Hank Williams

by Colin Escott

  One time, he said, “Boy, drive me down to Ernest Tubb’s Record Shop. I wanna buy somethin’.” I always jumped at the chance because I got to drive his Cadillac convertible. We headed down Broadway to the record shop, and I heard a squeaking noise. I said, “Hank, this car’s got a squeak somewhere.” He said, “Yeah, boy, but don’t you wish you had a car that squeaked like that?” We got down to the record shop and there wasn’t any place to park. He said, “Well, shoot, put it up in the door.” I said, “C’mon, Hank, where should I park?” “I told you, boy, put it up in the door.” That’s where I parked it. Right in E.T.’s doorway.”

  It seems as though Hank gave Faron Young much more than a chance to drive his Cadillac. In March 1952, Young signed with Capitol Records, but his first three singles went nowhere. Apparently, Hank gave him a song he’d written, “Goin’ Steady,” and Faron recorded it on October 12, 1952. The song was credited to Faron Young, not Hank Williams, so it could have been ceded to Faron in a trade. The trade might even have been for Billie Jean. It became Faron’s breakthrough hit, and the only song Hank ever pitched that became a hit for someone else. The evidence that Hank wrote it is sketchy, but compelling. There’s a song manuscript of “Goin’ Steady” in Hank’s handwriting among his papers at Acuff-Rose, and, as Faron’s record wasn’t released until a few weeks after Hank’s death, it’s very unlikely that Hank would have heard it on the radio. It also sounds like a Hank Williams song. Faron Young wasn’t a songwriter. His name appears on many songs, but usually as a cowriter, and his “cowriters” almost invariably insist that Faron didn’t write anything; he just offered to record the song in return for half of the composer credit. In March 1953 (when “Goin’ Steady” was high in the charts), Hank’s attorney, Robert Stewart, corresponded with Hank’s sister, Irene, about the song. “I understand from Audrey this morning,” he wrote, “that he [Fred Rose] is not attaching the royalties on ‘Goin’ Steady’ in spite of definite information sent him as to Hank’s authorship.” Stewart, though, didn’t specify what that information was.

  Within weeks of Billie Jean’s arrival in Nashville, Hank asked her to marry him. They hired a driver and went to Shreveport to visit her parents in early August; Hank dictated thirteen songs along the way. “He looked over to me in the car,” she said, “and he told me, ‘I can say one thing, baby, I could never be ashamed of you.’ Like he had been of Audrey. He said, That’d be a good idea for a song. Write this down for ol’ Hank, baby.’ He’d call ’em off as fast as I could write.” They told Billie Jean’s parents that they would marry as soon as her divorce became effective.

  As they neared Nashville on the return trip, Hank bought five pounds of fish and was planning to have the driver cook it up that night, but when they pulled up in front of the house, they found the plate glass in the front door smashed in. A woman’s red shoes were on the doormat and her luggage was in the hall. One of Hank’s old flames had moved in. He ordered her out, then they started wrestling with each other. Billie Jean and the driver stood, mouths agape, as Hank and the ex-girlfriend tussled in the hallway. Billie told the driver to take her back to her apartment. Hank climbed in beside Billie Jean. Then, incredibly, the girlfriend got in too.

  “We loaded up the car, got to my apartment,” said Billie. “I got out, took off up the path, and Hank came in with me. I was mad. He said he was gonna get rid of that broad but it was gonna take a club. I told him, ‘That’s it, I’m gone. I’m history. I ain’t puttin’ up with this crap no more.’ It was like wolves chasing him. The rest of that week, I packed. He got rid of that sucker and came back over. I said, ‘I’m going back to Louisiana. This is wrong and I don’t want any part of it.’” A few days later, she was gone.

  Hank was now in a serious mess. According to Billie Jean, Audrey was refusing him access to Hank Jr., and Bobbie Jett had reappeared, heavy with what she insisted was his child. After Billie Jean left, Hank appears to have plummeted downward yet again. He missed show dates and radio commitments, and the only two out-of-town show dates that he’s known to have played in July were at Sunset Park in West Grove, Pennsylvania. One of the shows was taped, and Hank was on top of his game, telling jokes and sounding as good as he ever did. Still, WSM would not allow this state of affairs to continue, and everything came to a head during the second week in August. At some point during that week, Jim Denny and Carl Smith visited Hank at his house, and Denny told Hank that WSM’s management was demanding that he be dismissed. Denny asked for one more chance, and told Hank that he absolutely had to be at the Opry on August 9 and at an Opry-sponsored show the following day.

