Hank Williams

by Colin Escott

  Hank had never been happier. The atmosphere in the Packard was warm and convivial. Very soon, Hank had given everyone in the band a nickname. Don Helms was “Shag” because, as Rivers said, “before the days of much hair, Don had much.” Rivers had a G.I. crewcut so Hank called him “Burrhead.” “When I’d tip my hat, he’d say, ‘Look at that, looks like a stump full of dead grandaddies,’” said Rivers. Hank called Hillous Butrum “Bew” because he was intrigued by his middle name, Buell, and Bob McNett was dubbed “Rapid Robert” because he played a song called “Fingers on Fire.” Occasionally, Hank would call McNett “The Mayor of Roaring Branch, Pennsylvania,” and tell the audience that he had to roll peanuts off the mountain to get him to come join the band. That was the sort of homespun humor the crowds liked. The Cowboys called Hank “Bones” or “Gimly” (short for “Gimly-Ass") because he was so skinny he had no ass to speak of.

  Hank’s early Opry tours were organized by Oscar Davis in conjunction with the Opry’s Artist Service Bureau manager, Jim Denny. Second only to his relationship with Fred Rose, Hank’s relationship with Denny was critical to his professional career, and it was a relationship founded on a mixture of mutual respect and antagonism. With a steely sense of purpose, Denny had worked his way up from the mailroom at WSM’s parent company, National Life and Accident, and had persuaded National Life to give him the concession stand at the Opry as a side venture. He sold souvenirs, food, and fans, and it became the first of many operations that blurred the line between his interest and that of his employer. One of his moonlight ventures was a short-lived recording studio.

  Denny found his niche when he was made Artist Service Bureau manager in November 1946. Originally set up in 1934 to arrange charity appearances, the Bureau controlled how the Opry name was used on touring packages, and acted as a coordination point for the various tours and shows that Opry stars were on. Denny parlayed his position into one of the most powerful jobs in country music. He could have written the book on winning through intimidation. Although only five feet nine inches tall, he was built like a bear, and had been a bouncer at the Opry stage door during the 1930s. He had a habit of staring at people and saying nothing, which spooked the naturally garrulous country performers.

  Denny divided the country into regions and assigned them to different promoters who would have the right to book Opry shows into those regions. He would then work with the artists’ managers or directly with the artists to assemble package shows that he offered to these franchisees. For this service and the right to use the Grand Ole Opry name on shows, the Artist Service Bureau took 15 percent of the artist’s fee; in fact, the fee was required whenever the Opry trademark was used, regardless of whether the Service Bureau had booked the show. That explained how it was possible that Hank Williams was one of the Opry’s biggest stars but often owed the show more than he was paid.

  If Hank didn’t have much leverage at the Opry, he had newfound clout at MGM. The first session under his new contract was held in Cincinnati on August 30, 1949. Records were the key to everything now. Hank had to answer the question of whether he was a flash in the pan who’d gotten lucky with a pair of someone else’s tunes or an artist with staying power. Increasingly, he decided to stand or fall with his own songs, and on the evidence of this session and every other session until his last, he had quite suddenly become the most accomplished writer in country music.

  Country song craft was in transition. From the dawn of recorded country music in 1923, country songs had been a mixture of traditional ballads, dance tunes, Victorian parlor songs, hymns, blues, and vaudeville numbers. Deep introspection was rare. If there was sin, there would be retribution by the final verse. Then honky-tonk singers like Ernest Tubb and Floyd Tillman began writing almost embarrassingly intimate songs, clearly rooted in personal experience. In old parlor ballads, such as “After the Ball,” a man lives alone his entire life because he thinks he has seen his fiancée with another man. Tillman’s “It Makes No Difference Now” was almost diametrically opposite. Its message was quite blunt: “So you’re leaving? Screw you!” Tillman went on to write “Slippin’ Around,” the first cheating song that neither moralized nor condemned. His vocals were just as revolutionary. He sang as if his world were viewed through the bottom of a shot glass. He slurred words, broke meter, and bent notes. Ernest Tubb wrote sour valentines to his wife, and achingly confessional songs that spoke of weakness, drunkenness, and acute loneliness. Hank’s songs began taking their cue from Tillman and Tubb, but he didn’t sing with their detached irony; instead, he clung to Acuff’s emotionalism. On tour with Tubb in 1949, Hank had told him that he had “found me a place right between you and ol’ Roy Acuff.”

