Tillman, Lefty Frizzell, and Hank Snow, began as Rodgers disciples and recorded his songs. Hank was a few years younger, just nine years old when Rodgers died. Jimmie Rodgers’ influence on Hank was less direct. Rodgers brought the barroom culture to country music, and inasmuch as Hank’s music came from the honky-tonk, he was a Rodgers disciple. Hank learned to yodel like Rodgers, but usually did no more than break occasionally into falsetto, and he probably learned that from blues singers.
It was probably after Lilly moved to Greenville that she acquired a radio, broadening Hank’s horizons. Greenville was fifteen miles further up the L&N tracks toward Montgomery and was four times bigger than Georgiana. As the seat of Butler County, the focal point of the town was the courthouse square rather than the railroad station. Lilly moved her family there in time for Hank and Irene to start school in September 1934. Several of Hank’s contemporaries remember him bringing his guitar to school. He would play during the lunch break and tell people that to play and sing was his “highest ambition.” The ditty he sang repeatedly was as follows:
I had an old goat
She ate tin cans
When the little goats came out
They were Ford sedans
Lilly set up a boardinghouse by the cotton gin and worked in a sauerkraut cannery known locally as “The Smell of Success.” It was the rooming house business that ideally suited her “take no crap” temperament, though. “She’d just as soon knock you in the head as look at you if you made her mad,” said J. C. McNeil. “She had to be tough. She’d bounce them suckers out of there if they gave her any crap.” One of Lilly’s boardinghouse tenants later characterized her as mean and violent with a short fuse. Perhaps in emulation of her, Hank never shied away from a fight, particularly when drunk. He would pitch in with a wild-eyed fury, even knowing he was going to be thrashed. Later, he told a band member that all he needed in a fight was his mother standing behind him with a broken bottle.
For all her shortcomings, Lilly had a singleminded desire to better the lot of herself and her family, and, with the help of Lon’s disability pension that she fought hard to get, the family wasn’t as badly off as many during the depth of the Depression. In Greenville, Lilly performed charity work rather than being a recipient of it.
What happened to Lon is the subject of some dispute. He later told his second family that his aneurysm burst. He was sitting under a tree, he said, and it was as if a .22 gun went off in his head. Fluid ran from his nose, ears, eyes, and mouth, but instead of being pronounced cured he was diagnosed with dementia praecox and kept in the hospital system against his will. He told Hank’s first biographer, Roger Williams, that he was detained on account of Lilly, who tried to get a commitment order against him. Others have a different account, insisting that ” for a while at least ” Lon was happy to be in the hospital. In January 1937, he was moved to the V.A. hospital in Biloxi, Mississippi, and he stayed there until August 1938. The V.A. in Biloxi is situated on several acres of parkland within walking distance of the beach. Three square meals a day were served, making it a very alluring proposition during the late years of the Depression. “He didn’t particularly want to get out,” said J. C. McNeil. “He would pull all kinds of tricks. One time they came into
his room and they looked everywhere ” he had crawled up under the bed, pulled himself up to the springs and held himself there until they had left.”
At some point, though, Lon decided that he wanted to leave, and found that he couldn’t. He rarely spoke about it in later years, although he spat every time the word psychiatrist was mentioned, giving some indication of what happened. The records have been lost, but Lon said that Lilly had told his family that he was dead, and had told the V.A. that he had no family except for her and the kids. Lon insisted that he tried to tell the doctors that he had a brother and sister, but no one would believe him. Finally, he persuaded the kin of another patient to mail a letter to his sister, Bertha, who handed it to Lon’s brother, Mack. Bertha detested Lilly, and it’s through Bertha that much of the story was handed down, but Bertha insisted that Mack went to the V.A. hospital with affidavits attesting to the fact that he was Lon’s brother, securing his release.
Nobody remembers Lilly going to visit Lon very often, so it’s unlikely that Hank saw his father more than once or twice during the 1930s. Lon said that Hank came once when he was fourteen, which would have been in 1937 or ‘38. Perhaps Lon’s disappearance meant that Hank, now a spindly kid with steel-rimmed glasses, retreated into himself while perfecting his public mask. Working the streets and having almost limitless access to Rufus Payne, he learned how to be conversational ” even confidential ” with people he hardly knew. This was a critical skill for someone in the line of work he proposed to take up, but it meant that from an early age the core of Hank Williams became a thing known only to himself, masked by the molassified haw-haw that led people to think that they were his closest friends.