by Colin Escott
Number 10 Stuart Avenue was small, boxy, and sparsely furnished, and Audrey spent money that should have gone into stocking the icebox on tony metal awnings over the windows. It might have been home, but if Audrey and Lycrecia were out of town, Hank would do anything to avoid being in his little house by himself. “He’d come over to where I lived,” said Lum York. “He’d say, ‘Come on, go with me.’ I’d say, ‘Where you goin’?’ He said, ‘I’m goin’ to the house.’ I’d say, ‘Hank, I don’t want to go out there, all you gonna do is git a funny book and sit there and read, and I’ll be sittin’ there with nobody to talk to.’” Like many entertainers, Hank always needed an audience. Nothing unsettled him more than his own company.
Lycrecia insists that times were good on Stuart Avenue; others, particularly band members, remember the spats. Both Hank and Audrey had low boiling points, and arguments would blow up out of inconsequentialities. Once, Hank called the Radio Hospital to come and repair his wire recorder (the forerunner of the tape recorder) and the bill came to $17.50. Audrey hissed at him for squandering all that money on his recorder, and Hank grabbed Audrey’s fur coat and began trashing it. The repairman ran for the door. A couple of days later, Lilly appeared at the store with the $17.50. Peace had returned to Stuart Avenue. On another occasion, Fred and Irella Beach were at the house working up a new song (Fred had worked in one of the earliest incarnations of the Drifting Cowboys). “Audrey was whining and whining,” said Irella. “Then Hank said, ‘Fred, let’s us try another song,’ and Audrey went storming off into the bedroom and sent her little girl into the living room. She said, ‘My momma says for you all to go home.’ When we left, Hank was yelling at Audrey and screamin’ at her like nothin’ you ever heard. He hit her hard, too.”
The Beaches had walked in on one of the problems that plagued Hank and Audrey’s relationship. From the time they married, Audrey had been a part of the show. She played bass, even drums on occasion, and she sang. Now she sensed Hank distancing himself from her professionally. She wanted to be more than a happy homemaker, which would be easier to applaud if her singing were better. It’s hard to know if Hank was trying to ease her out of the picture because she couldn’t sing, or because he thought she should be at home cooking and cleaning. Clearly, it was a source of tension. In a letter to Fred Rose dated August 19, 1947, Hank mentioned that he had mailed a demo of himself and Audrey singing “I Saw the Light.” He’d already recorded it for MGM, but it hadn’t been released, so perhaps Audrey wanted to redo it as a duet. “We didn’t do much on [it],” Hank wrote, as if trying to discourage Rose from doing much on it either. “We never had tried it until we went to make the record.” Rose had no problem resisting the notion that Hank and Audrey should record together, but, as Hank became more successful and Audrey more insistent, their pairing on record became inevitable.
If Rose didn’t already know it, the demo would have told him that Audrey’s singing voice was shrill and tuneless, and, like many people who sing badly, she seemed to have no sense of how bad she was. “Audrey couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket,” said R. D. Norred, “and the more she practiced, the worse she got.” Her duets with Hank were like an extension of their married life as she fought him for dominance on every note. For the present, she would be confined to occasional show dates and morning radio in Montgomery, but she wouldn’t be denied much longer.
In late 1947, the music trade papers were consumed with talk of an upcoming recording ban. It soon became clear that the American Federation of Musicians would call a strike effective December 31, 1947, when agreements with all the record companies expired. The problem was a dinosaur named James C. Petrillo, who held the presidency of the AFM as a virtual fiefdom. Petrillo was bitterly opposed to records, the use of records on radio, and the network broadcasting of live and prerecorded music. All of these, he declared, were inimical to his members’ best interests. The AFM’s agreements with radio were good until 1949, but, with the recording agreements running out at the end of 1947, Petrillo wanted to send a message to the networks via the record companies. It was a more direct hit than it seemed because two of the three major labels, RCA and Columbia, were owned by NBC and CBS, respectively. As a long-term goal, Petrillo wanted to shut down the record business; one of his oft-repeated lines was, “These records are destroying us.” In the short term, though, he wanted to test the union’s strength against the Taft-Hartley bill, wring a few financial concessions from the record companies, and fire a warning shot over the bows of the radio networks.
