by Colin Escott
Wesley’s skills as an administrator were unquestionable. In hiring him, Fred freed himself to do what he did best: handle the music and the writers. After his father’s death, Wesley began assuming credit for all manner of decisions and began to fancy himself a music man. His magnified view of his importance was reflected in sycophantic articles he commissioned, such as “Wesley Rose Chooses Nashville — a Crucial Decision for the World of Music.”
It was almost certainly Fred rather than Wesley who realized Hank’s dilemma, though. Hank’s promise was wasted at Sterling, and Rose began looking elsewhere. He had a good relationship with Art Satherley at Columbia, but Satherley passed on Hank, although he hung onto an acetate of several songs that Rose sent him (an acetate that later surfaced on an Arhoolie Records EP and a Country Music Foundation album). RCA’s head of folk and western music, Steve Sholes (who later signed Elvis Presley to the label), passed too. Capitol was generally geared toward West Coast country music, and Mercury had only been in business a year or so and wasn’t a much better bet than Sterling. Fred took the Sterling dubs to New York and pitched them to Paul Cohen at Decca. Then he waited.
A good record deal was crucial. Fred Rose knew that Hank couldn’t follow the normal pattern: working stations in ever bigger markets, then using the radio work as an entrée to recording. Hank was generally considered to be too much trouble and too hillbilly by half. He needed to reverse the paradigm by getting some hits that would convince a bigger station to take a chance on him, and that in turn would increase his exposure. Records were the key.
Chapter 5
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive
Robert Loius Stevenson
THE YEAR OF THE LION
ONE more opportunity was opening up for Fred Rose as he tried to place Hank Williams with a major record label in the spring of 1947. The giant Loews corporation, which owned MGM Pictures, had just started a record division. The same economic conditions that had prompted the formation of Sterling Records hadn’t gone unnoticed further up the corporate pecking order. MGM had seen songs from its fabled musicals go on to sell hundreds of thousands of records for other companies. They had, for instance, stood by helpless as José Iturbi’s “Polonaise in A-Flat” from A Song to Remember sold more than eight hundred thousand copies for RCA. Loews saw this income slipping through its fingers. Viewed from the outside, the record business seemed like a no-lose proposition in those immediate postwar years. But MGM didn’t want its record division to be a lowly independent, so industry veteran Frank B. Walker was hired away from RCA in August 1945. MGM bankrolled him for a couple of years as he prepared to launch a fully functioning quasi-major label.
Born in upstate New York in October 1889, Walker had, as he liked to tell Hank and Fred Rose, been cutting country records since before Hank was born. One of them had been the Coles’ “Tramp on the Street.” Walker had broken into the music business in 1919 as a concert booker with Central Concerts in Detroit, then joined Columbia Records in 1921. As the label’s head of “race” music, he signed Bessie Smith in 1923, and recorded country music on his field trips. He liked to recall how he rode horses back into the woods in search of a singer or musician that someone had told him about. He sold records in the rural areas by renting vacant storefronts, setting up benches, playing the new releases, and taking the cash himself.
In 1933, Walker moved to RCA and launched Bluebird Records as a Depression-era budget label. During the Second World War, he was seconded to the government’s V-Disc unit, resuming with RCA before being seduced by MGM. Walker had seen and done it all. He could talk as easily about injection molding in the plant as he could about the innards of music publishing, or the respective merits of two blues singers. He was the sort of generalist that doesn’t exist anymore. Short and dapper, with steel-rimmed glasses and a patrician air, he wasn’t entirely convincing in his attempt to make Hank feel as though they were both ex–farm boys, but of all the record company CEOs in New York or Los Angeles, he was the only one with much understanding of what Hank Williams was doing.
After Walker came onboard, MGM paid $3.5 million to convert a munitions plant in Bloomfield, New Jersey, into a pressing plant capable of churning out forty million discs a year. Walker then set up distribution through Zenith Radio stores, supplemented by a network of independent distributors. Despite MGM’s clout, MGM Records never really became a major player. For one thing, Walker was notoriously cheap. He told his promotion staff to write to radio stations because it was cheaper than phoning, and he didn’t like to give away promotional copies. His first signings were in December 1946 for a scheduled launch in March 1947. Waving MGM’s checkbook, he culled Jimmy Dorsey, Kate Smith, Ziggy Elman, and Billy Eckstine from the ranks of established artists whose contracts were up. His initial signings in what could loosely be termed country music were Sam Nichols, the Korn Kobblers, and Carson Robison. Of those, Robison was the best known. He’d written topical songs through the Depression and the war (such as “Prosperity Is Just Around Which Corner?” and “Hitler’s Last Letter to Hirohito"). To give MGM a little filip at launch time, Walker lowballed the price of his records to sixty cents instead of the usual seventy-five cents, maintaining the lower price until May 1948. By the time he hiked the price, the label had its first hits, one of them by Hank Williams.
