by Colin Escott
Hank got his stage outfit from Tillman. A year or so earlier, Tillman had worked briefly in Houston with Claude King and Buddy Attaway. A car dealer named Elmer Laird sponsored them on radio, bought them matching uniforms, and helped them write a song called “Poison Love.” Then an angry customer stabbed Laird to death on the steps of the dealership. The trio returned to Shreveport, and their song eventually became Johnnie and Jack’s first hit. Tillman had no use for his stage outfit now that he was booking acts, so he sold it to Hank Williams. Tillman was short and rotund; Hank was tall and almost anorexically thin, so the outfit was far from a perfect fit. “Mrs. Maxie Goldberg, who had a tailoring place across from KWKH, tailored it to fit Hank, but the britches never did fit,” says Tillman. “I sold it to him for sixty dollars, but he never did pay me.”
The fact that Tillman Franks was booking acts into schoolhouses in northern Louisiana and eastern Texas was symptomatic of the problem that plagued the Hayride throughout its existence: the Ewings had no commitment to the music business. Franks remembers Henry Clay telling him that the family patriarch, John D. Ewing, viewed KWKH as a sausage factory; in other words, he didn’t care what went in — only about the profits coming out the other end. At the same time, WSM had the Artist Service Bureau assembling and booking Opry package shows. “The KWKH management wasn’t interested in the future,” said Horace Logan, in rare agreement with Tillman Franks. “They were interested in this fiscal year. They wouldn’t put up the money to let me start an Artist Service Bureau, which would have been self-supporting very quick.”
In fact, the Ewings were socking some money into the Hayride roster, bringing in big second-tier artists like Zeke Clements, Red Sovine, Sheb Wooley, and America’s first singing cowgirl, Patsy Montana. Later, the Ewings made a couple of half-hearted stabs at setting up a booking agency, first with Jim Bulleit in 1951, then with Tillman Franks in 1957. When Hank was in Shreveport in 1948 and 1949, he couldn’t unravel the paradox that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, heard his voice every Saturday night, but the following Monday he was driving all day to play a schoolhouse in eastern Texas for a hundred people. Then he’d have to drive back in time to do his early morning show. All that for thirty or forty bucks.
It might have been a marginal existence, but those close to Hank throughout his career say that the early months in Shreveport were the happiest. It was a new start. Audrey was several hundred blessed miles from Lilly, which improved her disposition enormously. Hank was mingling on a regular basis with some of the hottest minor-league prospects in country music, and he and Audrey got along particularly well with Johnnie Wright and Kitty Wells. Johnnie and Hank would go fishing on Sundays and have a fish fry that night. All the while, Hank was making a determined effort to stay sober, which improved Audrey’s disposition still more. An article in the Shreveport Times in November 1948, though, seemed to hint that, in some respects, Hank was still his old self. The Ewings cross-promoted the Hayride through the Times, so criticism was bound to be muted, but the article said, “The trouble with Hank is that you can’t keep him in one place long enough. An announcer in Alabama dubbed his gang as the Drifting Cowboys because of Hank’s inconsistency. The name was so appropriate it just stuck.”
Starting January 10, 1949, Horace Logan found a new sponsor for one of KWKH’s late-morning drive-time slots, just before Arthur Godfrey came in on the network feed. The Shreveport Syrup Company had a brand, Johnnie Fair Syrup, and Logan, together with KWKH’s time salesman, Red Watkins, persuaded the company to invest five thousand dollars in sponsoring Hank Williams. Hank dubbed himself “The Ol’ Syrup Sopper” and performed alone with his guitar. The KWKH schedule for mid-January 1949 has him on the air for fifteen minutes at 5:45 a.m., again at 6:30, and again at 8:15 for Johnnie Fair. No one else on KWKH’s roster had more than one sponsorship.
Back in November 1948, the Ewings had sprung for two state-of-the-art RCA acetate cutters, primarily to record CBS network shows for playback later. Hank made good use of these machines, cutting shows to be played on air when he was out of town. A few shows survived on acetate, and around 1955, they ended up in the hands of Leonard Chess, boss of the R&B label Chess Records. Chess turned around and sold them to MGM, then in dire need of some new Hank Williams material.
