by Colin Escott
In 1946 and 1947, Molly O’Day recorded four of Hank’s songs: “When God Comes and Gathers His Jewels,” “Six More Miles (to the Graveyard),” “I Don’t Care (If Tomorrow Never Comes),” and “Singing Waterfall.” All of them had appeared in the song folios that Hank had self-published in 1945 and 1946, so if Hank wrote anything especially for her in 1946 it must have been rejected. The only song that he is known to have written specifically for Molly was “On the Evening Train,” which was also the only song ever credited to Hank and Audrey. Molly O’Day recorded it in April 1949.
Shortly before Molly’s first session, Rose got a call from Al Middleman, the president of Sterling Records in New York. Sterling had started with grandiose plans. It was incorporated in July 1945, bankrolled by three investors, George H. Bell, Pearl Richards, and Eleanor Benedek of New York. It was to have wholly owned distributors in major markets and its own pressing plant in Los Angeles. Art Rupe was brought in as A&R manager, and his label, Juke Box, was made an affiliate of Sterling and was bankrolled by the same three partners. By the summer of 1946, though, Rupe reclaimed his repertoire, using it to start the hugely successful Specialty label. Shortly after Rupe quit, Middleman convinced himself that Sterling needed a hillbilly and black gospel line to complement its jazz, pop, and R&B series. He asked Fred Rose to find some acts for the hillbilly series, record them in Nashville, and ship the masters up to him.
Again, it’s unclear exactly how Rose came to think of Hank as a potential Sterling recording artist. According to Hank’s bass player, Lum York, he and Hank had already made a trip to Nashville to demo some songs, and during the session, Fred told Hank that he ought to be on a label himself. According to Murray Nash, then an RCA field rep and later Rose’s factotum at Acuff-Rose, it was Rose’s secretary, Eleanor Shea, who actually remembered Hank and suggested that Rose contact him. According to Wesley, he was the one who remembered Hank. According to Hank, Fred Rose’s first thought had been to sign Johnnie and Jack, and he only thought of Hank after Johnnie and Jack told him of a prior commitment. Johnnie and Jack made their recording debut ten weeks after Hank for another New York indie, Apollo Records, so it’s possible that they were already under contract when Rose approached them, which might, as Hank said, have prompted Rose to contact him. Whether he did so at his own initiative or that of Wesley or Eleanor Shea is unclear.
Rose also contacted a group called the Willis Brothers, who also went under the name of the Oklahoma Wranglers. Vic, Guy, and Skeeter Willis had grown up in rural Oklahoma, and had been making the rounds of five-hundred-watt stations before they came to Nashville in June 1946. “We were doing guest appearances on Saturday on a show called the Checkerboard Jamboree at the old Princess Theater on Church Street,” remembered Vic Willis. “Fred Rose approached us on a flat-fee, no-royalty recording deal with a New York company, Sterling Records.” Rose then asked the Willis brothers if they wouldn’t mind backing Hank, who was coming up from Montgomery. He forewarned Vic Willis that Hank sang out of meter. Willis said that wouldn’t be a problem because they’d backed a duo called Polly and Molly at the Kansas City Brush-creek Follies who were the world’s worst at breaking meter.
On Tuesday, December 10, 1946, Hank Williams took the bus from Montgomery to Nashville. “He had on an old beat-up-looking coat and a big dirty cowboy hat,” said Vic Willis. “He was a skinny, scrawny guy. He could sit in a chair, cross his legs, and have both feet on the floor. When I saw him I remembered I’d seen him once before. It was at the Princess one afternoon about two months before that. He had been trying to pitch a song to Ernest Tubb.”
They rehearsed the day Hank arrived in Nashville, and made plans to record the following day at the WSM studio. “We did ours first and Hank hung around in the control room,” remembered Willis. Everyone broke for lunch. Hank and the Willises walked down Seventh Avenue North to the Clarkston Hotel. “Hank was a quiet guy and kinda negative,” said Vic Willis. “But he had a hell of a dry sense of humor. Someone asked Hank if he wanted a beer with his meal, and he shook his head. ‘You don’t know ol’ Hank. Hank don’t just have one beer.’” Vic Willis finished before the others and went back to the studio, where Fred and Wesley were having a game of Ping-Pong. Fred asked Vic if Hank was drinking. Vic said, “No.” Fred said, “Good.” Vic didn’t understand why at the time.
