by Colin Escott
Although he returned home empty-handed, word about Hank Williams was slowly seeping out of Montgomery. Ernest Tubb remembered him opening an Opry show as a local added attraction around the time the war ended. In exchange for a spot on the show, Hank would promote it on WSFA. “When I got there, Hank had already started the show,” remembered Tubb. “He was supposed to do twenty minutes, and he was tearing the house down. He came off and they kept applauding. We like to never got him off the stage.” Tubb suggested to his booker, J. L. Frank, that he take on Hank, but Frank knew Hank’s reputation firsthand from working with Pee Wee King and told Tubb to stay clear.
There have been persistent claims that Hank sold songs to visiting Opry stars, but there is no firm evidence that he ever sold anything other than “(I’m Praying for the Day That) Peace Will Come.” One of the prime candidates for purchasing the kind of songs Hank wrote was his idol, Roy Acuff. In common with most of his contemporaries, Acuff bought songs outright when he could. When he became successful, he tried to administer his own music publishing, but then decided to go into partnership with Fred Rose, the man who would secure his future — and Hank’s too.
Fred Rose wasn’t a hillbilly, although he was born on the Kentucky-Indiana line in Evansville, Indiana, on August 24, 1897. He spent a miserable childhood in St. Louis, then set out for Chicago when he was in his teens. He later told an interviewer that he had been on his own since he was seven. He played piano, sang in the speakeasies, and was part of a twin piano feature on the Paul Whiteman show. Almost inevitably he turned to songwriting. He scored his first hit in 1921 with “Sweet Mama (Papa’s Gettin’ Mad).” Then in 1924, Sophie Tucker popularized “Red Hot Mamma,” and Isham Jones cut the first of many versions of “Honest and Truly.” Rose’s most enduring song, “Deed I Do,” was published in 1926. He married for the first time while in Chicago, and had two sons, Wesley and Lester, whom he would later bring into Acuff-Rose.
Through the Jazz Age, Rose was a featured radio performer on WBBM in Chicago, and he wrote prolifically. He remarried, and began grinding out show tunes, novelties, and topical songs, but the Depression and a bad drinking problem scuppered his career. He was thrown off radio in Chicago, moved to New York, and then, in 1933, he joined WSM in Nashville. This was not the comedown that it might seem. Much of WSM’s broadcast day was devoted to pop music despite the fact that it owned the Grand Ole Opry. Its orchestra was among the most renowned in the NBC network. Rose had his own show, Freddie Rose’s Song Shop, and he toured the mid-South with a trio. He also married for the third — and last — time during his first stint in Nashville.
In late 1935 or early 1936, Rose converted to Christian Science. He was back in New York, and his career was in a trough. His newfound faith enabled him to lick his alcoholism and try for a new start in Hollywood. He wrote many songs for Gene Autry, all the while commuting back and forth to Nashville. He also worked a stint at KVOO in Tulsa, where he met Bob Wills, whom he would later produce for Columbia. Rose’s conversion to country music was more gradual and less spectacular than his conversion to Christian Science, and it probably started soon after he arrived in Nashville. “Fred Rose came to Nashville to laugh,” Hank told Ralph Gleason in 1952, “and he heard Roy Acuff and said, ‘By God he means it.’” In the summer of 1942, Acuff approached Rose, who was back on WSM, with the proposition that they form a joint music publishing venture. Acuff offered to bankroll the company with twenty-five thousand dollars, but Rose apparently never needed to draw on that capital. The partnership, technically between Rose and Acuff’s wife Mildred, was launched in October 1942. It would be Nashville’s first professional music publishing company.
While Acuff was at the pinnacle of his career, Hank was just a local star in a small market. He wasn’t even semi-itinerant like most country musicians. No one was sick of him in Montgomery, but he couldn’t use his local success as a springboard to a bigger market because he was already damned as unreliable, and, in a business full of problem drinkers, his reputation was among the worst.
Chapter 4
Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.