Most writing about Hank Williams has taken its cue from Wesley Rose, who said that it was the success of “Honky Tonkin’” on Sterling that encouraged his father to seek a better deal and persuaded Walker to sign Hank. This could not have been the case, though. The MGM contract was dated March 6, 1947, two months before “Honky Tonkin’” was released, and it became effective on April 1, 1947. Hank received an artist royalty for the first time: two cents per record, or roughly 3 percent of MGM’s low list price of sixty cents. Three percent was, if anything, on the high side of what an untested act could expect. There is an apocryphal — but probably true — story that Hank didn’t understand percentages and opted for a flat fee instead.
According to a deposition that Walker gave in February 1963, he had known Fred Rose since the early 1930s, and seemed to imply that he had met Hank before the Sterling contract. “[Hank] was submitting songs he had written to Mr. Rose for potential publication,” Walker said. “Mr. Rose and I looked at them together, and we agreed to the possibilities.” Walker also said that he, Fred Rose, and Hank jointly chose all the Hank songs recorded for MGM, although he’s probably overstating his involvement. Rose acted as producer, or “A&R Representative.” Today, a producer would expect to receive around 3 percent of a record’s gross, but Rose, like many A&R men at the time, worked solely for the music publisher’s share of the songwriter’s royalty. RCA Victor’s legendary A&R man, Ralph Peer, reportedly received just one dollar a year from RCA, but secured the publishing on almost everything he recorded (thereby acquiring songs that became standards, like “Walk Right In” and “Wildwood Flower"). Rose agreed to give MGM a bargain rate of 1.25 cents per song when the standard rate was 2 cents per song. This income was split fifty-fifty with the songwriter. When Hank’s contract was renegotiated in April 1951, the publishing royalty (or “mechanical,” as it was known) was upped to 1.5 cents.
Hank’s first MGM session was held on April 21, 1947, with the core of Red Foley’s band. Rose knew what was at stake. Hank would get one or two shots on MGM, and if the sales weren’t there, he’d be dropped. Nashville had no session men in April 1947, and Foley’s band was the sharpest in town. Rose probably figured that he needed a touch of class on the instrumental track to offset Hank’s hillbilly edges. Guitarist Zeke Turner would play on several of Hank’s sessions, and his brother Zeb would play several more. The backwoods aliases (Zeb and Zeke’s real names were Edward and James Cecil Grishaw) disguised two of the more adroit pickers Hank ever used; they were perhaps too fancy for his taste. Brownie Reynolds played bass. Tommy Jackson was on fiddle, and Smokey Lohman on steel guitar. This was a group capable of delivering exact
ly what Rose wanted, and more than Hank wanted.
“Move It on Over” was the first song Hank cut for MGM. More than any other song he’d recorded to that point, it betrayed his debt to black music. It rocked. The melody was as old as the blues itself; a variant had done business as “Your Red Wagon” and another variant became “Rock Around the Clock.” Hank, like Elvis Presley some years later, never played black music in the tragically white way — oversouling and overplaying. “Move It on Over” was a lazy record even at its brisk tempo. This may have been Tee-Tot’s legacy to Hank, and — if it was — it was worth all the nickels and dimes Lilly had scrimped to pay him. Zeke Turner played a lovely little solo, a model of brilliant economy. If the melody of “Move It on Over” had been around the block, the lyrical content was pure Hank Williams. As Hank’s future fiddle player, Jerry Rivers, once said, “[Hank’s] novelty songs weren’t novelty — they were serious, not silly, and that’s why they were much better accepted and better selling. ‘Move It on Over’ hits right home, ’cause half of the people he was singing to were in the doghouse with the ol’ lady.”
