by Colin Escott
Audrey always maintained that she had been signed to MGM with Hank, but Rose evidently refused to produce her as a solo act, leading to the Decca deal. Rose did, however, schedule the two unissued Hank and Audrey duets, “Jesus Remembered Me” and “I Heard My Mother Praying for Me,” for September 1950. The fall time slot was dubbed the “After Harvest” release, when the market for religious songs was supposed to be especially good. Even then, with Hank’s credibility near its zenith, the record fell stillborn from the presses.
Hank’s 1949 royalties were reported by Variety magazine at $65,000, but the actual figures were substantially lower. The MGM royalties for 1949 were $15,400 and the Acuff-Rose royalties were $8,219, totaling $23,619. Still good money. In 1950 the MGM royalties jumped to $22,574, in part because some “Lovesick Blues” sales from 1949 were accounted for in 1950. Hank’s Acuff-Rose royalties for 1950 increased substantially to $18,040 because he was now writing his own songs.
The same Variety report stated that MGM’s top seller, black crooner Billy Eckstine, grossed more than $100,000 in royalties in 1949. Even if true, there was no disguising the fact that MGM was in trouble almost from the first day. Eckstine, Hank Williams, and MGM’s other quasi-major names like orchestra leaders Blue Barron and Art Mooney weren’t generating enough sales to cover the giant overhead. When the parent corporation, Loews, was ordered to divide its business into independently operating studio and theater divisions, MGM Records devolved to the theater division. There were rumors in the trade that the theater division would shut down MGM Records when Frank Walker’s initial five-year term was up in August 1950, but it was decided to keep MGM Records afloat, and Walker was re-signed.
One expense that MGM hadn’t counted upon when it broke ground at its plant in New Jersey was the need to retool the presses to accommodate 45 rpm records and LPs. RCA had introduced the 45 rpm in March
1949 in response to Columbia’s introduction of the LP in June the previous year. Trying to sidestep the cost, MGM began pressing its 78s on a supposedly unbreakable compound in October 1949, but Walker soon had to face up to the inevitable and began pressing 45s in May 1950. For all companies, the LP and 45 “micro-platters” as they were called, represented additional overhead for a minimal return. The only benefits were their lighter shipping weight and unbreakability (all record labels made a “breakage allowance” on shipments of 78s). It wasn’t until October
1950 that Seeburg introduced the first 45 rpm jukebox, and even though 45s gained acceptance in the pop market, 78s would outsell 45s for years in the country and gospel markets. Jerry Rivers remembers seeing 45s for the first time in Cincinnati when Hank and the band went to Nelson King’s house on one of their earliest tours. Hank’s first record to be released simultaneously as a 45 and a 78 was “They’ll Never Take Her Love from Me” / “Why Should We Try Anymore?” in August 1950.*
For Hank, records and music publishing were icing on the cake. His personal appearance fees made up the greater part of his income, which was estimated at ninety-two thousand dollars for 1950. A record that sold 150,000 copies, as both “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” and “Why Don’t You Love Me?” had done, netted Hank just three thousand dollars from MGM. If he wrote both sides of the record, he would receive an additional forty-five hundred dollars from Acuff-Rose. Airplay royalties would filter back from the performing rights society, BMI. But the true value of a big hit lay in the fact that Hank could hike his personal appearance fee or anticipate a higher turnout, which would increase his share of the gate.
Hank’s personal appearance fee fluctuated wildly. The rule of thumb was that you worked for what you could get, and you got it in cash. If Hank was playing a date as a headliner in a major center, he often settled for 50 or 60 percent of the gross after tax; if he filled a four-thousand-seat auditorium at ticket prices that ranged from a dollar for adults to fifty cents for children, he might expect to stuff two thousand dollars into his valise for the night’s work. He never took checks after being burned a few times. But then, if he had a free night and was expecting to pass through a small town where he knew a deejay or someone who promoted hillbilly shows, he might play a club for a few hundred dollars.
Grand Ole Opry appearances were a loss leader. Like the Hayride, the Opry paid American Federation of Musicians scale. For backing men, this was seven dollars a spot on the non-networked portion and twenty dollars on the Prince Albert portion. Hank’s rate was roughly fifty dollars a show. Soon after arriving at the Opry, he was given some fifteen-minute early morning shows on WSM. His sponsors included Duckhead Overalls, Pops-Rite Popcorn, and Mother’s Best flour. The net result was that after Jim Denny’s Artist Service Bureau deducted the money that Hank owed WSM for using the Opry name on shows, he was usually in the hole to the station.