The Johnnie Fair transcriptions rank alongside Hank’s most affecting work. With few hits of his own, he filled the show with his favorite songs. He sang both sides of Jimmy Wakely’s current hits, “I Wish I Had a Nickel” and “Someday You’ll Call My Name.” The songs were trite and affectless in Wakely’s hands, but Hank filled them with vengeance and unrequited longing. The Sons of the Pioneers’ “Cool Water” became an eerie haunting blues. Bill Carlisle’s song about returning servicemen, “Rocking Chair Money,” really rocked. “I love to rock, yeah rock,” Hank sang. He needed no more than his guitar, never appeared to strain, yet never let the tension falter. He once told Tillman Franks that he loved the sound of his own voice, something these shows make clear. Parodists have him singing in a high nasal whine, but he actually had a light baritone; without a band behind him, he explored the natural warm contours of his voice. After every song, he would pitch Johnnie Fair Syrup in two delicious flavors, maple and cane. “Remember, friends,” he would say in closing, “meals are easy to prepare when you set your table with Johnnie Fair.”
During those early days in Shreveport, Hank and Audrey hung out with Curley Williams and his wife a good deal. They’d introduce each other onstage or on the radio as if they were brothers. Curley flitted in and out of Hank’s life from the time he poached Boots Harris in 1942 to the time Hank recorded one of his songs, “Half As Much,” a decade later. Born in southern Georgia in June 1914, Curley had been christened Doc Williams because family legend held that the seventh child would be a doctor; instead, he was a fiddle player. He changed his name to avoid confusion with Doc Williams on the Wheeling, West Virginia, Jamboree. The Peach Pickers’ music was far removed from Hank’s; it was light, jazzy, sophisticated western dance music. Curley, who talked so slowly it seemed like a put-on, rarely sang and used a rotating cast of singers to share the spotlight with his daughter, Georgia Ann. Curley’s Peach Pickers joined the Opry’s parent station, WSM, in December 1942 — shortly after Boots Harris quit Hank. Their Opry tenure started the following September, and they landed a Columbia Records contract in November. Curley recorded for Columbia for seven years, and even backed Fred Rose (then recording for Columbia as “The Rambling Rogue") on one session. He lit out for the West Coast to play dance halls late in 1945, returning east to join the Hayride. Curley and Hank became good friends, and Hank and Audrey lived with Curley and his wife, Louise, when money was tight.
The 1948 recording ban was in effect for the first five months that Hank was in Shreveport, and MGM worked through its backlog, releasing a new Hank Williams single every two months or so. Just before he arrived in Shreveport, MGM issued the recut of “Honky Tonkin’.” Billboard lauded its “deft ork beat,” and its brief appearance in the country charts in July probably helped secure the Hayride spot. To avoid confusion with the Sterling record of “Honky Tonkin’,” Fred Rose bought all of the Sterling masters on May 17 for two thousand dollars, then sold them to MGM. One thousand dollars was charged back to Hank. “This was a real break,” Wesley Rose wrote to Hank, “as you will now get artist royalties on these as they are released on MGM.”
Hank arrived in Shreveport promoting “I’m a Long Gone Daddy.” It was in the charts the week he joined, peaking at number six during a three-week stay. Unsure how long the ban would last, Fred Rose paired “Pan American” and “I Don’t Care (If Tomorrow Never Comes)” from the Sterling sessions in June 1948, then released two abandoned cuts from Hank’s first MGM session, “I Saw the Light” and “Six More Miles,” in September. After that, there were only three cuts left before MGM was staring at the bottom of the Hank Williams barrel. MGM scheduled two of the remaining cuts, “A Mansion on the Hill” and “I Can’
t Get You off of My Mind,” for December 1948, but by then the ban was falling apart. Some companies were cutting instrumental tracks overseas, then over-dubbing the vocalists (who were members of a different union) at home; others were simply violating the ban. MGM, RCA, and Columbia played closest to the rules because they had union-staffed affiliate companies and couldn’t risk a strike. The ban was ended by an agreement reached on October 27, 1948, which became effective December 14. After all the upset, the union gained a very marginal increase in its pension fund contributions, and a couple of other minor concessions.