Petrillo’s first attempt at strangling the record business had come a few years earlier. He’d called a strike in August 1942 that lasted until various points in late 1943 and early 1944. One by one, the companies settled with him, and he won some concessions. In 1947, the companies were ready for Petrillo and began stockpiling masters as year-end approached. The majors viewed the ban as a blessing in disguise; they could work through their backlog of masters, press up catalog, squeeze out the independent labels and, as one unnamed executive said, “There’ll be no placating artists with expensive sessions.” Petrillo’s crusades against records for home use and broadcast as well as the networking of live broadcasts were all doomed. Fewer remotes of live broadcasts were being picked up every year, and more deejays were being hired. And, by 1947, the growth of the home record market was a tide that no one — least of all Petrillo — could stem.
Down in Montgomery, Hank Williams was barely aware of this. He knew he was being called to Nashville for two sessions on November 6 and 7, 1947, and needed to have some songs ready. Rose wanted eight usable sides that could be doled out over the length of the strike. MGM, only in business for nine months, had more reason to feel jittery than the other major labels because its overhead was already high and its back catalog was shallow.
“We had worked up some songs ’cause of the ban coming,” says R. D. Norred.
Fred Rose had called Hank and told him to get his songs together, and we had maybe fifteen worked up. I knew you made forty dollars a session, so I went down to Art Freehling’s [music store] and got me a real steel guitar and we was ready to go. We had it pretty well complete, then Fred come down to go over things, and he said he couldn’t use the band. Hank said, “Why?” and Fred says, “You know how Lum was the last time he was up there. Fidget, fidget, it took all night cutting songs. This time, you ain’t gonna get to try it twice.” He said, “Them staff musicians up there, you’re not gonna have to practice with them boys, you just do your part and they’ll do theirs.” Hank said, “Well, I’ll take Norred with me, anyway,” and Fred said, “No, you just can’t put Norred with Zeke Turner and expect it to work.” Hank didn’t like it, but there wasn’t too much he could say about it.
Hank arrived in Nashville to find a group drawn from two Opry bands. Zeke Turner was back, together with two other members of Red Foley’s band, steel guitarist Jerry Byrd and rhythm guitarist Louis Innis. Rose paired them with Bill Monroe’s fiddle player, Chubby Wise, and might have played the barely audible piano himself. The first song they cut, “Rootie Tootie,” was one of Rose’s songs. He’d already pitched it to Pee Wee King and country bandleader Paul Howard, and all three versions were released in January 1948. Rose did very well from King’s version because it got a free ride on the flip side of King’s original version of “Tennessee Waltz,” but the song otherwise did little business.
Hank then cut three of his own songs, “I Can’t Get You Off of My Mind,” “I’m a Long Gone Daddy,” and a remake of “Honky Tonkin’.” The following day, he cut three more original songs, “My Sweet Love Ain’t Around,” “The Blues Come Around,” and “I’ll Be a Bachelor ’til I Die,” and one not-so-original song, “A Mansion on the Hill.” The originals were a marked departure from the Sterling songs, recorded just one year earlier. Perhaps the success of “Move It on Over” had shown Hank the way, and given him some encouragement. These recordings sounded like hits, not like 1930s field recordings caught out of time.
&n
bsp; “A Mansion on the Hill” was credited to Hank and Fred Rose. The old story that Hank had written it in a side room when he first met Rose wasn’t the way Audrey remembered it:
Fred said…"To prove to me you can write, I’m gonna give you a title, and I want you to take it back to Montgomery and write a song around it.” Hank worked with it and worked with it, but he never could do too much good with it, and the reason he couldn’t was because it wasn’t his idea. One night I had just finished with the dinner dishes, and I started singing “Tonight down here in the valley…” After I got through with it, I took it in to Hank and said, “Hank, what do you think of this?” He really liked it, and it was a mixture of my lyrics, Hank’s lyrics, and Fred Rose’s lyrics. Hank sent it in, and for a long time I wouldn’t tell anybody that I had anything to do with that because I wanted it to be all Hank.
