by Colin Escott
Back in New Brockton, Helms assembled a band with two cousins and two friends, one of whom was Sammy Pruett. Helms and Pruett had met in Panama City at a Neal McCormick gig, and they stayed in touch. Their band was called the Alabama Rhythm Boys, and they played the honky-tonks around southern Alabama from Wednesday through Saturday. One of the guys in the band knew Hank and went to Montgomery to meet him. Helms recalled:
He came back and said, “Hank Williams is putting a band together. Y’all wanna go work for him?” We said, “Aw hell, it’s probably better ’n this,” so we gave three or four days’ notice and rode the bus up to Montgomery. We were supposed to meet Hank at Art Freehling’s music store, but he wasn’t there. We went outside and I saw this real long-legged guy coming. He walked up, and he said, “Y’all the group?” We said, “Yeah.” He said, “Well, I’m Hank Williams, follow me.” We walked round the corner and down the block to a hock shop. He said, “Jake, you got any more of them blackjacks in there?” and there was a tray of ’em. He passed ’em out, he said, “Boys, if y’all gonna play with me, by God you’re gonna need these.” He wasn’t kiddin’ either.
Hank lined up Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday nights at the Riverside Club in Andalusia, and Tuesday and Thursday in nearby Opp. The Riverside was one of the biggest dance halls in Alabama, and there would often be six hundred people there on the weekend. Hank rented a trailer and moved to Andalusia. Helms and the band didn’t live far away, so they drove in from New Brockton in Helms’ fiancée’s car, then went home after the show.
Audrey was with Hank much of the time. It was understood that they would get married at the same time as Helms and his fiancée, Hazel, and another group member and his fiancée. Hank and Audrey jumped the gun, though. He pestered her constantly to marry him, but there were several hoops to jump first. Audrey was still married to Erskine Guy who by now was an enlisted man. Divorcing a serviceman who was serving overseas was not easy, and both Hank and Audrey had grown attached to the eighty-dollar-a-month allotment check that Audrey received from the military while Guy was away. It didn’t help that Audrey’s father was bitterly opposed to her relationship with Hank. Audrey also insisted that she never liked the name Williams. “I told my aunt after I started dating Hank, ‘I cannot imagine “Audrey Williams,” ’ she said. As always, though, the biggest problem was Hank’s drinking, but during those late months of 1944, he made a concerted effort to stay sober, and as the year came to a close, sobriety drew its reward.
Audrey always portrayed her decision to marry Hank as a spur-of-the-moment act, but she had to take the first step of divorcing Erskine Guy, a divorce that became final on December 5, 1944, on the grounds of voluntary abandonment. Hank then went to see a Dr. Parker, who declared him free of venereal disease, and then a notary public, who swore out the marriage license. The last stop was a justice of the peace, M. A. Boyett, who operated a filling station near Andalusia and pronounced them man and wife on December 15, 1944. Technically, it was an illegitimate marriage because they hadn’t sat out the sixty-day waiting period necessary after a divorce.
Audrey said she was cooking for the band in the trailer, but Paul Dennis, who came down to play with Hank, remembers only one meal — and that was inedible. The honeymoon didn’t last long. On the weekend that the Andalusia gig ended, Hank got drunk. Audrey pitched a fit, Hank threw her clothes into the mud out in front of the trailer, and she called the police and had him put in jail. Don Helms had to get him out. “I was embarrassed,” says Helms, “but I went back in there. He was sitting on a bench in his cell watching me. I didn’t know what to say, but he was staring at me. He said, ‘What d’ya want me to do? Stand on my darn head?’ I paid the thirty dollars and got him out. As we were leaving, one of the policemen said, ‘Come back ’n’ see us, Hank,’ and he said, ‘All of you can go to hell.’”
By 1945, Hank was back in Montgomery, reestablishing himself as the most popular hillbilly act in town. He sold a self-produced folio of songs called Original Songs of Hank Williams, printed by Leon Johnson, a local musician who ran a print shop. Johnson had been printing flyposters for Hank since the late 1930s, although it was usually Lilly who came to pick up the order and take care of the account. Johnson didn’t take much notice of Hank until he got a call for a second printing of the songbook. This time, Hank arrived with a half-gallon jar of nickels, quarters, and dimes to pay the bill. He sold the books for thirty-five cents and he’d tell the audience that the money was for handling. “You send in the money,” he’d say, “and I’ll handle it.”