Hank supplemented his income in various ways. Sheet music and song folio sales were a big deal in 1950. At the top end of the scale, Pee Wee King’s “Tennessee Waltz” sold 1.1 million pieces of sheet music in 1951. Hank’s sheet music sales were substantially less (between January and June 1950, for instance, “Honky Tonkin’” sold 4,769 copies), but still combined to provide a healthy adjunct to his income. Songbooks were an even better business. Acuff-Rose reported sales of 7,300 copies of The Hank Williams Country Folio during the first six months of 1950, and Hank doubled his money by selling many of those himself. The band typically went out into the crowd and sold song folios and photographs on commission during the intermission. The usual asking price for photos was fifty cents, and Hank would sign them for that price. When he returned to Shreveport for a concert on May 31, 1950, he was open for business. “Some guy near Hank’s dressing room was selling pictures of Hank,” said Tillman Franks, who’d booked Hank in leaner times. “I bought one, and Hank saw me buy it and didn’t offer to give it to me. Then I asked him to autograph it, and he spelled my name wrong.”
Hank grabbed wildly at every source of income because he had no inkling that his success would last. He saw the opportunities suddenly opening up, and lunged at them. It was a natural reaction for someone who had been trying for success as long as he had. It’s true that Audrey was spending the money faster than he made it, but the reason he made it was because it was there to be made.
By paying his band slightly more than scale, he was able to keep the steadiest lineup he’d ever had. The only change during the first year in Nashville came when Bob McNett quit in May 1950. He’d messed up on the networked portion of the Opry, kicking off a song with the wrong intro. No amount of faking could cover it up that night; they had to stop and restart the song. Hank didn’t dismiss him, but McNett came to believe that he wasn’t cut out for the big time, and as he says, “I wanted to do something on my own. I had the feeling I was traveling all over the country lookin’ at someone else’s back, and that’s as far as I could see.” He and his brother planned to open a country music park back in his native Pennsylvania, so he quit the Drifting Cowboys. Rather than recruit a guitarist from the growing pool of Nashville sessionmen, Hank replaced McNett with Sammy Pruett, who had played with him in leaner times. Pruett was a fine guitarist, generally reckoned to know more chords and chord inversions than anyone then working in country music, but Hank’s decision to hire him was more indicative of his profound mistrust of Nashville success. He needed to surround himself with familiar faces, and Pruett had stuck with him when they were lucky to walk away from a gig with five bucks apiece and no open wounds. Pruett was working with Happy Wilson’s Golden River Boys on WAPI in Birmingham when he got a call from Hank in Sioux City, Iowa. “I got to Nashville about nine o’clock one Saturday morning,” he remembered. “Hank picked me up in front of the Grand Ole Opry and we left for somewhere out west and we were gone for three weeks.” Like McNett, Pruett was confined to playing the tic-toc rhythm that was now one of the trademarks of the Hank Williams sound. Hank called it the “cheap banjo sound” when interviewed, and Pruett soon grew bored playing it.
In June 1950 Hank and Osca
r Davis came to a parting of the ways for reasons that Davis never specified. Hank tried to increase his share of the personal appearance pie by managing himself, but things fell apart. On July 4 he was supposed to headline at the Watermelon Festival at DeLeon, Texas, a hundred miles southwest of Fort Worth. The town was small, but the festival drew some of the biggest names in country music in the late 1940s and early ’50s because it was a magnet for farming families for hundreds of miles around. The promoter, W. B. Nowlin, was also the mayor of DeLeon, and paid Hank a three-thousand-dollar guarantee for the July 4 date. Hank committed to be there by 10:00 a.m. By 2:00 p.m., there was no sign of him, and Nowlin had eleven thousand farmers baking in the Texas sun, getting madder by the hour. Then, just after two o’clock, Hank’s limo came racing into the field where the festival was being staged, and someone calling himself Hank’s road manager got out and told Nowlin that Hank was “too sick” to perform. What had seemed like Nowlin’s biggest coup earlier that day was now a disaster. Nowlin insisted that Hank at least get out of the limo and appear onstage, but the road manager refused, so Nowlin ordered the chief of police to handcuff the road manager to the steering wheel while two men dragged Hank up onstage. Nowlin got on the microphone and said, “Hank Williams’ manager says Hank Williams is too sick to perform, but if you were standing as close to him as I am you would know what he’s sick from.” Then the two men holding Hank let go for a moment and Hank fell almost to his knees before he regained his balance and staggered back to the limo.