  As far back as a 1947 Montgomery Advertiser feature, Hank was dubbed “the hillbilly Shakespeare,” though in truth there was more Shakespeare in songs the bog Irish sang on the way back from the pub, or in half-forgotten Tin Pan Alley tunes. Hank’s achievement lay elsewhere. He cast the highs and lows of everyday life in terms that were simple enough to register quickly over a car radio or jukebox yet profound enough to bear repeated listening. His songs were the true-to-life blues. Any art form at its best has the one-on-oneness of physical intimacy, and that’s what Hank brought to country music. Like most truly great songwriters, he flirted with banality, but nearly always managed to sidestep it. After he’d been writing for a few years, he stopped rejuggling clichés and gave his songs the little flashes of detail that led people to think he was writing about them. He never lost his audience with wordiness or poeticism. From Fred Rose, he also learned the importance of starting with a commanding image, as in “Mind Your Own Business.”

  One of the enduring myths about Hank Williams is that he purchased finished or half-finished songs. It’s true that he bought a few songs, stole a few melodies, and occasionally even wrote new songs to titles he had found on MGM release schedules ("I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” was one), but many, probably most, Hank Williams songs were the pure product of Hank himself. With few exceptions, the songs that bear his name have the imprimatur of sole authorship. The Acuff-Rose archives are full of lyrics that Hank brought in. He wrote screeds, compulsively diarizing his life. He did most of his writing on the road. There wasn’t even room to break out a guitar in the sedan, so he’d beat out a rhythm on the dashboard and someone would get something like a cardboard stiffener from a pressed shirt and take the words down. “We were coming back from a Minneapolis–St. Paul show,” said promoter A. V. Bamford. “Hank pulled out a notebook, opened the glove compartment, and leaned into its light. He had a little pencil. A small, stubby, stubby pencil. And he had a notebook. He wrote something and we’d be driving, then he’d write some more. I’d say he wrote, altogether, an hour or so. Next day, he went to Fred Rose’s home studio.” Hank would come back off the road with a billfold full of scraps of paper on which he had verses, half-completed songs, and abandoned ideas. The band would kid him because his billfold was so thick. They’d say, “Hoss, be careful, you’ll fall off that billfold, break an arm and we’ll have to get us a new lead singer.” All the melodies were in Hank’s head.

  The other enduring myth is that Fred Rose wrote the songs. Starting with the August ’49 Cincinnati session, Hank came closer to hitting a home run every time at bat than anyone in popular music before or since, and some say that Fred Rose was more responsible than Hank himself. It’s true that you’d be hard-pressed to see promise in the songs that Hank wrote before his Acuff-Rose contract (although Rose must have seen something), and the dramatic improvement led many to the conclusion that Rose was responsible. The fact remains, though, that Rose wrote hundreds, perhaps thousands, of songs, and few sounded anything like Hank Williams’ songs. Rose himself emphasized that point when he spoke after Hank’s death: “Don’t get the idea that I made the guy or wrote his songs for him,” said Rose. “He made himself, don’t forget that!” Rose deliberately excluded everyone from his writing sessions with Hank, so we’ll never know who did what. In a
ll likelihood, Rose brought no more than a commercial gloss and organizational skills to Hank’s work. He encouraged him to write bridges rather than simply string verses together, and provided a much-needed element of quality control. He also probably told Hank to dispense with archaic folk forms like “ne’er” and “o’er,” and assert the primacy of everyday speech.

  Whenever Hank was asked about his songwriting, he was always careful to downplay the element of song craft, something he perhaps thought unbecoming a “folk” musician. “People don’t write music,” he told Pathfinder magazine in 1952, “it’s given to you; you sit there and wait and it comes to you. If [a song] takes longer than thirty minutes or an hour, I usually throw it away.” It was up to Fred Rose to separate the gold from the dross and work with Hank to transform the best ideas into integrated, complete statements, taut with commercial logic. If Rose contributed substantially, as he did on “A Mansion on the Hill” and later “Kaw-Liga,” he took half-credit; if he simply doctored Hank’s songs, he didn’t take a share. Rose knew that he would get the publisher’s half of the royalty, and there is consensus that he was not a greedy man.

