Hank Williams

by Colin Escott

  For its part, KWKH needed Hank Williams or someone like him. KWKH’s owners, the Ewing family, owned another station, KTHS, in Hot Springs, Arkansas. KTHS had just been alloted a fifty-thousand-watt clear channel, and twenty other stations were picking up the Hayride on transcription, while CBS was talking about picking up part of the show for networking. The only cloud in the sky was that the Hayride had just lost two of its major stars, Webb Pierce and Faron Young. Only Slim Whitman remained. Sick, sober, or sorry, Hank Williams seemed just the ticket, and the negotiations started that would send him back to Shreveport. Reports in the Shreveport Times stated that he signed a three-year contract. The deal was announced on August 30, 1952.

  On September 8, 1952, Hank cut one of his last remaining ties to Nashville when he sold his farm in Williamson County in what amounted to a fire sale. He got $28,500 — less than half of what he had paid for it. A little earlier, he sold Hank and Audrey’s Corral and $50,000 or $60,000 worth of inventory and fixtures to the manager, Mac McGee, for $4,000. To compound the loss, he paid off the $12,000 in accounts payable to leave McGee with a clean slate. McGee ran the store until April 1953, when it folded.

  Hank Williams wanted out of Nashville at any price.

  Chapter 15

  It’s a great separation my friends have caused me By bearing the spite my favor has won,

  It’s a great separation, likewise a vexation And they shall be sorry for what they have done.

  “Adieu to Bon County” (unknown)

  “I’M SO TIRED OF IT ALL”

  “Boy, thank you, Horace, thank you a lot. Boy, sure feels good to be home, y’know.”

  “Been ‘bout two years since you’ve been home, boy.”

  WITH that exchange, Hank Williams was back on the Louisiana Hayride. It had been a shade over three years since he had left with his heart full of hope. He was brought back on September 13 for a teaser, and after Horace Logan’s introduction, he sang “Jambalaya,” “Lovesick Blues,” “Honky Tonk Blues,” and the as-yet-unrecorded “I Could Never Be Ashamed of You.” The crowd clapped and stomped, and wouldn’t let him off the stage for twenty minutes. He promised to be back to play and sing every week.

  Just before Hank left for Shreveport, he called Billie Jean. “Baby,” he said, “this is ol’ Hank.” Billie Jean was taken off guard. “I do believe we’ve got a date October nineteenth,” he said. It was the date they had planned to marry, after her divorce from Harrison Eshliman had become final. “Well,” she said, “we had a date.”

  “Listen,” he said, “in a coupla days, ol’ Hank’s gonna be down. I’m movin’ to Shreveport. I want you to find me a place.” And a few days later, as Billie Jean recalled it, Hank drove in. Marie Glenn, though, said that he flew while she and Clyde Perdue drove his cars. Perdue had staged the Greenville Homecoming and was now Hank’s personal manager. Born in April 1914 in Farmersville, Alabama, some twenty-five miles outside Greenville, Perdue was an Air Corps veteran who had returned to Greenville after the Second World War, first as an express clerk and then as a theater manager. Neither occupation had groomed him to be Hank Williams’ manager.

  Everything Hank owned from his three and a half years at the top of his profession was in those two vehicles. Billie’s brother, Sonny Jones, found him a room in an apartment hotel, and, as Hank drove around the streets he knew so well, greeting a few old cronies from the first go-round, no one came away with the impression that he thought he’d been demoted. He was upbeat, or, as he would say, spry, still insisting that he had quit the Opry.

  “He called me from an Italian restaurant downtown, Tony Sansone’s on Spring Street,” said Horace Logan. “He said, ‘Come on down, I want you to meet my French girl.’ I went down, walked in, and there was Billie Jean. I said, ‘Billie Jean, where in hell have you been?’ Hank said, ‘You know my French girl?’ I said, ‘She’s not French — she’s Irish as can be.’”