Word got back to Nashville that Hank was on a drunk, so Jim Denny flew Hank Snow to Dallas to do the evening show at the Northside Coliseum. Still in bad shape on July 5, Hank signed a curious document naming Jerry Rivers as his general manager while in Texas, then checked into the Adolphus Hotel as Herman P. Willis, the band’s pet name for anyone who couldn’t win for losing. Later that day, Rivers saw Herman P. Willis walking around the hotel wearing dark glasses with a hat pulled low over his eyes. The reason, according to Rivers, was that he was trying to avoid a local booker, Jack Ruby (the Jack Ruby). If rumors of Ruby’s mob connections are true, Hank probably had valid reasons for keeping a low profile. Rivers said that Hank was hiding from Ruby because he didn’t show at a party.
As he was bundled on a plane back to Nashville, even Hank must have drawn the conclusion that he was stretching himself too thin trying to handle his own business. Not long after, his bookings were taken over by A. V. Bamford, the self-styled “Cuban Jew.” Right away, Bamford placed him on a package tour with Ernest Tubb and Minnie Pearl. Bamford had arrived in Nashville in 1949 from the West Coast. He had been booking big bands into the Venice Pier when the orchestra business went sour. Then he’d taken a chance on Bob Wills at the pier, saw the huge turnout, and experienced a conversion to country music that eventually brought him to Nashville. Bamford was a packager. He would figure out an itinerary, assemble a troupe of artists, book the halls, print up posters, arrange the advertising, then ride with the artists.
Hank’s first Bamford tour took him out to Phoenix on July 17, then on to Albuquerque, El Paso, Odessa, and Lubbock on consecutive nights before heading back to Nashville. After a couple of weeks at home, he took off on another Bamford tour with Lonzo and Oscar and Rod Brasfield that started in Ohio, and swung across to Richmond, Virginia. Hank then returned to Nashville to rest up and prepare for another recording session slated for August 31.
Hank now believed that “blues” was the password to the top of the charts, and he was finishing up a song called “Moanin’ the Blues” that he hoped would keep his hit streak alive. Once again, he left plenty of windows for yodels and flashes of trailing falsetto. The end result was greater than the sum of its parts. It rocked and rolled. The bridge was particularly compelling; Hank yodeled over the stops, setting up the smooth segue back to the verses. The rhythm, carried by Jack Shook’s prominently mic’d acoustic guitar played up on the neck, was rein- forced by big band drummer Farris Coursey playing brushes on the snare. It was one of only two times that Hank worked with drums.
The second song on the slate, “Nobody’s Lonesome for Me,” was clearly a B side. It had no bridge, and lacked the radio-friendliness of “Moanin’ the Blues.” Then, for the last half of the session, Hank once again became Luke the Drifter. First, he recorded a trite little homily, “Help Me Understand,” a parable for the nag and the philanderer. A little more detail would have elevated it above the mundane. “One word led to another, and the last word led to divorce,” said Hank tearfully, clearly cognizant of the threat of divorce hanging over his own head. Audrey had been the first to record the song back in March, and it was one that she and Hank often performed together as a two-part piece; Hank would narrate it and Audrey would sing the little girl’s part, a rare occasion when her tuneless singing actually worked.
The last song was Fred Rose’s “No, No Joe.” The Cold War was heating up, the Korean War had started in June 1950, and the main enemy was Joseph Stalin. Roy Acuff had already recorded “Advice to Joe” ("When Moscow lies in ashes, God have mercy on your soul"); Jimmy Osborne chimed in with the slightly premature “Thank God for Victory in Korea;” and Elton Britt recorded “The Red We Want Is the Red We’ve Got in the Old Red, White and Blue.” Red-baiting briefly became an issue in the music business, but the only casualties were black folk singer Josh White, who was forced to publicly confess that he had once held communist sympathies, and the Weavers, who saw their bookings dry up and were forced to disband.