The sound edged closer to Roy Acuff on the session’s second song, “I Saw the Light.” It remains Hank’s best-known hymn, but if gospel composer Albert E. Brumley had been a litigious man, his name would be bracketed alongside Hank’s in the composer credit. Not only was the melody very close to Brumley’s “He Set Me Free,” but even the lyrics bore a passing resemblance. The hugely prolific Brumley, best known for “I’ll Fly Away,” had published “He Set Me Free” in a 1939 songbook titled The Gospel Tide, and it had been cut in March 1941 by the Chuck Wagon Gang. Another white gospel group, the Southern Joy Quartet, recorded it shortly before Hank wrote “I Saw the Light.”
By all accounts, “I Saw the Light” was written on the way back from a dance in Fort Deposit. If all the people who later claimed to be in the car with Hank that night had actually been there, he would have needed a twenty-passenger bus. One who claimed to be there was Leaborne Eads, who had flyposted the dance for Lilly. He remembers:
Mizz Williams had given me money to hand out circulars at Fort Deposit. Hank was higher than a kite by the time the show was over. She drove home, and he was in the back seat sleepin’ it off. There was a beacon light near Dannelly Field Airport, and Mizz Williams knew it always took time to get Hank awake when he was drunk like that, so she turned around and told him, “Hank, wake up, we’re nearly home. I just saw the light.” Between there and home he wrote the song.
“I Saw the Light” wasn’t just “He Set Me Free” with new lyrics, though. It was the prayer of the backslider, who lives in hope of redemption. Hank wrote at least two drafts, which was unusual for him. The first was dated Sunday, January 26, 1947, so perhaps, as Eads said, it was written right after the Saturday night dance in Fort Deposit. “Lord” was spelled “Loard.” Why? Probably because the words Hank knew best were “Room and Board” posted outside Lilly’s boardinghouse. If “board” was “b-o-a-r-d,” then “Lord” was “l-o-a-r-d.” Hank was the first to record the song, but wasn’t the first to release it. His version was held back until September 1948, but Rose pitched the song around. On August 13, 1947, Clyde Grubbs recorded it for RCA, and then on November 18 the song’s copublisher and spiritual mentor, Roy Acuff, recorded it. Both versions were released before Hank’s.
The other two songs from that first MGM session, “(Last Night) I Heard You Crying in Your Sleep” and “Six More Miles (to the Graveyard),” became flip sides for “Move It on Over” and “I Saw the Light,” respectively. An embryonic version of “(Last Night) I Heard You Crying in Your Sleep” exists as a lyric sheet in the Alabama Department of Archives and History. As with the early version of “I Saw the Light,” the words are quite dissimilar, suggesting that songwriting wasn’t quite the spontaneous act that Hank later made it out to be.
“Move It on Over” was released on June 6, 1947, and, two months later, it became Hank’s first Billboard hit. On August 21, 1947, he received his first extended write-up in the Montgomery Examiner. Calling him the “spur-jangling Sinatra of the western ballad,” the writer stated that Hank had already sold more than one hundred thousand copies of “Move It on Over.” Then, inviting gales of laughter from those close to Hank, the article went on to say, “Where the inspiration for the song came from [Hank] couldn’t say,” adding, “it’s not his own married life. Mr. and Mrs. Hank Williams lead a model domestic life.” The model for the Bickersons, perhaps.
Around the same time, there was another write-up, this one by the Reverend A. S. Turnipseed in the Montgomery News. Turnipseed had evidently attended one of Hank’s shows. He described the audience as young and “not dressed as to indicate any affluence.” It was, he noted, a mostly restrained crowd. “Any preacher who has preached in the rural sections of the white counties of Alabama has observed the same restraint even when highly emotional preaching was going on,” he said. Turnipseed went on to say that fully half of Hank’s program was devoted to comedy routines and horseplay. There was one religious number, but the only time the crowd was whipped up was when Hank sang “Move It on Over” and “Pan American.” Turnipseed concluded by trying to put Hank in a broader context. Changes were taking place in Montgomery as white sandyland farmers like Hank moved into town, challenging the right to rule of the state’s old-money families. “As Hank Williams plays,” Turnipseed noted apocalyptically, “Rome is burning.” There was a half-valid point beneath the bluster. There was a migration into town from the rural communities, and even if the new migrants weren’t challenging the old money’s right to rule, they were certainly bringing their music with them. The former farmers weren’t stopping in Montgomery, either. That’s why Hank had ready-made audiences when he eventually appeared in places like Cleveland, Washington, and even Oakland. He was a letter from home.