Fred Rose clearly hadn’t taken much notice of what Art Satherley had said a couple of years earlier when he told the Saturday Evening Post that he wouldn’t put a Texas boy with a Mississippi band. The Wranglers played western music: tight harmonies with a little taste of jazz in the rhythm section and in the solos. Hank Williams played hardbitten, unornamented hillbilly music. “My brothers and I weren’t used to anyone that country,” said Vic Willis. One episode stuck in his mind. Hank pronounced “poor” as “purr” on “Wealth Won’t Save Your Soul,” so the tag line became “[wealth] won’t save your purr wicked soul.” The Willises were supposed to join in on that line, but sang “poor wicked soul,” expecting Hank to wise up. Finally, in exasperation, Fred Rose said, “Dammit, Wranglers, sing it the way Hank does.”
After the session, Rose gave Hank and the Willises a prepared letter to sign in which they agreed to record in exchange for union scale ($82.50 for leaders, $42.50 for sidemen) and waived their rights to future royalties. With his signature, Hank stepped on the bottom rung of the recording ladder. “He wanted to get that check cashed before he got the bus back to Montgomery,” remembered Vic Willis. “The Clarkston wouldn’t cash it, so we went down to the Tulane Hotel. We knew the girl on the desk and got her to cash Hank’s check.”
Rose made acetate masters of Hank’s four songs and the four by the Oklahoma Wranglers, and shipped them to Sterling Records. In addition to “Wealth Won’t Save Your Soul,” Hank recorded “Calling You,” “Never Again,” and “When God Comes and Gathers His Jewels.” All four were traditional in form and execution, and only one, “Never Again,” was secular. Sterling coupled “Calling You” with “Never Again” for the first record, and released it during the second week of January 1947. WSM’s recording quality was poor, and the muddy overall sound was made worse by Sterling’s pressing quality. If not for the electric guitar, these could have been field recordings from the 1920s or 1930s. Billboard magazine reviewed Hank’s debut in glowing terms: “With real spiritual qualities in his pipes, singing with the spirit of a camp…meeting, Hank Williams makes his bow an auspicious one.” The praise might well have been related to a full-page advertisement that Sterling took out to promote their hillbilly and western releases, but, even if the reviewer was feigning appreciation, he still understood more of what Hank was about than Sterling Records.
Sterling’s art department came up with an advertisement that neatly encapsulated everything country music was trying to live down. Two peckerheads without a full set of teeth between them, with patches on their britches and a bottle of hooch beside them, are fiddling and, incongruously, playing a bull fiddle with a classical bow to announce Hank’s debut. The advertisement reflected the attitude that Fred Rose had railed against in his letter to Billboard a few years earlier, an attitude that was still prevalent in New York. Sterling was no less dismissive in its trade literature. “Hank Williams is the Acuff type of hillbilly,” it said. “[He] sings a real country song, the kind folks buy.” Then, in describing the Oklahoma Wranglers, it went on to say, “The Wranglers do a higher class song and can sell anywhere.”
No one at Sterling could understand it, but Hank’s first record sold well. Fred and Wesley Rose probably had a greater role in the success than Sterling. Assiduous promoters of their copyrights, they would send sheet music to every radio station that programmed country music, prompting the station’s on-air performers to sing Acuff-Rose songs. The Roses also had a full-time promo man, Mel Foree, out on the road handing out record samples to deejays, and promoting the copyrights at Saturday night radio barn dances. More than anything, the success of Hank’s first record showed that the coun
try music market wasn’t heading uptown as fast as some people thought. The top-selling country record during the spring of ‘47 was Merle Travis’ “So Round, So Firm, So Fully Packed.” In that context, Hank’s music was an anachronism. Travis’ record had horn obbligati and included references to bobby-soxers, Frank Sinatra, and then-current ad slogans like “The Pause That Refreshes.” Hank’s music was, as he later told session guitarist Harold Bradley, “from a mean bottle.”