  August the ninth arrived, and Hank didn’t. Ray Price says that Hank showed up drunk at an Opry-sponsored show in Reading, Pennsylvania, the following day, and the park owners raised hell with the Opry. Jim Denny couldn’t go back on his ultimatum. The Opry was a brand, and Hank was ruining its reputation. WSM’s program director, Jack Stapp, once took whatever credit was to be had for canning Hank, but it appears fairly certain that, on August 11, Jim Denny picked up the phone and fired him. “It was the toughest thing I ever had to do in my life,” he said later. Ernest Tubb said he was hanging around WSM that day. In Tubb’s recollection it was Friday that Hank was fired, although newspaper reports indicate that it was Monday. This was how Tubb remembered the events unfolding:

  I heard Jim on the telephone. He said, “Hank, that’s it. You gotta prove to me. You call me in December, and I’ll let you know about coming back to the Opry next year.” When Jim hung up the telephone, he had tears in his eyes. He said, “I had to do it. I had to let Hank go.” When I was in the parking lot, I ran into [National Life chairman] Mr. [Edwin] Craig. He knew, and he said, “What do you think, Ernest?” I said, “Well, I hate it, but I saw tears in Jim’s eyes, and I know it was the hardest thing he ever had to do. He told me he was going to try and get Hank to straighten up.” Mr. Craig said, “I’m sure Jim means well, but it may work the other way. It may kill him.” I was feeling the same way.

  Johnnie Wright claims that he was sitting with Hank at the moment the phone rang. According to Wright, the scene played out with far less sentimentality:

  Jim Denny told him he was going to have to let him go. Hank said, “You cain’t fire me ’cause I already quit.” He had a check coming, about three hundred dollars. Jim asked Hank if anyone was there with him, and Hank said, “Johnnie Wright’s here.” He said, “Tell Johnnie I want to talk to him.” I got on the phone and Jim said, “Johnnie, he’s got a check up here. You come by and pick it up.” My brother-in-law had a Chrysler limousine, and Hank had his trailer with “Drifting Cowboys” written on the side. We put all his belongings in the trailer and his reclining chair in the back of the limousine, and put him in the reclining chair.

  Don Helms heard the news and, just as Hank was leaving with Johnnie Wright, he came over to Hank’s house to return a shotgun and a watch that he’d been holding. Helms’ wife was with him; they had all been friends since 1944. “I told Hazel,” says Helms, “Hank Williams won’t live six months.” Hank was drinking as he and Wright drove away.

  According to Wright, their first stop was at WSM:

  Roy Acuff and Owen Bradley was in Jim Denny’s office. Roy said, “Have you got Hank out there?” I said, “Yeah.” Owen said, “Let’s go out and see him, Roy.” They went out and I picked up his check. Then we took off to Montgomery. We went out on Broadway, and there was a liquor store out there at Sixteenth and Broad, and Hank said, “Johnnie, pull in there and get me some whiskey.” So I pulled in and got him a fifth and cashed his three-hundred-dollar check. The guy that owned the liquor store said, “Is Hank out there?” I said, “Yeah,” so the guy came out and spoke to him. We took him to his mother’s house. We pulled his clothes off, put him to bed, and talked to his mother ’til he woke up. Hank acted like he didn’t care that he’d been canned.

  Part of Hank’s act was bravado, but he may have felt that he had outgrown the Opry, and that he now was of greater value t
o the show than it was to him. Eddy Arnold had quit the Opry and was doing well, and Red Foley would soon quit. The Opry tied up its entire cast at paltry wages on potentially the most lucrative night of the week. Instead of walking away from a Saturday night show date with several thousand dollars stuffed in his case, he was flying to Nashville at his own expense to work for little more than exposure that he now thought he didn’t need. During their conversation, Hank had mouthed off to Denny about the number of records he had on the charts, but from Denny’s perspective it didn’t matter anymore. The irony of Hank Williams’ relationship with the Opry is that some Opry stars were on the show for forty, fifty, or even sixty years, but Hank Williams remains the star associated in most people’s minds with the Grand Ole Opry, despite the fact that he was on the show for only three years.