  The only person to walk in on Hank and Fred Rose working together was Roy Acuff, and his description was studiedly trite. “They worked as a good team of mules,” Acuff said on an MGM Records documentary. “They pulled right together. Hank would come up with the ideas, and Fred would say, ‘Well, write it down and let me look at it.’ Hank’d bring it to Fred, and Fred would sit at the piano and complement Hank and say, ‘Well maybe you ought to express this a little differently, let’s change it a little bit,’ but Fred never changed Hank’s thinking.” For his part, Hank took Rose’s lessons to heart, worked hard at his craft, and received the best positive reinforcement there was — hits.

  Hank’s ultimate triumph as a songwriter was that he learned to tell an audience of thousands what he couldn’t tell someone sitting one-on-one across the room. “If he’d had the personality offstage that he had onstage, he’d have been all right,” said Lum York, so often the victim of Hank’s interminable, impenetrable silences. Hank felt the need to mask his tenderheartedness with callousness and shitkicker bravado, but in his songs he let his weakness show, increasingly so once he discovered that everyone else was weak too.

  By late 1949, Hank had shaken off the dry spell that had afflicted him in Shreveport, and was in the process of becoming the most accomplished songwriter in country music history. The session held between 2:00 and 5:30 p.m. on August 30, 1949, at the Herzog Studio in Cincinnati was the first convincing proof that Hank had arrived.

  Fred Rose still insisted that Hank record with the Pleasant Valley Boys — Zeke Turner, Jerry Byrd, and Louis Innis — and was prepared to go to Cincinnati if necessary. Hank drove down from Milwaukee to meet them. He had been working a weeklong stint at the Palace Theater with Ernest Tubb, Cowboy Copas, and Minnie Pearl. His road band stood in the studio and watched, but didn’t play. The first song they cut was “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” Its poetic form comes from the fact that it was originally intended to be spoken — not sung. Acuff-Rose staff writer Vic McAlpin said that Hank had written it for his first session of recitations slated for January 1950, but changed his mind. “I think ol’ Hank needs to record this,” he told McAlpin. Hank was concerned that some of the lines might sound artsy and alienate his audience, so he tried them out on friends, fellow performers, and Fred Rose, and let them convince him that he had excelled. Zeke Turner underpinned “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” with recurring figures on the bass strings of the electric guitar. A few weeks earlier, Turner had led the backing on the Delmore Brothers’ recording of “Blues Stay Away from Me” using very similar licks, so perhaps they were still echoing in his mind. Jerry Byrd played a solo of unusual simplicity, paraphrasing the melody to haunting effect, subtly adjusting tone and volume. Hank sang with unshakable conviction. It was, as he surely knew, a masterpiece.

  “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” was the song Hank would cite as his personal favorite, but when it was released on November 8, 1949, it was on the flip side of “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” another song that Fred Rose didn’t want to touch. We’ll never know what prompted Hank to record it, but it’s his only commercial recording with direct antecedents in black music, and the only one on which he takes a guitar solo. Some have advanced the theory that Tee-Tot taught him the song, but Pappy Neal McCormick also took credit. Perhaps Hank was scouring his mind for ancient, up-tempo songs because “Lovesick Blues” had been so successful, and his own songs less so. The song began in the brothels of New Orleans during the early part of the twentieth century, and it’s the kissing cousin of a very similar song, “Keep a’Knockin,’” later recorded by Louis Jordan and Little Richard. The riff that underpins both songs probably came from the church. The first recorded version of “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” (then called “The Bucket’s Got a Hole in It") was by Tom Gates on Gennett Records in 1927. Then, in 1933, it was copyrighted by Clarence Williams, one of the first African Americans to cross the line between the music and the business. Williams produced and accompanied Bessie Smith, among others, and worked with Frank Walker for years. His own recordings were part jazz, part hokum, and part blues: in other words, much the same mix that Hank heard from Tee-Tot. Clarence Williams’ version of “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” is very different from Hank’s. Among the song’s eight couplets, one berates a frigid woman:

  Wintertime is cold, dear, summertime is too

  You know a doggone iceberg’ll turn black to blue.