On August 4, just as “Move It on Over” was breaking, Hank was called back to the studio. This time he brought up a band from Montgomery, but they weren’t used to recording and Rose quickly became frustrated. Midway through the session, he sent for Red Foley’s fiddle player, Tommy Jackson, to replace the man Hank had brought up. Two of the four songs recorded, “Fly Trouble” and “I’m Satisfied with You,” were written or cowritten by Fred Rose. As incomprehensible as it seems now, it was common during the 1940s to release a new record just as a hit was peaking, so “Fly Trouble” was released in September 1947, just as “Move It on Over” reached number four. Rose wrote it with the blackface comedy team of Jamup and Honey, modeling it on slick West Coast country novelty songs like “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette).” It seemed to signal Rose’s intention of easing Hank uptown. From the hokey lyrics to Sammy Pruett’s jazzy guitar breaks, the entire production was precisely what Hank’s music was not about, and it was precisely what white sandyland farmers who had just moved to town did not want to hear. Rose issued it with “On the Banks of the Old Pontchartrain,” a ballad along traditional lines, in the sense that it related a story. The writer was Ramona Vincent, a crippled woman from Louisiana. She had mailed the song to Hank as a poem, and he put a melody to it. There’s correspondence in which Hank asks Fred Rose how to go about buying a song. It remains the least typical song with Hank Williams’ name on it. The coupling of “Fly Trouble” and “On the Banks of the Old Pontchartrain” flopped miserably, and in later years Hank would use it as a personal metaphor for a poor-selling record. “Sure am glad it ain’t another damn ‘Pontchartrain,’” he’d say when people would congratulate him on a hit. More than anything, it proved how much Rose had yet to learn about Hank’s music and his audience.
At this point, Hank was no more than a sidebar to Fred Rose’s activities and was far from MGM’s best-selling artist. In October 1947, Rose was in Chicago producing Bob Wills’ last Columbia session for Art Satherley. As Satherley knew, Wills had been seduced away by Frank Walker, an acquisition that seemed to be the coup Walker needed. By the end of October 1947, MGM’s country roster consisted of
Bob Wills, Hank Williams, Carson Robison, Denver Darling, Jerry Irby (who’d written the beer-joint anthem “Driving Nails in My Coffin"), and another Rose protégé, Rome Johnson. It was Robison who would give the country division its biggest hit in 1948 with “Life Gits Tee-Jus, Don’t It.” Bob Wills’ career was in a slow, inexorable decline, and it would be another year and a half before Hank got his career back on track.
“Move It on Over” gave Hank the first serious money he had ever seen. When he talked to the Alabama Journal in 1947, he estimated that his songwriting alone would bring him between $15,000 and $20,000 that year, but he was a little overoptimistic. His MGM royalties came in at $439.55 (equating to roughly twenty-two thousand copies of “Move It on Over"), and his Acuff-Rose royalties totaled $1,709.11. Under pressure from Audrey, Hank put some of that money down on a house — his first — at 10 Stuart Avenue in Montgomery, and some toward a fur coat for Audrey. Citizens Realty (owned by Bill Perdue, who co-owned Radio Recording, where Hank cut his songwriting demos) had to give Hank the commission it made on the sale to help him with the $2,200 deposit.
The delays built into royalty accounting meant that more “Move It on Over” money came through in 1948, and it seems likely that some of it was earmarked for 318 North McDonough Street, a large boarding-house that Lilly purchased that year. Perhaps she had made it unambiguously clear that since she had supported Hank from the first guitar to the first hit, the bill was now due. Lilly was a married woman again. On May 1, 1946, she had divorced J. C. Bozard, and on March 1, 1947, she married one of her boarders, William Wallace “Bill” Stone, from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Everyone liked Stone, a widower some years younger than Lilly, but he had a fondness for the bottle and remained a shadowy presence in Hank’s life. Stone had been a taxi driver and had apprenticed as a carpenter with Crump Craft, but was working at Pelham and Shell Antique Reproduction Furniture when he married Lilly. Later, he brought one of Hank’s cousins, Walter McNeil, into the company as an apprentice.