Only the words were published in the songbook — not the music. Hank told Johnson that if people wanted to learn the tune, they’d have to listen to his radio show, but the truth was that Hank didn’t know musical notation and wasn’t about to pay somebody to transcribe it for him. The little folio included “I’m Not Coming Home Any More” as well as several songs that were recorded later and several more that never surfaced again. Among the latter was a saber-rattler called “Grandad’s Musket,” possibly born of Hank’s guilt for having done so little toward the war effort:
The boys up in the mountains have closed down their stills
They’ve moved to the city and are making leaded pills
While me and Grandad’s Musket, when we are off to
War We’ll join up with MacArthur and even up the score.
After the gig in Andalusia ended, the band moved to Lilly’s boardinghouse in Montgomery, and resumed the prewar routine of school-houses during the week and beer joints on weekends. Hank usually paid five dollars a night on top of room and board. Audrey would ride with them, sitting on Hank’s lap all the way down to the show and all the way back because Lilly’s ‘37 Chevrolet was packed full. The bass sat on top. Most nights, Lilly came to watch the door.
The lineup of the Drifting Cowboys was never stable for more than a few weeks. Helms quit the group shortly before he went into the service in 1945, but Pruett stayed on a little longer. Shortly after Helms was drafted, Hank hired Doyle and Bernice Turner, a husband-and-wife team living in Panama City, Florida. Helms had recommended them to Hank, and when they came home one night they found that he had called. “Doyle had made me practice and practice barre chords,” said Bernice, “and when Hank heard me he had a fit. He had a good sock rhythm play- ing open chords, but he couldn’t play barre chords. We auditioned at the boardinghouse, done two or three songs, and he hired us. He knew we were exactly what he wanted.” Bernice remembered them playing throughout Alabama, the Florida panhandle, and parts of Georgia. There was talk of a USO tour, but, according to Turner, Hank would have had to sign papers promising to be sober, and refused to do so. The Turners were furious because Doyle was eligible for the draft, and the USO tour would have earned him a deferment.
Playing with Hank was still no plum job. Even the relatively unsophisticated musicians he hired looked down on his music. “I always thought Hank was too corny,” said Sammy Pruett in conversation with radio interviewer Jim Owen, “because whenever he’d end a tune, instead of playing a chord up on the neck of the guitar, he’d do an [open] A or G or D, just as plain as you could get. We used to set around backstage, and he’d play a few tunes with a little pop taste, and he’d say, Awright boys, get them pop licks outta ya before we get out onstage ’cause we’re gonna keep it vanilla.’” “Vanilla” meant unadorned hillbilly music. Occasionally, he would let his two guitar players cut loose in unison on a western swing tune, but he usually derided western swing as “longhair crap.” The only music other than hillbilly and gospel that seemed to reach him was cottonpatch blues. Band members remember him sitting around backstage and at home playing songs like “Matchbox Blues” and “Bottle Up and Go.” He would even sit in with blues singers on the sidewalk.
In the summer of 1946, Hank appears to have deviated briefly from his course. He led a band that featured E. B. Fulmer on piano, an instrument he later said had no place in country music, and Lefty Clark on saxophone, an instrument even more
at odds with his music. Lum York was on bass, and the group was rounded out with a steel guitarist and a drummer. They played dance music. The sharp double-breasted gabardine suit that Hank wore around this time seems to imply that he was giving some thought to changing direction. As always, he had his ear cocked toward his audience, and he was probably hearing that they wanted the old Hank Williams back.
