by Colin Escott
Rose also told Jerry Rivers to play in the traditional double-stop fiddle style in which the melody and the harmony are carried on two strings. Hank always called it the “garden seed” fiddle. There would be no more jazzy single-string western swing fiddle on Hank Williams records.
When Zeb and Zeke Turner had worked Hank’s sessions, they had taken solos, but from this point the electric guitar was limited to keeping time with a steady tic-toc on the bass strings. Hank played the acoustic rhythm guitar, although Rose tried to persuade him to drop it and concentrate on singing. Hank probably knew that the guitar helped him keep time, so he hung on to it. Rose wouldn’t put a microphone on Hank’s guitar, though; instead, he brought along rhythm guitarist Jack Shook to reinforce the rhythm. Shook could play percussive barre chords, which took the place of brushes on the snare drum.
Rose had very precise ideas about the pace of every song. If it was going too fast or dragging, he would come down from the control room, sit at the piano, and pound it out at the tempo he thought best suited the piece. At first, the band was surprised at the way Hank and Fred Rose seemed to be at each other’s throats, but the bickering was, they found out, just the way they worked. Hank took note of Rose’s suggestions most of the time, and, for his part, Rose gave Hank a lot of latitude. “Hank needed Fred to say, ‘That’s a good un,’” said Don Helms, “but if Fred said, ‘Naw, naw, it needs…such and such,’ Hank would say, ‘I don’t see it,’ and Fred would say, ‘It does. Let me show you why’, and then Hank would usually say, ‘Awright, okay’”
Rose’s true feelings about the second day’s sessions are hard to guess. After lunch on January 10, Hank cut his first set of recitations and talking blues as Luke the Drifter. The recitation was a little homily, usu- ally with a strong moral undertow, narrated to musical accompaniment. It was a tradition embedded deep in country music, and one that was still kicking as it went down. T. Texas Tyler’s narration “Deck of Cards” had been one of the best-selling records of 1948. Hank would have heard Cowboy Slim Rinehart broadcast complete programs of narrations over the powerful unregulated Mexican border stations, and he performed them often on his own radio shows. Bernice Turner, who worked with Hank toward the end of the war, remembered that he’d include a narration on almost every radio show, then he’d walk the short distance from the radio station to Lilly’s boardinghouse and the boarders would be gathered around the radio, some of them still crying. “Some,” added Turner, “would be drinking and crying, but they’d still be crying.” The “talking blues” was part of vaudeville’s legacy to country music. Robert Lunn, “the Talking Blues Boy,” was still a fixture on the Opry when Hank joined. Hank’s talking blues were more sardonic than his narrations, and more personal. Over time, Luke the Drifter became Hank’s alter ego, a wise and thoughtful soul, dispensing advice that the willful Hank Williams ignored.
Don Helms says that Hank pestered Rose long and hard to cut narrations and talking blues, so they were clearly something close to his heart; in fact, Helms believes that Hank was more deeply committed to the recitations than to his regular songs. Rose’s objection was rooted in commercial logic: jukebox operators had huge standing orders for Hank Williams records and, if the recitations were issued under Hank’s name, the operators would complain. Virtually all of the operators serviced bars, and the last thing they needed was for someone to punch up a Hank Williams record and get a sermon. Credibility in the marketplace is hard to win and easy to lose, and Hank didn’t have enough of a track record to take too many risks.
Rose decided to solve the problem by issuing the narrations under a pseudonym, but from the beginning there was no attempt to disguise the identity of Luke the Drifter. An entry in Billboard’s “Folk Talent and Tunes” section made it obvious to the trade. In interviews, Hank never denied that he was Luke the Drifter, and told interviewers that the records were primarily designed for what he called the “take home” trade. Introducing a Luke the Drifter talking blues on one of his radio shows, he would say, “And here’s a little number by one of my closest relatives, Luke the Drifter,” or he’d say, “Here’s one by my half brother.”