  Johnnie Wright was due to work a show with Hank, a Greenville Homecoming organized by the Rotary Club. It was scheduled for August 15, four days after the firing. Hank had to get himself straight and he had to get a car to squire himself through town because he had literally lost his tan Cadillac Coupe de Ville. He bought a four-month-old 1952 powder-blue Cadillac convertible coupe. The first owner was a serviceman at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, named Homer Cooper, who’d bought it for $5,083. Hank paid $3,818 with the help of a loan from the Third National Bank.

  The Greenville Homecoming didn’t pack quite the punch of the Montgomery Homecoming in July the previous year. Greenville was a smaller city, and Hank had only lived there two years. Still, there were two shows at Greenville Stadium and a parade preceding the afternoon show. In the photographs, Hank has an ugly contusion above his lip, suggesting that he’d recently been in a fight. One strong possibility is that the welt came from a beating Lilly had administered after Hank had returned home fired and drunk. Apart from that, Hank seemed to bounce back yet again. In all, eighty-five hundred people turned out to honor him, including his father and his uncle Robert. Marie’s son, Butch, rode in the car. Hank looked for Tee-Tot and acknowledged him publicly, but apparently no one knew that Tee-Tot had been in a pauper’s grave since 1939.

  After the Homecoming, Hank went back to Lilly’s boardinghouse. The word in the local paper was that he was suffering from blood poisoning from an infected wound, and was lying low as he regrouped. On the Opry it was announced that Hank was sick, although his dismissal had been made public by the Nashville papers on August 14. Hank finally located his other car in Philadelphia, and arranged for it to be driven to Nashville. He and one of his WSFA band members, Shorty Seals, drove up to collect it. Hank now had one ex-wife, one ex-fiancée, one pregnant girlfriend, two cars, no band, no show dates, and far too much time on his hands. The pregnant girlfriend, Bobbie Jett, joined him in Montgomery. Hank appears to have gotten back with her right after Billie Jean left town.

  Lilly phoned Bob McKinnon, a deejay in Alexander City, Alabama, and asked him to take Hank out to the country for a few days. Hank was introducing Bobbie Jett around town as “Bobbie Blue,” and telling people that she was his nurse. McKinnon had a cousin who was married to an automobile dealer named Darwin Dobbs, who owned a nicely appointed lodge out on a part of Lake Martin known as Kowaliga Bay. Originally, Kowaliga was the name of a creek that ran into the Tallapoosa River, and when the river was dammed to make Lake Martin, the locals started calling the area where the creek had been Kowaliga Bay. A legend goes that the Creek Indians are supposed to have had a settlement there called “Kia-leach-shi” (headdress) because they made headdresses there.

  Hank, Bobbie, and Bob McKinnon got to Dobbs’ lodge early on the afternoon of Sunday, August 17. McKinnon left around 4:00 p.m. for Alexander City. Hank was sober and looking forward to some rest. Around midnight, McKinnon was awakened by a call from the police department. Hank was no longer at the lodge nor sober. He was in the Alexander City jail. “I believe he was more or less having DTs,” said Chief Winfred Patterson. “He was running up and down the hall [of the Russell Hotel] yelling that someone was whupping old ladies and he was going to stop them.” After he was arrested, the chief said that Hank was no trouble. Hank told the chief that he’d been in some worse jails, some better.

  Bob McKinnon went to get Bobbie at the Russell Hotel, came down to the jail, made Hank’s bail, and got him released. No charges were laid. It has long been supposed that a photograph of Hank, shirtless and disheveled, was taken as he exited the jail that morning. He had the cornered-animal look that he had when coming off a spree. It was a harrowing photo, but probably taken on the occasion of an earlier arrest in Alexander City. That time he had threatened to buy the town.

  McKinnon took Hank and Bobbie to another motel, and left Hank to sleep it off. He then took Bobbie back up to the lake to get some of her things. McKinnon heard her vomiting in the bathroom and she told him that she was pregnant. On the way back, she explained what had happened the previous day. Hank had been playing with some kids on a bridge and he’d waded out into the lake. Some people from Red Hill had seen him, found out he was Hank Williams, and produced a five-gallon jug of corn liquor. And so the party began.

  The following afternoon, McKinnon went to get Hank and Bobbie. Hank was dreadfully hungover. He only remembered going to jail. “I got me in,” he said to McKinnon. “Who got me out?” McKinnon told him what had happened. He drove Hank and Bobbie to Frank “Country” Duncan’s house, then back out to Kowaliga. Duncan and a black valet were to stay with Hank for a few days, but Hank was restless. The following day, he appeared at the radio station where McKinnon worked and asked to go to the bank. Lilly had specifically told McKinnon, “No banks,” but, as Hank had said for as long as he could remember, “What momma don’t know won’t hurt her.”