The reason Hank had a problem with “A Mansion on the Hill” was that he couldn’t write narrative ballads. All of his best songs froze a moment, a feeling, or a grudge. The only shred of personal experience he could draw on for “A Mansion on the Hill” was the unrequited ardor he’d once had for the daughter of the mayor of Montgomery. Boots Harris remembered driving him around in Lilly’s station wagon looking for her night after night in theater lineups, knowing all the while that she was unattainable. Perhaps a little of that surfaced in the song.
Hank set “A Mansion on the Hill” to a melody he’d poached from Bob Wills’ 1938 recording of “I Wonder If You Feel the Way I Do.” Released in December 1948, just as the ban was ending, “A Mansion on the Hill” did little business until March 1949, when it was caught up in the tidal wave of Hank’s career.
The two sessions before the record ban were a template for the years ahead. Under Rose’s guidance, Hank began to realize his strengths and weaknesses as a writer, and he brought along songs that improved with every session. The sessionmen might have looked down their noses at Hank’s music, but they were attuned to the challenge of bringing the Acuff sound into the honky-tonk. Rose’s role was to hone Hank’s songs before the session and work with the pickers during the session to keep a tight commercial focus. He seemed happiest to let Hank follow his instincts, although he continued to feed him dumb little novelties like “Rootie Tootie.” Perhaps Rose included his own songs to double his money from MGM, but it’s likelier that Hank simply wasn’t generating enough material that Rose considered worth releasing.
At the time the ban came into effect, Hank’s band was still composed of R. D. Norred, Lum York, Little Joe Pennington, and Red Todd. The stability in the lineup was itself an indication of the growing confidence level around Hank. That November, it looked as though Rose would land them a gig on WLAC in Nashville, which would be a step toward the Opry. Penington recalled the group buying matching outfits in anticipation:
We’d ordered in western outfits. Pea-green shirts, western-cut khaki pants, and western boots. [Hank’s cousin] Marie did appliqué embroidery on the shirts from a pattern that you ironed on. We were a real band when we had suits like that, but those outfits cost thirty dollars each, and thirty dollars was about what we made a week, and we had to pay our board out of that. Hank paid for all the outfits when the order come in. He said, “Boys, any y’all got the money you can pay me off, the rest that don’t come on down to the loan company and we’ll sign you up.” So Lum and Red and me went down and signed up with the Montgomery Loan and Finance Company to pay off these outfits.
The loan agreements were dated November 3, 1947.
Rose’s approach to WLAC fell through, and in February 1948, Hank thought about moving to the Washington, D.C., area. A promoter there, Connie B. Gay, had a show, Town and Country, that needed a star. On February 23, Hank wired Lilly from Cincinnati, telling her to tell the boys that he was heading for Washington. Lum York says that he’d left tickets for them, but the band had so little faith in Hank’s ability to deliver on the promises that they cashed in the tickets and waited for him to return.
It was still a rare day that the band got more than a day’s drive out of Montgomery. On one occasion, Hank was booked as a supporting act on a show at the Temple Theater in Birmingham. Pennington discovered that it was a union gig, checked with the union hall, and found out that scale (the minimum that could be paid) was roughly twice what Hank was paying. Norred recalled:
Hank said, “I want y’all in the back room.” We got in there and he said, “Who’s the little bright boy been down to the union office?” Joe said, ‘"I did.” Hank said, “Did you find out what you wanted to know down there?” Joe said, “Yeah, union scale is fifteen dollars.” So he paid us. Joe said, “I just wanted to make sure I was gonna get what was coming to me,” and Hank said — sarcastic like — “Friend, you’ll get what’s comin’ to you.”
It was a pattern Hank would follow throughout his professional life. He would leave a twenty-dollar tip on a fifty-cent breakfast, or simply forget where he had stashed the night’s takings, but would chisel his band members out of five bucks if he could.