Rose’s concerns were validated by the numbers. The jukebox operators were a hugely powerful force in the industry. In 1950, there were four hundred thousand jukeboxes on location serviced by fifty-five hundred jukebox operators. Even though the number of operators was dwarfed by the number of home phonograph owners (then estimated at between sixteen and seventeen million), the operators bought an average of 150 records a week, whereas the average record buyer bought fewer than 10 a year. Wesley Rose estimated that if one of Hank’s records sold 250,000 copies, the jukebox operators accounted for 150,000 of those. The ops, as they were known, were accommodated to the point that Hank, like most other songwriters, kept his song titles to fewer than five words so that they would fit onto the jukebox cards, and made sure his records timed out at under three minutes and twelve seconds, the time at which a record would automatically eject from a jukebox turntable.
Every year, the operators’ organization, the Music Operators of America, held a convention that was celebrated with special issues of Billboard and Cashbox. Everyone in the industry took out advertisements to greet the ops, thanking them for buying their product. The record labels laid on entertainment; in fact, Hank was sent to the March 1950 convention in Chicago. Rose didn’t want to alienate the ops, but if he refused to let Hank cut narrations, he would alienate his prize asset. “Luke the Drifter” was the best compromise he could hope for.
Hank was particularly keen to cut two narrations, “The Funeral” and “Beyond the Sunset.” Just a few weeks before the Luke the Drifter session, Elton Britt had cut “Beyond the Sunset,” and T. Texas Tyler had just cut both “Beyond the Sunset” and “The Funeral” (which he titled “Colored Child’s Funeral"). Then, a few days after the Luke the Drifter session, East Coast deejay Buddy Starcher cut both. From this distance, it’s hard to account for this little flurry of activity. As poems, both songs had been kicking around in one form or another for decades.
By today’s standards, “The Funeral” was an uncomfortably patronizing account of a black child’s funeral service. Originally a poem by Will Carleton, it was first published in 1909 and designed for recitation in caricatured black patois. Unlike Starcher and Tyler, though, Hank delivered “The Funeral” in his regular voice, and was clearly extending every ounce of compassion within him. His sincerity, though, was undermined by the words: “I pictured him while livin’, curly hair, protrudin’ lips,” he said, “I’d seen perhaps a thousand in my hurried southern trips.” Then the preacher arises “with a manner sorta awkward and countenance grotest [sic]. The simplicity and shrewdness in his Ethiopian face, showed the ignorance and wisdom of a crushed, undying race.”
In the background, an organ (manned by Fred Rose or Owen Bradley) played the reedy chords of Rose’s “A House Built on a Rock” with accenting from Don Helms’ steel guitar. When Rose submitted artist and publisher information to MGM, he noted that there was to be no songwriter or publisher credit on the record label, but that he was to receive half the composer royalty for “A House Built on a Rock.” Later, the Williams estate claimed “The Funeral” as one of Hank’s compositions, and in a 1993 edition of his lyrics it appeared in a new, politically correct version (the “protruding lips,” for instance, were now “smiling lips").
Bob McNett didn’t play on “The Funeral” but he was there. He remembers that when Hank and Helms finished, they both had tears running down their cheeks. “I’ve formed an opinion of Hank over late years that I had never thought of when I was working with him,” he said. “Hank had a deep personal feeling for his fellow man. This didn’t show on the outside. You had to get to know him, and then he’d give himself away every now and again about his deep concern for people who were less fortunate. ‘The Funeral’ touched him. When he did it, he lost himself in it.” On his narrations, Hank rarely gave in to mawkishness. He was simply, al
most painfully, direct, letting tenderness edge out the knuckleheadedness with which he often greeted the world.
“Beyond the Sunset” was pure Victoriana caught out of time. The words came from “Should You Go First,” a poem by Albert “Rosey” Rowswell, the voice of the Pittsburgh Pirates for more than twenty years. The poem first appeared in a book called Rosey Reflections, but Hank probably found it in a popular anthology called Poems That Touch the Heart. Tillman Franks claimed to have given Hank his copy of the book, but it was on almost as many shelves as the Bible in the late 1940s, and often tucked next to it. Even Elvis Presley, en route to Germany, said at a news conference that he had been reading Poems That Touch the Heart on the train and had been especially moved by “Should You Go First.” The 1936 hymn “Beyond the Sunset” was first married to “Should You Go First” by Chickie Williams, a performer on WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia. Elton Britt’s version briefly cracked the charts in February 1950, three weeks before Hank’s was released, but it didn’t linger.