  Settled back in Shreveport, Hank tried to reassemble his old band. He called Felton Pruett, his steel guitar player from the first time around, but Pruett had had enough Hank Williams for one lifetime. “He got real perturbed at me for not going back with him,” said Pruett. “He was pretty strong with me. He had Billie Jean with him and he was treating her bad, cussin’ at her, and I thought, ‘Hell, I don’t need none of this.’” Although he tried, Hank never succeeded in putting a band together. When he toured, he sometimes used Red Sovine’s band, which included pianist Floyd Cramer, steel guitarist Jimmy Day, and guitarist Tommy Bishop; sometimes he used the house band at the clubs. Like Chuck Berry, Hank figured that everyone knew his songs, so he wouldn’t even bother to rehearse his pick-up bands. At show time, he would kick off every song with a chord. “Gear of C, boys,” he’d say. He’d telegraph the last verse by lifting his foot.

  Hank managed to get Oscar Davis to rejoin him for a while. Perhaps with Oscar, he thought, it would be just like 1949 all over again. Hank found him in Vancouver, Canada, and persuaded him to come down to Shreveport. “He was living in a horrible, horrible motel,” said Oscar. “Sparsely furnished. An old kitchen table and junk all around. He wanted me to meet Billie, so every night we had to go out and sit and drink.” It’s possible that Oscar arrived from Canada with an Australian singer he was managing, Tex Morton. When Morton signed with Columbia Records in 1952, Davis was listed on the contract as his manager, and they’d reportedly worked together in Canada. Morton later told friends in Australia that Davis asked him to hypnotize Hank into giving up alcohol.

  Commercially, this would be life lived at a lower level than Hank had known it for several years. Oscar Davis notified Billboard that he expected Hank to tour every second week and spend the other week songwriting. It was a gauge of Hank’s unreliability that his record of “Jambalaya” was atop the country charts and Jo Stafford’s pop cover version was in the top ten, yet he and the song everyone wanted to hear were confined to smaller halls and beer joints around Shreveport. The emphasis on songwriting might have represented much more than an attempt to slow down, though. In terms of record sales, Hank was already a falling star. “Jambalaya” was number one, but his income from record sales had slipped from $22,574 in 1950, to $20,224 in 1951, down to $13,869 in 1952. Meanwhile, his Acuff-Rose income had risen from $18,040 in 1950, to $32,632 in 1951, and jumped to $55,044 in 1952 as the revenue from the pop cover versions kicked in.

  Immediately after arriving back in Shreveport, Hank went out on a short tour, accompanied by Billie Jean and Clyde Perdue. On September 17, they went to San Antonio, where they visited the Alamo. That night, Hank played Charlie Walker’s club, the Barn. Walker later scored several big hits, chiefly “Pick Me Up on Your Way Down.” Doug Sahm, then eleven years old, was in the audience. Already something of a child prodigy, he was brought up onstage to sit on Hank’s lap and play “Steel Guitar Rag.” “His breath stank of whiskey,” said Doug, “and there wasn’t nothin’ left to him. His knees were sharp. Poked right into me.” Hank was in a good mood that night, though. He was celebrating his twenty-ninth birthday, and Charlie Walker had arranged a private party after the show. Walker ordered a cake with the musical notes of “Jambalaya” around the circumference, and “Happy Birthday Hank from All Your Friends” in the center. The cake was hidden behind the piano, then brought out at the end of the set. Hank was so moved that tears streamed down his face.

  Hank and Billie Jean went to change after the show while Walker stood guard over the door. Suddenly, a three-hundred-pound oil field worker appeared and demanded to see Hank. He pushed Walker aside and burst into the room. Walker called his bouncers, but the intruder broke free and sent the cake flying to the floor. Billie Jean’s brothers were with Hank. One of them, Sonny, had frizzy hair, and Hank called him “Niggerhead.” “Git him, Niggerhead,” said Hank, and Sonny flew across the table and floored the guy. As he went down, Hank kicked him several times with his pointy-toed boots, and left. It was a bizarre coda to what would be his last birthday.

  Three days l
ater, Hank made his official return to the Louisiana Hayride. He had hassled with KWKH general manager Henry Clay, insisting that he wasn’t going to work for scale, and Clay had agreed to pay him around two hundred dollars a show instead of the usual eighteen. Horace Logan insists that Hank was tied to the show with a one-year contract on which the Hayride could exercise two additional one-year options.