Noel Coward
SONGS FOR HOME FOLKS
EVERYONE has a celestial city. For Hank Williams and subsequent generations of wanna-billies it has been Nashville. It wasn’t always that way, though. When Hank and Audrey visited one weekend in 1946, country music had a low profile in Nashville, but not low enough for the city elders. The hillbilly music business was anathema to the city’s view of itself as the Athens of the South. In 1943, celebrating the fact that his radio show was relayed to 129 stations nationwide, Roy Acuff had thrown a party at the Ryman Auditorium. Governor Prentice Cooper was invited to attend, but declined, saying that he would have no part of a “circus,” and that Acuff was bringing disgrace to Tennessee by making Nashville the hillbilly capital of the United States. Acuff responded by running, unsuccessfully, for governor in 1948. Only gradually, over the last fifty years, has the music industry won the city’s embrace, and now of course the only reason that Nashville is known at all throughout most of the world is because of its association with country music.
The country music business has not merely grown, but centered itself in Nashville to the point that the two are now synonymous. In 1946, country music was a sidebar to the music business, and often treated with derision. It had no focal point. According to a poll of record company artist and repertoire (A&R) men in 1946, Chicago was reckoned to be the city with the greatest concentration of country musicians. Country recordings were made there and in Dallas, Cincinnati, New York, and Los Angeles. Almost no recordings were made in Nashville in the year Hank Williams first recorded.
Unlike the equally maligned R&B record business, which was dominated by feisty independent labels, the country record business was dominated by the three major labels, Columbia, RCA Victor, and Decca. The only quasi-majors with sufficient volume to make a blip on industry surveys were Capitol Records (launched in Los Angeles in 1942), Mercury Records (Chicago, 1945), and the long-gone Majestic Records (Elgin, Illinois, 1944).
The majors assigned just one man to look after country music, then known as “hillbilly,” “folk,” or “western” music. At RCA Victor, it was Steve Sholes. “In sales meetings when it got to Steve’s department, a lot of guys would say, ‘Hey, I gotta go to the john,’” remembered field rep Brad McCuen. Sholes himself remembered the same thing. “I was never allowed to play more than six or eight revolutions of one of my records,” he said. “The gospel records I wasn’t permitted to play at all: just announce the titles. There was no attention paid to merchandising — special merchandising or any merchandising. There was no promotion or publicity to speak of.”
At Columbia, the head of country A&R was Arthur Satherley, an expatriate Englishman who looked and spoke as if he were an Oxford professor of some arcane discipline. Satherley still did what prewar record men had done; he traveled more than seventy thousand miles a year making recordings in the field onto acetate discs. Tape wasn’t in common use until around 1950. Decca’s country division was in the hands of a gregarious hard-drinking salesman, Paul Cohen, originally from Chicago.
If current country musicians have a homogeneity born of the fact that they’ve been weaned on an identical diet, that wasn’t the case when Hank was starting out. As Art Satherley explained to the Saturday Evening Post in 1944, “I would never think of hiring a Mississippi boy to play in a Texas band. Any Texan would know right off it was wrong.” In the mid-1940s you could listen to a country record and stand a good chance of guessing where the performer was based. When Fred Rose sent out demos of Hank Williams, A&R men would have known at once that he was from the South or Southeast. No one would have confused his music with East Coast country music, cowboy music, or western swing, and Hank had so little in common with Eddy Arnold’s country-pop hybrid that the two barely deserved to be categorized together. Hank’s music was called “hillbilly music,” and the little respect it had could be att
ributed almost entirely to Roy Acuff. Most country music in the mid-1940s was smooth, shading ever closer to pop. Only hillbilly music retained the fierce insurgency of mountain music. “Hillbilly” was a pejorative term to those who played the music. When asked, Hank always called his music folk music.
The industry put-downs gnawed at Fred Rose, and, with the zeal of the new convert, he made a spirited defense of hillbilly music in a letter to Billboard in August 1946:
We pride ourselves in being a very intelligent people and good Americans, but are we? We put on our best bib and tucker and make quite an affair of spending an enjoyable evening being entertained with Russian, Italian, French, etc., folklore…. We read all kinds of books that will give us an understanding of foreign folklore, but what do we say and do about our own good ol’ American folklore? We call it “hillbilly” music and sometimes we’re ashamed to call it music.
Hank, too, was fiercely protective of his music and its populist base. “It makes me mad,” he told an interviewer in 1951, “to hear these popular orchestras make a jammed-up comedy of a song like ‘Wreck on the Highway’ It ain’t a funny song. Folk songs express the dreams and prayers and hopes of the working people.”