Two other narrations were cut that day. The first was “Too Many Parties and Too Many Pals,” a morality play in one mercifully short act by Tin Pan Alley veteran Billy Rose (no relation to Fred) and two other New Yorkers. It was first published in 1925 when Rose, the writer of songs like “I Found a Million Dollar Baby (in a Five and Ten Cent Store),” “Clap Hands, Here Comes Charley,” and “I Got a Code id By Dose,” was new to the business. One of the first singing cowboys, Carl T. Sprague, recorded it as “The Wayward Daughter,” and by the time Hank turned to it, it was a minor hillbilly standard. One of the versions immediately preceding Hank’s was by Bill Haley, then leading a group called the Saddlemen. Hank’s version was released in June 1950 with his own gently mocking “Everything’s Okay,” a “What, Me Worry?” talking blues that he’d first sent to Fred Rose back in August 1947.
“Long Gone Lonesome Blues” did exactly what Hank calculated it would, and Rose hoped it would. On March 25, 1950, it shot straight into the charts at number two, staying there until April 29, when it dislodged “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” from the number one spot. It was the knockout punch Hank needed, and it ended up spending twenty-one weeks on the charts, eight of them at the top. None of the Luke the Drifter releases sold sufficiently well to chart. By August 1950, “Too Many Parties” had sold 20,000 copies and “The Funeral” had sold just 6,600 copies, while “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” had sold 150,000. Hank’s credibility was born anew, and “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” set the table for the unprecedented success he would enjoy until his death, success that would create its own ceaseless pressure to keep delivering. For the present, Hank was desperately eager to rise to the challenge.
Nothing else was recorded until June 14, when, at a half-session, Hank cut another Leon Payne song, “They’ll Never Take Her Love from Me,” and a third version of “Honky Tonk Blues” that, like the other two, was abandoned. After “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” had spent eight weeks at number one, only to be replaced by “Why Don’t You Love Me?” Hank was probably disappointed to see “They’ll Never Take Her Love from Me” top out at number five. The message was fairly clear: the public wanted brisk, up-tempo juke joint songs. History might decide that Hank Williams was the finest writer and singer of “heart” songs in all country music, but that wasn’t what the radio and jukebox audiences wanted in 1950.
Since joining the Opry, Hank had worked shows with Bill Monroe, the irascible father of bluegrass music. Hank’s feelings toward Monroe’s music are unknown, but he probably loved it because it contained much that he held dear. Monroe refused to have electric instruments in his lineup, and voiced some criticism of Hank’s singing style ("He drug it to death,” he once said, referring not to drugs but to Hank’s tendency to hold on to notes), but he was a good judge of songs, and knew that Hank was writing some great ones. Somewhere on tour in Texas, Hank played Monroe a new song, “I’m Blue, I’m Lonesome,” and Monroe somehow acquired it. There were rumors that the song’s notional writer, “James B. Smith,” was a pseudonym for Hank and Bill Monroe, but it appears as though the royalties went solely to Monroe until Acuff-Rose challenged for a share in the 1990s. Monroe later asserted that he wrote some of the song, but his sideman, Jimmy Martin, who was with Hank and Monroe at the time, insists that Hank wrote it all.
Monroe recorded “I’m Blue, I’m Lonesome” on February 3, 1950, during his first sessions for Decca, and it became a bluegrass classic. At the same time, Monroe cut “Alabama Waltz,” a song that Hank had written to stoke the ongoing craze for “state” waltzes that had started with Monroe’s “Kentucky Waltz” and Pee Wee King’s “Tennessee Waltz.” Monroe couldn’t recall if Hank was at the session, but if he was in town he usually liked to sit on the sidelines when his songs were being cut.