After it became clear that Hank would not be moving to Nashville or Washington, he could do no more than cement his already high standing around Montgomery. As he told the Montgomery News that year, “I got the popularest daytime program on this station” (the nighttime programming was drawn from the NBC feed). During the spring of 1948, the group landed a regular gig at the 31 Club, a juke joint in Montgomery with a big dance area. But that spring, Hank slowly unraveled. His disintegration is documented in a series of letters from Fred Rose. Over the course of eighteen months, Rose had taken a profound interest in Hank’s well-being. “I’m opening up my heart to you,” he wrote in one letter, “because I love you like my own son, and you can call on me anytime when you are in a problem.” Going well beyond professional interest or self-interest, Rose dispensed advice on every aspect of life.
In February, Audrey gave up on Hank and took Lycrecia back to Banks, leaving Hank despondent. “The trouble with you kids is that both of you want to be boss,” wrote Rose. “Both of you have pride. Pride is one of the most destructive lies on earth.…It is something we should all get rid of as quickly as possible so that we can enjoy the happiness of humility.…If Audry [sic] wants you to wreck your life because of this misunderstanding, fool her, show her you can be a success in spite of her, not because of her.”
One month later, on March 19, Rose wrote to Hank, castigating him.
Wesley [Rose] tells me you called this morning for more money after me wiring you four hundred dollars just the day before yesterday…. We have gone as far as we can go at this time and cannot send you any more.
Hank I have tried to be a friend of yours but you refuse to let me be one. I feel that you are just using me for a good thing, and this is where I quit. You have been very unfair, calling the house in the middle of the night and I hope you will not let it happen again.
When you get ready to straighten out let me know and maybe we can pick up where we left off, but for the present I am fed up with your foolishness.
One week later, Rose wrote to Lilly. Apparently, Hank was holed up in Pensacola, Florida. Rose had sent him some contracts, and Hank hadn’t returned them. “The reason I am asking Hank to sign this particular legal type of contract is for his own protection,” Rose wrote, “so that he won’t get too full of firewater and sign a bad contract with someone else.”
By April 3, Hank had returned to Montgomery, and Rose thought he had come to his senses.
I hear you have been doing a pretty good job of straightening yourself out and nobody is more glad to hear it than me. Hank, anything I’ve written you or said is for your own good as I know what a fool a man can make of himself with drinking….
You are destined for big things in the recording and songwriting field, and you are the only one who can ruin this opportunity. In the future, forget the firewater and let me take care of your business and you’ll be a big name in this business.
Remember that women are revengeful an
d do all in their power to wreck a man when they separate from him and the only way to win is for the man to become successful.
In fact, Hank hadn’t straightened out. That day, he sold his house at 10 Stuart Avenue. He got his $2,200 deposit back, and the new owner assumed the mortgage. Hank went on a spending spree. Five days later, on April 8, a package show came to the Charles Theater. Cowboy Copas and Johnny Bond were the stars, and Hank was to open for them while the group played the 31 Club. Perhaps he was drunk, but he didn’t go over well at the Charles. Johnny Bond took it upon himself to tell the people of Montgomery not to take Hank for granted. “You people don’t know ‘bout this boy here,” Bond told the crowd. “He won’t be ‘round here very long. His records are going like wildfire all over the West Coast.”
Hank had promised that he would bring the headliners back to the 31 after their show, so the band was surprised when Bond appeared without Hank. “Johnny come in, sang a song,” remembered Pennington, “and we said, ‘Is Hank with y’all?’ One of them said, ‘Well the last we saw him, him and Copas was backstage with a couple of women and a bottle.’ R.D. said, ‘Well, you needn’t look for him for a while.’”
Two or three nights later, Hank showed up. He hadn’t shaved since before the Charles show, and was still pitifully hungover. He went up to the bandstand and tried to play a few songs, but he’d known better nights. He tried to smooth things over with the bartender, who was also the owner, but it didn’t work, and he staggered off into the night. The band was offered Hank’s job and they took it. “Now, who’s gonna tell Hank?” said Pennington.