  McKinnon took Hank to the First National Bank in Alexander City, and Hank arranged to get some money wired in from somewhere. Bobbie asked him what he wanted the money for, and Hank said he wanted to get some clothes. Bobbie said, “Hank, what’re you gonna do with clothes? We’ve got clothes scattered all the way from San Diego, California, to Portland, Maine.” But Hank bought clothes anyway. He also bought some tires from Darwin Dobbs’ dealership to repay him for the loan of the lodge. While the tires were being changed, Lilly drove up with Detective Louis King. She gave McKinnon some antialcoholic medication, had words with Hank, then drove back to Montgomery.

  That night Hank, Bobbie, McKinnon, and a party of locals went back to Kowaliga. When it was time to send out for drinks someone suggested Whitley’s near Montgomery. Hank said, “No, I might run into Momma. I don’t want to chance it.” So they went to a bootlegger in Kellyton instead. On the way there and back Hank started pounding out a wardance rhythm on the dashboard and chanting “Kowaliga, Kowaliga.”

  Hank worked on his song that night and told McKinnon to phone Fred Rose the following morning. He wanted Rose to get what he called an “arr-plane” down to Montgomery so that they could polish the song. Hank stayed at the cabin for several days, worked on “Kaw-Liga” and several more songs, including “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and one called “Lonesomest Time of the Day.” Bobbie Jett, meanwhile, returned to Nashville and took a room at a hotel with her daughter, Jo. At some point, Hank and his cousin Marie Glenn drove up to see her, but Marie never said what transpired between them.

  Rose didn’t get an airplane to Montgomery, but he drove down with Murray Nash. They drove overnight from Nashville and were in Montgomery by eight o’clock the following morning, just as Lilly was serving breakfast to her boarders. She went and roused Hank, and Hank produced the three songs he had written. “I needed to get some things into the post office,” said Nash, “and Fred said Hank should go with me to the post office and he’d work on the songs. By the time we came back, Fred had refashioned ‘Kowaliga’ into ‘Kaw-Liga’ and made it into a song about a dimestore Indian.” If nowhere else, the hand of Fred Rose was apparent in the way “Kaw-Liga” starts in a minor key and modulates to a major key on the bridge. Murray Nash had brought a little home recorder, and Hank’s demos of
both songs survived. Hank clearly had trouble with the minor key in “Kaw-Liga” and, at one point, stops in exasperation. “Shit,” he says. By the third take, he’d mastered the song. “Purr ol’ Kaw-Liga,” he sang, just as he’d sung “Purr wicked soul” on his first session.

  Talking to the local paper a few weeks later, Lilly recalled Hank and Fred Rose sitting in her front room, talking and writing songs until late into the night. “Sometimes,” she said, “I woke up and heard the prettiest song I ever heard. They’d already put it on tape and recorded it and they were playing it back. It’s so pretty, it made my hair stand on end.” Coyly she added, “It’s called…well, I better not say.” She might have been among the first to hear “Your Cheatin’ Heart.”

  Fred Rose had a plan to get Hank’s career back on track. Rose had plenty of other irons in the fire, but Hank Williams was his ace. Aside from anything else, Hank was doing what Acuff had originally done — drawing other writers to the company. Then there was the income that Hank single-handedly generated for the company. Between January and June 1952, Acuff-Rose had a total of 89 copyrights recorded; Hank’s records and the cover versions they attracted made the biggest single contribution to that tally. To put those 89 copyrights into perspective, the top popular music publishing group, Robbins Music, which represented hundreds of standards, had 156 copyrights recorded during the same period.

  Rose wanted to get Hank back on the Louisiana Hayride, and Hank’s remaining trump, “Jambalaya,” gave him just enough leverage. It had already sold two hundred thousand copies when Rose started talking to KWKH, so many copies in fact that MGM had to lay on a Saturday shift at the plant to cope with the demand. The success of “Jambalaya” pushed the official tally of Hank’s record sales to more than ten million in a shade over five years, and on September 12, MGM released his second album. Once again, it was issued in three formats (10-inch LP, or four 45s or 78s packaged in an album), and it was called Moanin’ the Blues. And once again, Rose used the LP as little more than an excuse to offload some back catalog, in this case songs with “Blues” in the title.