Hank usually wrote songs without regard to upcoming sessions, so it’s hard to know if his barrenness in Shreveport was the result of the strike or the side effect of a better relationship with Audrey. In late 1948, Fred Rose sent his promotion man, Mel Foree, down to Shreveport to see what was going on. Hank and Foree went on the road together to Jacksonville, Texas. Hank had just bought a new fishing rod, and threw a line into every creek along the way. Foree’s presence seemed to spur him and they wrote four songs on the road. As soon as they got back, Hank went into the KWKH studio to cut the songs onto acetates. Foree mailed them to Rose. “When I come back Fred had these acetates on his desk,” Foree said. “Each song was written to a melody he [Hank] had already written.” Rose found just one usable song in the batch, “’Neath a Cold Gray Tomb of Stone.” Bill Monroe’s brother, Charlie, recorded it in October 1950. Hank also worked with Curley Williams on some goofy novelty songs like “No, Not Now” and “Honey, Do You Love Me, Huh?” which Curley recorded for Columbia. Hank gave Foree some lyric sheets to take back to Rose, but Foree put them in a suitcase that was stolen before he got home.
Audrey became pregnant just days after arriving in Shreveport, but pregnancy made her sick and irritable; clothes made her skin hurt and she found little joy in bearing a child. The spats continued, but Hank seriously tried to curb his drinking, and Lycrecia was there to bring a little stability. Hank took the rituals of procreation, gestation, and birthing very seriously, and was trying to be a strong family head — a role for which Lon and life in general had done little to prepare him.
Until Audrey outgrew her outfits, she continued to insinuate herself onto Hank’s shows. Horace Logan recalled:
Audrey was a pure, unmitigated, hard-boiled, blue-eyed bitch. She wanted to be a singer and she was horrible, unbelievably horrible. She not only tried to sing, she insisted on it, and she forced herself out onstage when Hank was out there. I’d never let her out, but Hank would say, “Logan, I’ve got to let her sing, I’ve got to live with the woman.” I said, “OK, Hank, here’s what we do. We put two mics out there. Don’t let her sing on your mic. I’ll bring down the volume on her mic, and keep yours up.” We let her sing some just so Hank would get along better with her.
By the fall of 1948, the move to Shreveport still couldn’t be called a success. Hank hadn’t recorded for a year because of the recording ban, and although the records from the stockpile were doing decent business, they weren’t exploding over the charts. Then, during the late months of the year, he began performing “Lovesick Blues.” He’d played it in Montgomery. His former band remembered it clearly because they had to hit minor chords on the bridge, which was very unusual for a Hank Williams song. When R. D. Norred heard it on the radio, he turned to his wife and said, “There’s that blamed old song.” It’s likeliest that Hank played it on a whim at some schoolhouse dates, got a good response, then played it on the Hayride.
“The first time Hank did ‘Lovesick Blues’ on the Hayride, he didn’t have his own band,” remembered Tillman Franks.
Dobber Johnson was on fiddle, Buddy Attaway was on guitar, Felton Pruett was on steel guitar, and I was on the bass. We were rehearsing up there and Hank was singing it in F. Then there was this part where it went from F to B-minor or something, and I said, “Hank, that one chord you got in there, I can’t figure it out.” He says, “Don’t worry ‘bout it, hoss, just stomp your foot and grin.”
When the Shreveport Times published a feature about the Hayride stars on November 21, 1948, it said, “Hank’s rendition of ‘Love Sick [sic] Blues’ is one of the most requested songs.” Presumably, he’d been singing it for a while by then, and had figured out that he was onto something. He cut a demo at Curley Williams’ house with Boots Harris on steel guitar, Smokey Paul on electric guitar, and Curley on fiddle. Hank sent it to Fred Rose, but, according to Boots, Rose wrote back and told Hank that he wanted nothing to do with it.
With the end of the recording ban in sight, Rose began scheduling sessions. Hank insisted that he record “Lovesick Blues,” and he’d written nothing better. On December 22, 1948, eight days after the ban ended, Rose scheduled a session in Cincinnati. Around the twentieth, Hank and Audrey, Johnnie and Jack, and Kitty Wells left Shreveport in a convoy. They dropped off Lycrecia at her grandparents’ house in Alabama, then drove on to Nashville, where they left Johnnie and Jack and Kitty, all of whom were from the Nashville area. Then Hank, Audrey, and Johnnie and Jack’s mandolin player, Clyde Baum, drove on to Cincinnati, where Fred Rose was waiting for them at the E. T. Herzog studio. Rose had fronted one hundred dollars to cover expenses on the trip. He’d also enclosed a song of his that he wanted on the flip side of “Lovesick Blues,” although it’s hard to know what that song was. “Blue it up as much as you can,” Rose wrote when he sent it to Hank, “and if you can better the melody, go ahead and do it because I wrote it quick.” Rose also mentioned that Nelson King would get behind the song. King was one of the first country deejays, and his show, Hillbilly Jamboree, went out every night between 8:05 p.m. and midnight over fifty-thousand-watt clear-channel WCKY.