The second Sterling single coupled “When God Comes and Gathers His Jewels” and “Wealth Won’t Save Your Soul.” It was released just three weeks after the first. Then, on February 13, 1947, Hank cut his second and last Sterling session. Rose probably recognized his mistake in using the Willis Brothers, and opted instead for a group of WSM staff musicians. By this point, he had trawled through Hank’s songbooks and demos and had selected four secular songs. Two of them, “My Love For You (Has Turned to Hate)” and “Honky Tonkin’,” were classic Hank Williams.
Hank had published “Honky Tonkin’” in his first song folio, where he called it “Honkey-Tonkey.” As originally written, it contained the couplet: “We are going to the city, to the city fair / We’ll get a quart of whiskey and get up in the air.” At Rose’s behest, those lines were changed to the more anodyne “We’re going to the city, to the city fair / If you go to the city, baby, you will find me there.” Even then, it’s hard to know what a skilled musician like Rose thought of a song that stayed in one chord for fifteen and a half of its sixteen bars.
“Pan American” was about the Pan American Clipper, a train that ran daily on the Louisville and Nashville Railroad from Cincinnati to New Orleans via Montgomery. It highballed through Greenville, Georgiana, and other small southern towns that Hank knew very well. Since 1935, the Pan American’s whistle had been broadcast every day over WSM in what was then a feat of remote engineering. Country folk would set their watches by it and could tell which engineer was at the throttle. Hank’s melody came note-for-note from “Wabash Cannonball,” a Carter Family song that Roy Acuff performed regularly on the Opry.
The second Sterling session saw the birth of one of Hank’s trademarks, the “crack” rhythm: an electric guitar keeping time on the deadened bass strings. Without drums in his lineup, Hank used the electric guitar to emphasize the pulse. It was the sound that Johnny Cash later made into a trademark, adding a little rhythmic flourish to make “boom-chicka-boom.”
So, as of March 1947, Hank Williams had two records on the market, four songs in the can, and two of his songs recorded by Molly O’Day, but was still virtually unknown outside WSFA’s listening area. He had a more or less permanent band for the first time, though. Steel guitarist Don Helms had returned from the service and worked with Hank again, but soon quit and was replaced by R. D. Norred. Joe Penney, who took the stage name Little Joe Pennington, was on lead guitar. Lum York, who’d met Hank in the shipyards, played bass, and Winston “Red” Todd was on rhythm guitar. Audrey joined them occasionally on bass and drums, bringing along Lycrecia, who’d sleep backstage in Lum’s bass fiddle case.
Norred was a fairly sophisticated musician, unhappy to find himself in a hillbilly band. He wanted to play western swing, not three-chord hillbilly music, and lost no opportunity to run down Hank’s music in front of him. Little Joe Pennington was from the Tampa Bay area. He replaced a guitarist called Chris Criswell in Hank’s band. Criswell was also from Tampa, and Pennington had taken the job that Criswell had held down there before he joined Hank. Criswell then wanted his old job back because his wife wouldn’t move to Montgomery. “He phoned me and said, ‘Boy, you wanna get this job playing five or six nights a week,’” said Pennington. “He said he’d call Hank for me, and Hank says, ‘Chris tells me you’re a pretty good guitar man. Do ya want to come up and try it?’ I said, ‘Well, guess I could. Ain’t there no good guitar players up around Montgomery there?’ He said, ‘None I’d want to hire.’ Found out later he’d hired every one of them and run ’em off.”
The promise of five or six nights’ work a week was hollow. That Hank was now a Sterling recording artist made little difference to his routine. At best, they worked three or four schoolhouse dates a week and the joints on weekends. Norred remembered one night in particular:
We was playing a dance at a juke joint and there was a poppin’ sound and someone come up and said there was a fella out there shootin’ with a gun. Directly, he come in. He was wearin’ overalls — no shirt — and he had a big ol’ loaded pistol and one of them bullets hit a heater and richocheted ‘round the room. Man, you talk about huntin’ a table. Lum run into the girls’ toilet- Hank had to go get him out. Another place down near Fort Deposit they had chicken wire out front of the bandstand so if they started throwing bottles they wouldn’t hit the band.