Billboard abandoned its “Folk Tunes” tag in June 1949 in favor of a new coinage, “Country & Western,” acknowledging that country music was no longer folk music, but a commercial discipline, and that “folk music” now meant something entirely different. By then, Nashville had become the music’s hub. It happened quickly, and the major reason was WSM’s Grand Ole Opry. Immediately after the war, the Opry was just one of hundreds of Saturday night radio jamborees; it wasn’t the first and it wasn’t the only one broadcast over a maximum-wattage station, but it was the only one with network airtime. Starting in October 1939, NBC radio picked up thirty minutes of the Grand Ole Opry every Saturday night, and for those thirty minutes, the Opry blanketed the nation. Quite suddenly, the Grand Ole Opry was the place to be. The other pieces fell into place. Music publishers, bookers, and A&R men all began coming to Nashville. They knew that the big stars would be in town on Friday and Saturday because the Opry would dismiss them if they weren’t.
Aside from a few prewar field recordings, the first professional recording session held in Nashville is generally reckoned to be Eddy Arnold’s debut session on December 4, 1944, at the WSM studios. The following year, three WSM engineers started a recording studio as a separate enterprise within the WSM studio complex, and in 1947 they built a self-contained studio in a remodeled dining room at the Tulane Hotel. Their business was called the Castle Studio because WSM was known as the “Air Castle of the South,” and it was there that Hank Williams cut most of his sessions.
Country music began earning industry respect not, as official histories like to say, for its ability to express the hopes and feelings of the common man, but for its ability to generate good revenue with low overhead. Billboard offered a snapshot of the music industry’s thinking in a review of a Carnegie Hall concert in September 1947 that featured Opry acts. “A cornbilly troupe called the Grand Ole Opry… took over the house and proved to the tune of $12,000 gross that the big city wants country music. The promoters, Sol Gold, Abe Lackman and Oscar Davis, got more than a kick out of it because they garnered about $9,500 with a talent nut of about $5,000.”
By the time Hank, nudged as always by Audrey, started thinking seriously about a shot at the songwriting or recording end of the business, Nashville wasn’t the place to go, but it was the only country music hub within easy reach of Montgomery. Early on Saturday, September 14, 1946, they took the train to Nashville, knowing that Saturday was very much a business day. “I knew about Fred Rose,” Audrey said later, “and I knew that he had started a publishing company with Roy Acuff. I knew that Fred had written some pretty good songs, and I felt that he could maybe help Hank. So we called and set up an appointment. It was at WSM radio station, studio B. It was for one o’clock, but I don’t remember the day. The nearer the time came, the more Hank backed out. He said, ‘I ain’t going. I ain’t gonna let him hear my songs.’ I said, ‘You’re going if I have to push you every inch of the way’ I just literally made him go.” According to one of Hank’s band members, R. D. Norred, Audrey had already been to Nashville to make the appointment.
That was not the way that Fred Rose’s son, Wesley, remembered it. According to Wesley, he and his father were having a lunchtime game of Ping-Pong in WSM’s recreation room on the fifth floor of the National Life and Accident Company building when Hank and Audrey walked in unannounced and asked to audition some songs. After listening to his songs, Fred is supposed to have asked Hank to prove that he hadn’t bought the songs by telling him to write one on the spot. Rose suggested a not particularly original theme: a woman leaves the one she truly loves to marry a man with money. Hank is supposed to have taken himself off into a side room and to have emerged with “A Mansion on the Hill.” Fred signed him; Wesley nodded in accordance.
The fine details of how Fred Rose came to sign Hank Williams aren’t clear, but it’s almost certain that Hank wasn’t making a cold call, that Wesley wasn’t there, and that “A Mansion on the Hill” wasn’t written until a year later. Despite what Wesley thought or said, Hank Williams had almost certainly come to Nashville by invitation. Country bandleader Paul Howard remembered working show dates in Alabama during the mid-1940s. Hank, he said, attended some shows and played him some songs. “I told Fred Rose about him,” Howard later recalled, “and Fred told me to have him come up and talk to him.” Howard, who later became one of Hank’s friends, said that Hank came to Nashville and set up an appointment from Howard’s hotel room.