Hank was off WSFA from February 1945 until January 1946. Starting January 26, 1946, he was on between 6:35 and 7:00 a.m., and that September he was given another sponsored show at 4:00 p.m. By the close of 1946, Hank was so popular that even the radio shows were an event. Fans would turn up to see him at the station, creating a disturbance in the hotel lobby. WSFA still cursed him for his unreliability, but tolerated him as a necessary evil. Hank started using his clout to wrest concessions from the station. One stipulation was that WSFA wouldn’t hire a competing hillbilly band. WSFA acceded, although the agreement warped opinion against Hank among the other bands in town. The station’s ownership couldn’t comprehend his appeal; they simply knew they couldn’t afford to lose him. In radio stores, the question from the country folk was often, “Will it pick up Hank Williams?”
“Hank was a big drawing card,” said WSFA engineer Sebie Smith, “but the band didn’t always dress up too well. They’d come straggling through the Jefferson Davis Hotel. Finally the manager of the hotel asked [WSFA owner] Howard Pill to have Hank’s crew come in the back way.” At the same time, Hank was attracting a lot of jealousy from the other local acts on WSFA, chief among them Camille Brown, the Oprah of Montgomery. She hosted a show called Around the Town with Camille Brown, and griped loud and often to the station’s management about the amount of sponsorship Hank got.
Part of the chronic unreliability that dogged Hank can be attributed to the tensions at the boardinghouse. Lilly and Audrey were both strong willed, belligerent, and grasping. In the name of loving Hank and helping his career, they tried to wrest control from each other. The conflict started early, and never really ended. As Audrey told Dorothy Horstman:
When I first met Hank, he kept saying, “I want to tell you. There’s something I want to tell you.” Each time, he’d back out. Finally, one day we were at my dad’s and we were sitting on the grass, and I said, “Hank, you’ve got to tell me what it is on your mind.” He said, “It’s my mother.” I was so innocent then, I didn’t know if she was dead. He said, “I want to take you home and introduce you to her,” then he said, “You know what she’s gonna say when she meets you? She’s gonna say, ‘Where did you meet this whore?’ I said, “Hank, your mother couldn’t possibly say that. I know she couldn’t.” You know, we walked in, and that’s the first thing she said. I ran back to the car. Hank and [his] mother fought like men would fight. I tell you, she was his trouble.
Lilly even hinted at the squabbles in a small booklet she published in 1953. “I must admit I was a little jealous at times,” she wrote, adding quickly and unconvincingly, “Not really. I’m joking. Hank’s mother was always his first girl, and he never forgot it.” She never let him forget it, either. “She would dictate to him,” said Don Helms. “She’d say, ‘You cain’t do this.…I ain’t puttin’ up with that…. ’ I can’t remember the times I heard Hank say, ‘Goddamn, don’t tell her.’” Lon’s absence not only meant that Hank didn’t have a male role model, but also meant that he never matured from the dependent mother-child state. He simply transferred his dependency to Audrey, a shift that Lilly felt acutely.
It’s doubtful that Hank appreciated the full ramifications of the dangerous curve that Audrey had thrown into his relationship with Lilly. He tended to see it in simpler terms. “No wonder you and Audrey don’t get along,” Hank told Lilly on one occasion. “Because one of you’s afraid the other one’s gonna beat you to my pocket when I get drunk.” Occasionally when Hank went on a bender, Audrey would take off, perhaps back to Banks. Then it was left to Lilly to organize a search of the local joints and hotels for Hank. Sometimes he would go to WCOV and pick a fight with Dad Crysel, and Crysel’s band would take great pleasure in beating him senseless and tossing him out onto the street.
Occasionally, when the three-way strife mounted and he could bear it no longer, Hank would take off for the Florida panhandle. He would hole up in the San Carlos Hotel in Pensacola, and stay drunk for several days, often a week or more. Sometimes Lilly would send Hank to Lon’s house when he was on a bender. Watching him sober up one morning, Lon’s daughter, Leila, came to know why Hank would refer to himself as her “half a brother.” Everyone knew that Hank’s drinking was abnormal. His cousin, Walter McNeil Jr. (or “O’Neil McNeil,” as Lilly called him), had never — and would never — see anyone who drank with such singlemindedness as Hank. Whether he was a happy drunk or a mean drunk depended on his mood when he started drinking. Lilly couldn’t understand it at all. “She’d demand that he stop drinking,” says McNeil, “but he needed to pitch his drunk and get it out of his system for a few weeks or a few months.” Lilly saw Hank’s alcoholism in terms of weakness of will. She railed against it, cursed him, but never cast him out, perhaps because he was her only son, and perhaps because she guessed that he would one day amount to something despite himself.