Some of the band lived with Hank’s mother, although Lum York lived with his own mother. Norred was paid fifty dollars a week regardless of whether they worked because he had a family to support; the others were paid around seven dollars a gig. No one was getting rich, and no one thought that Hank was on the brink of next-big-thingdom. “I couldn’t stand Hank’s music,” says Norred. “I’d tell him so too. I’d make fun of it. He’d get on Audrey for not being able to sing, and I’d say ‘Hank, you ain’t so hot y’self. I’m just puttin’ up with you.’ He wasn’t nothin’. If you played with Hank, you was kinda looked down on.”
The Drifting Cowboys had to grudgingly admit that Hank knew how to draw a crowd, though. For a few weeks toward the end of 1946 they headlined a Saturday afternoon jamboree with the Henley Harmony Boys featuring Leaborne Eads at the Capitol Stockyards in north Montgomery. The L. C. Henley Monument Company co-owned the yard, and the show was promoted by Marvin Reuben and Charlie Holt from WSFA. Hank and the Harmony Boys performed off the auctioneers’ stand, singing to around 250 people in the risers that had been erected for the cattle buyers. The show was starting to do decent business when Reuben and Holt decided that it would do as well without Hank and tore up his contract. They found out how big a draw he was when almost no one turned up the following week.
From the on-air personalities to the engineering staff, no one at WSFA could understand Hank’s appeal. The station management despised his unpredictability and occasional fits of arrogance, and would have loved to rid themselves of him, but knew they couldn’t. Hank knew it too. “Fans? I got a mob of ’em up here every morning and every afternoon,” he told the Montgomery Advertiser in 1948:
Some come from fifty miles! A lady from Opelika wrote me just this mornin’. She says, “Say Hank, how much do it cost to come up and hear you sing? If it don’t cost too much, we may come up there.” If anybody in my business knew as much about their business as the public did, they’d be all right. Just lately, somebody got the idea nobody didn’t listen to my kinda music. I told ever’body on the radio, this was my last program. “If anybody’s enjoyed it, I’d like to hear from ’em.” I got four hundred cards and letters that afternoon and the next mornin’. They decided they wanted to keep my kinda music.
During the early months of 1947, Hank probably sensed he was on the brink of something, and tried to stay straight, but something always triggered a bender. R. D. Norred remembered seeing a crowd gathered in the road and he went over to find his boss lying there with the cars going around him. The police came and hauled him home rather than to the drunk tank. Sterling Records artists were extended that small courtesy.
Hank’s success probably surprised Fred Rose, as he watched Roy Acuff’s sales slowly tail off, but the sales of the Sterling records made a believer out of him. Getting a true picture of his role in Hank’s career is hard because the company’s history was later filtered through Wesley Rose, who felt the need to cement himself to every critical moment in the Acuff-Rose saga. Wesley never understood Hank, although he later asserted that they had been best buddies. Rarely have a father and son been as different as Fred and Wesley Rose. Fred was artistic and temperamental. Wesley was sere and guarded.
He was the parish priest who knew everything and told nothing. Born in Chicago on February 11, 1918, Wesley stayed with his mother when Fred and his first wife divorced, and hadn’t seen his father for twelve years when they met in 1945. By then Wesley was an accountant for Standard Oil in Chicago, and never shed his accountant’s skin. It wasn’t until he made a trip to see an aunt in St. Louis in April 1945 that he was persuaded to visit Fred. When they met, they didn’t recognize each other.
Fred often came to Chicago because Acuff-Rose’s first selling agent was there, and he began calling on Wesley. He offered him a job, but Wesley cared nothing for country music, and even less for the prospect of living in Nashville. He held out for the position of general manager with responsibility for all business decisions, and finally joined the family business in November or December 1945. His name quickly appeared on the letterhead just beneath the company slogan: “Songs for Home Folks.”