  Five years after Clarence Williams copyrighted the song, blues singer Washboard Sam recorded yet another version that he credited to himself. This one was about pimping, prostitution, and dope dealing.

  When you walkin’ down Thirty-first Street, boy you better look round

  The vice squad is on the beat and you’ll be jailhouse bound

  Standing on the corner, everything is so slow,

  Can’t make no money, tricks ain’t walkin’ no more

  Gonna start a new racket, gonna start it out right

  Sell moonshine at day, peddle dope at night.

  Like “Frankie and Johnny,” “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” lent itself to endless additions and permutations, and as the Dixieland jazz revival took shape in the mid- to late 1940s, the song rose to the surface once more. New Orleans old-timers George Lewis and Kid Ory recorded it in 1944 and 1946 respectively. When Hank demo’d the song for the band in the studio, he included a couplet that didn’t make it to record:

  Me and my baby, we got a Ford,

  Now we change the gears from the running board

  Fred Rose’s opposition to the song had a lot to do with the fact that it mentioned beer, and probably had something to do with the fact that Acuff-Rose didn’t publish it. If Hank was to record it, though, the couplet about the Ford definitely had to go. If Hank endorsed Ford, then deejays sponsored by GM, Chrysler, and Studebaker wouldn’t spin his record. Hank came to the studio with a guitar solo already worked out. He played it twice as he demo’d it for the band, then reprised it on the record, and while it didn’t break new ground, it was loose and swinging, and wonderfully bluesy. The entire record had a mellow compelling swing that showed just how deeply Hank was immersed in black music.

  Hank Williams made “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” into a minor standard. Right away, there were cover versions: Murv Shiner recorded it for Decca, Dave Denny for RCA, and T. Texas Tyler for 4-Star. Fat Man Robinson’s R&B cover version for Decca was interesting in that it included the verse about the Ford that Hank dropped, suggesting that either Hank and Robinson were copying another record or that Robinson had somehow acquired Hank’s demo. Just as Hank’s record was descending the charts, Louis Armstrong recorded it, thereby bringing it back to New Orleans. In 1956, Sonny Burgess recorded a rockabilly version for Sun Records, and Ricky Nelson covered it. With Ozzie Nelson behind the control board, the reference to beer disappeared
. The refrain now went, “My bucket’s got a hole in it, won’t work no more.” Completely deracinated, the song finally scaled the pop charts. In fifty years, it had made its way across the breadth of American culture from the whorehouses of Storyville to The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.

  The other two songs Hank cut that day in Cincinnati were somber reflections on what his life had quickly become. “A House without Love” resonates with emptiness and unfulfillment. “We slaved to gain a worthless treasure” and “the simple things have gone forever” were a bleak commentary on what success was doing to the Williamses’ ever less-than-stable relationship. “I Just Don’t Like This Kind of Living” was a tad faster and had flashes of Hank’s dark humor ("You ain’t never bin known to be wrong, and I ain’t never bin right"). Audrey’s thoughts can only be guessed at as she heard the substance of their domestic disputes on the radio, particularly as only one side ever got aired. Perhaps, like a game show contestant, she was willing to live with any amount of humiliation for the prize money.

  Audrey was, in fact, spending the prize money, and more that Hank had yet to make. She and Hank bought a house at 4916 Franklin Road from Mr. W. Raymond Denney, and the deal closed on September 3, 1949, the Saturday after the session. Hank was back in town for the Opry that day. The Williamses paid $21,000 for a three-bedroom, ranch-style house set back from the road on three acres of land. It was more or less in the country, but still conveniently close to the new Acuff-Rose building at 2510 Franklin that Hank had also partly paid for. Audrey had big plans for the house, which, like Graceland, became a monument to what good money and bad taste can accomplish. A new bedroom, den, breezeway, and two-car garage were added almost immediately, and Audrey went out and bought the most expensive furnishings she could find. The prevailing motif was Oriental: shiny black lacquer and dragons — lots of dragons. To Audrey, kitsch was a step up. The furnishings looked and felt so unusual and cost so much that Hank told his band he was afraid to sit on them. He preferred to lounge on the floor instead. The simple things really had gone forever.