Bernice Turner remembers driving to a gig in southern Alabama. Hank couldn’t drive because his license had been revoked, so he sat between Doyle and Bernice, asking them to stop every few miles so that he could get another beer. Doyle and Bernice decided to let him pass out, hoping that he would sleep it off and sober up in time for the show. “Hank mumbled something about wanting to lay his head in my lap,” said Bernice, “and as he said it he was falling anyway. When we got there, I eased out from underneath him, went in and set up.” They’d almost played a complete set when Hank came weaving in. He picked up his guitar and started singing “There’s a New Moon over My Shoulder.” “He was singing in one key and playing in another,” said Bernice. “Doyle looked at me and said, ‘Blue Steel Blues,’ and we started playing to try and drown him out. The place was packed, and Hank looked at us — a dirty look, then he looked at the fiddle player. He was gonna leave and take the musicians with him, but they didn’t go.” Later, there was a commotion outside when Hank picked a fight with a policeman. He was hauled off to jail, and the Turners went to get him out after the show, but found that the police had decided to keep him. They drove home, gave the takings to Lilly, and went to bed. The next day Lilly and Audrey drove down to get him out.
It seems that Hank was first treated for alcoholism early in 1945 at a sanatorium in Prattville, Alabama, although the treatment probably consisted only of rest and deprivation. As such, it was no more successful than any of the other treatments Hank was forced to take. Going on a spree was his way of dealing with life’s problems. It was also a means of relieving the back pain. When the band saw him gobbling aspirins, they knew that a bender was imminent. It probably never occurred to Audrey and Lilly that if Hank had a low tolerance for stress when the load was light, the success they craved might be a mixed blessing. “I’ll tell you something,” Audrey said many times, “if some woman, equally as strong as I am, had not come along, there would never have been a Hank Williams.”
Everyone associated with Hank felt that he could be their passport to better times, and they all fell into a dispiriting cycle with him. For several weeks everything would be fine. Hank would be straight, on time, and in tune for every gig. They’d go fishing down on the Alabama coastline. Hank and Audrey would be holding hands in the car, and the talk would be upbeat. Then something would snap, and Hank would be off on a drunk. The Turners eventually quit because he damned so many promising opportunities with his unreliability, which they — like everyone else — saw in terms of lack of willpower.
Toward the end of 1946, Hank tried to solve part of the problem by moving out of the boardinghouse and into a small rented house at 409 Washington Avenue. From the time that Audrey took up with Hank, Lycrecia had been living with her grandparents in Banks, bu
t now she joined her mother and new stepfather. For the first time since he had lived with the McNeils, Hank was part of a mom-pop-and-the-kid relationship. He tried desperately hard to fill the role for which life had ill prepared him. When Hank was sober, Hank and Audrey’s relationship looked like true love. He tried especially hard not to drink around Lycrecia, and with encouragement and not-so-subtle pressure from Audrey, he began to look beyond the limited horizons of south-central Alabama.
At some point in 1945 or 1946, Hank went to Nashville, intending to try out for the Opry. He went to see announcer Jud Collins at WSM, the home station of the Opry. “They said someone was outside to see me,” said Collins, “and there was this guy with blue jeans and a white hat. He said, ‘I’m Hank Williams. Charlie Holt from WSFA told me to come up here and see you. He said you’d tell me what I have to do to get on the Opry.’” Collins told Hank that there were no shortcuts and that he would have to audition for Jack Stapp like everyone else. “He wouldn’t go see Jack,” said Collins. “He said, ‘You tell Jack Stapp I’m here.’ I think he was disappointed that I couldn’t take him by the hand and say, ‘Hank, you’re on the Opry tonight at eight.’” Hank heard the same thing that thousands of others had heard. Some might get as far as “Judge” Hay, who had the last word on the Opry artist roster. Usually, he would listen politely and then say, “Boys, come back and see me when you’re hot ‘nuff to draw flies.”