It’s almost impossible to sort out exactly what happened in Cincinnati. Hank didn’t do the song that Rose sent him unless that song was “There’ll Be No Teardrops Tonight.” Rose’s letter, though, seemed to indicate that he’d written the song, and “There’ll Be No Teardrops Tonight” was credited to Hank with a half-share assigned surreptitiously to Nelson King. King always insisted that he and Hank had written the song together one night. He said that Hank stepped out onto the street and bought a guitar from a passer-by who was glad to sell it to him because he was Hank Williams. The problem with King’s account is that in late 1948 a passer-by was likely to have said “Hank who?” Also, judging from Rose’s correspondence, Hank didn’t arrive in Cincinnati until the morning of the session. A more plausible account of how King came to own half of the song came from Tillman Franks, who remembers a conversation with Hank in 1952 when he came to the Opry with Webb Pierce. All three of them went fishing on Hickory Lake and started talking shop. By then, Tillman had more or less invented payola in the country record business. “I’d given Nelson King half of [Johnnie and Jack’s hit] ‘Three Ways of Knowing’ to get him to play Webb’s record of ‘Wondering,’” said Tillman, “and Hank said, ‘Franks, you and Pierce have done fucked up business giving these deejays songs.’ I said, ‘Hank, I didn’t start it. Nelson told me you’d given him half of “There’ll Be No Teardrops Tonight."’ Hank said, ‘I didn’t mean to, I was drunk.’” Probably not drunk, but grateful for the spins, and hopeful of more.
Hank only had two other original songs to record in Cincinnati; one was a hymn he had written, “Lost on the River,” and the other was a hymn Audrey had written, “I Heard My Mother Praying for Me.” After the session, Hank and Audrey and Clyde Baum drove back to Nashville, where they ate supper with Johnnie Wright’s in-laws and dropped off Clyde Baum. Then they headed to Montgomery for Christmas. Shortly after Hank returned to Shreveport, he met Johnny Bond backstage at the Hayride. Bond was the writer of several big hits like “I Wonder Where You Are Tonight,” “Bartender’s Blues,” and “Drink Up and Go Home,” and he’d met Hank at the Charles Theater in Montgomery earlier that year. Now he found him almost despondent. “I’m tired of tryin’ to get on the Opry,” Hank told Bond. “It’s just too rough. I’ve recorded one song that’s in the can now, a thing called ‘
Lovesick Blues’; if that don’t make it, I’m thinkin’ seriously of gittin’ out of the business.”
Chapter 7
Where there’s a writ.
Music industry maxim
A FEELING CALLED THE BLUES
IT wasn’t a blues, it wasn’t a country song, and it wasn’t even from Hank Williams’ pen, but “Lovesick Blues” was the spark that ignited his career. It was a phenomenon that no amount of punditry, conventional wisdom, or research could have predicted. It was one of those times when the public saw something that the seasoned professionals missed.
Hank, Audrey, and mandolinist Clyde Baum arrived in Cincinnati on Wednesday, December 22, 1948, and met the core of the band that had backed Hank in Nashville before the ban. Zeke Turner was on electric guitar, Jerry Byrd on steel guitar, Louis Innis reinforced Hank’s rhythm, Tommy Jackson played fiddle, and WLW announcer Willie Thawl was on bass. That group, with the exception of Thawl, had worked with Red Foley in Nashville until WLW offered them twice the money to relocate. They dubbed themselves the Pleasant Valley Boys and worked the Mid-Western Hayride and other local radio and television shows.
The first two songs on the slate were the duets with Audrey, “Lost on the River” and “I Heard My Mother Praying for Me,” both featuring Clyde Baum’s mandolin. Hank loved string band music, but rarely brought the mandolin into his lineup; he preferred the electric “take off” guitar that Ernest Tubb had popularized. The sound of the electric guitar could cut through a noisy barroom as no mandolin ever could. By the time they’d finished the duets and recorded “There’ll Be No Teardrops Tonight,” there was less than half an hour left on the session. Hank pulled “Lovesick Blues” from his guitar case and ran it down for the band. “It was all out of meter,” said Jerry Byrd, “and Fred said, ‘That’s the worst damn thing I ever heard.’ He had eyes that went different ways — he couldn’t look at you with both eyes — but he was starin’ as hard as he could at Hank.”