In the context of McCarthyism, “No, No Joe” was understated and witty. Billboard noted as much in its review: “Tune and material are carefully wedded, not forced like so many of the recent patriotic tunes.” It wouldn’t have been stretching a point to issue “No, No Joe” under Hank’s name, but Rose held fast to his original intention and issued it under Luke the Drifter. MGM took out full-page advertisements in trade magazines, but it failed to crack the charts. After Hank died and MGM was looking under every rock for Hank Williams recordings, they never once resorted to reissuing “No, No Joe.” Its first domestic LP appearance was on a Time-Life set in 1981.
As the year ended, “Moanin’ the Blues” was atop the charts, but the competition was stronger than ever. Two major new players had arrived: Hank Snow (who stole Hank’s bass player, Hillous Butrum, soon after the debacle in Texas) and Lefty Frizzell. Snow’s first big American hit, “I’m Moving On,” had spent twenty-one weeks at number one (longer than any other country record ever had or ever would), and Hank’s “Moanin’ the Blues” had to share the top spot with Frizzell’s “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time.” In the year-end tallies Hank was rated the third-best-selling artist of the year. Red Foley and Eddy Arnold were still ahead of him, and Hank Snow and Lefty Frizzell were snapping at his heels.
Chapter 10
There’s no darker place than the edge of the spotlight.
Hal Cannon, Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering
A GOOD YEAR FOR THE ROSES
HERE’S a little number me an’ the boys been eatin’ off of fer a while,” Hank would often say in his introductions, and he had been depending on his music for so long that he probably saw it at least partly in those terms. If so, he had written and recorded his meal ticket for 1951 before he went out to play his New Year’s show. It was another little cameo of life with Audrey, and if, as some said, the warmest she ever got was thawing, then “Cold, Cold Heart” was one of the most awfully true songs ever written.
Stories of the song’s origin vary. The way that Pappy Neil McCormick remembered it, Audrey was in the hospital, probably recovering from an infection that had set in after she’d had an abortion in September 1950. The abortion had apparently been carried out at home without Hank’s knowledge, and Audrey would have kept him in the dark if she hadn’t developed an infection ("I was in the hospital over some little minor something,” she coyly told journalist Dorothy Horstman). The reasons for the abortion are unclear. Audrey probably didn’t want the physical p
ain of another pregnancy, much less the encumbrance of another child. According to McCormick, Hank went to the hospital and bent down to kiss Audrey, but she wouldn’t let him. “You sorry son of a bitch,” she is supposed to have said, “it was you that caused me to suffer this.” Hank went home and told the children’s governess, Miss Ragland, that Audrey had a “cold, cold heart,” and then, as so often in the past, realized that the bitterness in his heart held commercial promise.
Years later, Audrey told one of her lovers a different story about the song’s origin: she’d found out about one of Hank’s affairs while she was in the hospital, and that when he brought her some jewelry in atonement, she’d flung it back at him. Other stories surround the song, all of them reflecting the increasingly unhappy times on Franklin Road. Audrey, like most musicians’ wives, probably accepted the fact that Hank had dalliances out on the road. It was generally regarded as one of the few perks of the job. What irked her, though, was that Hank would often come back on Friday night or Saturday morning physically depleted, and would be gone again on Saturday night or Sunday morning. She had more stamina than he did, and could have coped with the rigors of the road, but she was left at home. So she began taking lovers to fill the lonely hours, and quite possibly suspected that the child she had conceived was not Hank’s.
Talking to the Wall Street Journal in October 1951, Hank was economical with the truth. “Cold, Cold Heart,” he told the interviewer, had taken about an hour to write; he just sat and waited, and pretty soon, God had written it for him. If so, the most that God gave him was the words; the melody was adapted from T. Texas Tyler’s 1945 recording of “You’ll Still Be in My Heart.” Lyrically, the songs bore some similarities, but melodically there was very little difference at all. “You’ll Still Be in My Heart” was originally copyrighted by Ted West in May 1943, then rewritten by Buddy Starcher and acquired in July 1943 by one of Starcher’s affiliates, Clark Van Ness. Earlier, Van Ness’ adaptation of an old Spanish-American War song of interracial passion, “Ma Filipino Baby,” had become a big hit as servicemen returned from the Far East. Van Ness traded as Dixie Music, and, as was common, waited until “Cold, Cold Heart” had racked up some sales before filing suit on December 3, 1951.