Braxton Schuffert says that Hank was at his recording session five days later, on February 8, although existing itineraries place Hank in Kansas City with Cowboy Copas and Jamup and Honey for that entire week (February 5 through 9). It’s hard to know if Hank felt as though he owed a debt to Braxton, or if he truly thought Braxton stood a chance of making it. Since the war, Braxton had been working six days a week for Hormel Meats in Montgomery, all the while performing as a Hormel-sponsored solo act on WCOV and WSFA. Whenever Hank went back to Montgomery, he tried to persuade Braxton to take another stab at the music business, and in January 1950 he took matters into his own hands. He called Brack’s wife and told her that he had train tickets ready, a backstage pass to the Opry, and reservations at the Hermitage Hotel. Braxton begged off work and took the Saturday morning train to Nashville. He joined the melee backstage at the Opry, and the next morning Hank picked him up at the hotel and drove him out to his house. Hank opened and closed his garage door a few times with the remote control. Braxton had never seen anything like it. Hank then phoned Fred Rose, asked him to come over, and ordered Braxton to sing Rose some songs. Rose had more or less been given carte blanche by Frank Walker to sign country acts to MGM, and he either heard something he liked in Braxton’s slightly antiquated style or realized that this was a concession, like the Luke the Drifter session, that he needed to make to keep Hank sweet.
“Fred said, ‘What have you got for him to sing?’” said Braxton, “and Hank said he had a couple of songs, and Fred said he had a song by one of the Anglins called ‘If Tears Would Bring You Back.’” Among the songs Hank pitched to Braxton was “Teardrop on a Rose,” a sentimental parlor piece that Hank had toyed with for years. He asked Braxton what he thought of it. Braxton said:
I told him it was one of the most beautiful songs I ever heard, and Hank said I could have it if I wanted. Then we needed one more. I was wanting to sing “I’ll Still Write Your Name in the Sand,” but Fred said, “No-o-o, we don’t give other folks royalties. I’m going over to the house for a few minutes. You and Hank write something.” So Hank and me wrote “Rockin’ Chair Daddy” sittin’ on the settee at his house. He’d write a line and I’d write a line. When Fred come back, I sang him “Rockin’ Chair Daddy,” and he signed me up that evening.
“Rockin’ Chair Daddy” was the closest to a Jimmie Rodgers–style song Hank would ever have a hand in writing.
The session was logged at the Castle studio on February 8, 1950, but that was a Wednesday, when Braxton should have been at work, and Hank, as noted, should have been in Kansas City. Braxton says he played Hank’s guitar, but insists that Hank didn’t participate except, as Braxton says, to “pop that heel — he wouldn’t pat, he’d pop that thing.” All four songs were released under the name “Braxton Shooford.” Like every record that Rose produced for MGM that wasn’t by Hank Williams, Braxton’s failed to do much business. MGM’s initial sell-in on “Rockin’ Chair Daddy” accounted for just under thirty-five hundred copies.
At the end of March, Hank was back in the studio. This time he was sitting in on Audrey’s first session for Decca. Having just missed the opportunity of signing Hank, Decca’s country A&R chief, Paul Cohen, now had t
he worst-case consolation prize: Hank and the Drifting Cowboys were at a Decca session, but Audrey was singing.
Audrey cut seven songs, and six of them were released. First out of the tape box was a cover version of “Honky Tonkin’.” Rose Maddox had revived the song in July 1949, and it had been picked up by Polly Bergen and Teresa Brewer for the pop market — the first pop cover version of a Hank Williams song, and the unlikeliest. Brewer was coming off her first big hit, “Music! Music! Music!” but “Honky Tonkin’” simply wasn’t a pop song. Even so, Brewer’s version was attracting a little airplay, and Audrey decided to corner some of the action. Her version was released back-to-back with a Hadacol song, “What Put the Pep in Grandma?” (the band yelled “Haddy-cole, Haddy-cole, Haddy-cole"). It was the kind of free advertising only Hadacol’s competitors would have wished on it.
When Billboard reviewed Audrey’s second Decca single in October 1950, its review staff concluded that “Orking [is] much superior to thrush’s singing,” and gave it one of the lowest ratings of the week. Audrey now had an official recommendation, almost a request, that she stop singing, but she continued to insinuate herself onto Hank’s radio shows and occasionally onto his live shows. If they were getting along, Hank would call her onstage at the Opry for a duet; if they were on the outs, she would stand backstage and pout while Hank did his portion alone.
Audrey felt excluded from a career she thought, with justification, she had done much to get off the ground. Having Hank’s money to spend was not enough of a consolation prize, so peace never broke out for long at the Williams household. Two weeks after the Decca session, the troubles resurfaced. Hank returned from a tour, and Audrey had heard that he was drinking and locked him out. Hank checked into the Tulane Hotel and was later arrested after he fell asleep drunk with a lit cigarette in his hand and set fire to his room.