Although Paul Howard’s scenario is possible, it’s even likelier that Hank Williams and Fred Rose came together through Rose’s need to find songs for Molly O’Day, an act he was about to produce for Art Satherley. Molly O’Day’s early career was a template for what Hank’s would have been if he had been more reliable. Born Lois Laverne Williamson in Pike County, Kentucky, she was torn between sacred and secular music, a conflict she eventually resolved by shunning the world. A month older than Hank, Molly O’Day (as she began calling herself in 1942) had been shuttling around the mid-South for six or seven years, playing radio stations and schoolhouses, and slowly building her career. She sang in Roy Acuff’s emotional, full-throated mountain style, and neither knew nor cared that she strayed off-key. Her husband and bandleader, Lynn Davis, took care of business. Davis had met Fred Rose when they worked on KVOO in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the mid-1930s, and Rose had kept abreast of Molly’s career. During the war, she was playing a show sponsored by Black Draught laxative over a small network of stations in the South. One of the stations that picked up the feed was WSFA in Montgomery. “We’d go into the towns that picked up the show, and I’d bring in big acts and we’d play over the network,” says Lynn Davis. “One time we were in Montgomery. Hank had announced the show on his program, and he was to be the local added attraction. He sang ‘Tramp on the Street’ and done four encores on it, and Molly said she had to have that song.”
“Tramp on the Street” was first recorded by its writers, Grady and Hazel Cole, for RCA Victor in August 1939. The Coles were based in Rome, Georgia, but worked for a short time in Gadsden, Alabama, and toured throughout Hank’s area, so there’s no telling where he heard their song. Hank probably didn’t know it, but the Coles’ song wasn’t that original. In 1877, Dr. Addison D. Crabtre had written a very similar song, “Only a Tramp!”
He’s somebody’s darling, somebody’s son
For once he was fair and once he was young
Somebody has rocked him, a baby to sleep
Now only a tramp found dead on the street
The Coles’ song, based closely on Crabtre’s refrain, became especially poignant during the late years of the Depression. The punchline in the song’s last verse hit home: what if the tramp knocking on your door were Jesus, and you turned him away? Then God would deny you on the great Judgment Da
y. For all its emotive power, the Coles’ record was almost a dreadful parody of hillbilly music. They treated it as a brisk waltz, but their harmony completely dissolved on the low notes, and it’s a testament to the song’s strength that it survived their rendition. Hank clearly loved it. He slowed it down, remodeling it almost as a blues. It appeared in one of his WSFA songbooks, where the byline coyly read “Author Unknown.”
After Molly O’Day heard Hank perform “Tramp on the Street,” she asked for a copy of the lyrics. Hank reached into his guitar case and gave them to her. This must have been no later than 1943 because the song appeared in a folio that Molly published in January 1944. Hank and Molly’s paths crossed several times after that. Lynn Davis remembers that Molly was back in Montgomery for a show in 1946 and he was handling the box office. Hank appeared; he was drunk and offered to sell a folder of songs for twenty-five dollars. Davis bought them and asked Hank to come to the hotel the following morning to complete the paperwork. When Hank appeared the following day, Davis gave Hank his songs back and told him that he was sitting on a gold mine. Hank said he didn’t have the twenty-five dollars anymore, and Davis said it didn’t matter.
In the summer of 1946, Fred Rose was vacationing in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and according to Lynn Davis, Art Satherley was with him. They heard Molly sing “Tramp on the Street” on the radio, and Satherley asked Rose if he knew the group. Rose said he did. At Rose’s prompting, Satherley signed Molly O’Day and gave Rose the responsibility of scouting out some repertoire for the session. Rose asked Lynn Davis where “Tramp on the Street” came from, and Davis told him about Hank Williams and suggested that they contact him. Perhaps Rose had already heard the same suggestion from Paul Howard. Rose even said later that he’d met Hank around 1945 on one of his junkets through the South, so he must have known Hank or known of him before September 1946, but it was almost certainly the need to find songs for Molly O’Day that brought them together. No one else in Rose’s little pool of writers was producing the sort of songs that Molly O’Day needed, so, according to Davis, Rose wrote to Hank, and Hank sent back an acetate with a few songs on it. Rose then invited him to Nashville. Perhaps Hank mentioned that “(I’m Praying for the Day That) Peace Will Come” had already been published by Acuff-Rose, but no one had yet recorded it, and no one was likely to record it until there was another war. In November, Rose issued contracts on several of Hank’s songs. On November 23 he wrote to Hank, telling him that he’d shown the songs to Molly O’Day, “and I feel sure she will like them, although I have changed the lyrics around in order to make them consistent. These will be minor changes and will not interfere with what you have written.”