  On Tuesday, September 23, Hank flew back to Nashville for a recording session. The two songs he had finished in Montgomery with Fred Rose, “Kaw-Liga” and “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” were on the slate together with the song he’d written for Billie Jean, “I Could Never Be Ashamed of You.” To round out the session, Fred Rose contributed perhaps the best song he ever presented to Hank, “Take These Chains from My Heart.” It was one of the very few Fred Rose songs that sounded somewhat similar to a Hank Williams song.

  If Hank was in terminal decline, it wasn’t obvious from this session. Most of those present remember him in better shape than the last couple of times he had recorded. The problems, such as they were, stemmed from the fact that Bobbie Jett had got wind of the fact that Hank was recording and appeared at the studio. Billie Jean was there as well as Paul Cohen, who had been one of Bobbie Jett’s suitors. Hank was denying everything to Billie Jean. After the session, Hank and Billie went for dinner with Wesley and Fred Rose at Bozeman’s Restaurant on Murfreesboro Road.

  Under the circumstances, it’s surprising that anything was cut, and even more surprising that the session was, in many ways, one of Hank’s best and most productive. It was also his last. Most singers hope to hang their careers on one or two classics; Hank cut four classics between 1:30 and 3:40 on the afternoon of September 23, 1952, including “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” the song that would become as much his anthem in death as “Lovesick Blues” had been in life. “Your Cheatin’ Heart” is the song that — for all intents and purposes — defines country music. Hank’s performance of the song underscores its scalding bitterness. Billie Jean says that Hank wrote the song on their drive to Louisiana in August, and insists that it was aimed at Miss Audrey. If so, Hank might have appreciated the irony that Audrey collected copiously off a song that was, in virtually every respect, a character assassination of her. “You’ll toss around and call my name…. You’ll walk the floor the way I do” were prophecies truer than Hank could ever have hoped or imagined. Perhaps unable to come to terms with the implications of the song, Audrey eventually tried to believe that Hank had written it about himself. “You or no one else would ever believe this,” she said late in life, setting up her listeners for the required leap of faith. “Hank wrote [’Your Cheatin’ Heart’] immediately after he and I had just separated, and he wrote [the] song about himself, hoping that I would think that he thought I might have been cheating.”

  “Kaw-Liga” needed a drummer, so Fred Rose brought in a big band musician, Farris Coursey, who’d played brushes on “Moanin’ the Blues.” Drummers were still prohibited on the Opry stage, but Coursey was the drummer in WSM’s dance band, and provided the Indian war-dance rhythm that Rose wanted. At the close, “Kaw-Liga” was faded — the first and only Hank Williams recording to end in a fade, now the industry norm. The lesson of “Jambalaya” had been that a novelty song with a faintly ethnic twist was a hot prospect, and that’s what Hank and Fred Rose had crafted on “Kaw-Liga.” Hank left the session with an acetate of the song, and when he played it for people he told them that it would be his biggest record yet. No one doubted him.

  The first song from the September 23 session to hit the stores was “I Could Never Be Ashamed of You.” Rose slotted it onto the flip side of “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” for November 21 release. After Frank Walker got the session tapes, he distributed the songs among his pop acts. “Your Cheatin’ Heart” went to Joni James, “Kaw-Liga” to Bill Farrell, and “Take These Chains from My Heart” to Tommy Edwards. After Mitch Miller got advance acetates from Fred Rose, he gave “Your Cheatin’ Heart” to Frankie Laine. Both Laine’s and Joni James’ version cracked the pop top ten in 1953. Dolores Gray’s Decca recording of “Kaw-Liga” got up to number twenty-three on the pop charts in May 1953.

  Two days after the session, Billie Jean finally filed for divorce from Harrison Eshliman, then accompanied Hank on a tour of Georgia and South Carolina with her old flame, Faron Young, on the bill. Generally, though, Oscar Davis booked short tours with Hayride acts. The Hayride still didn’t have anything comparable to the Opry ‘s Artist Service Bureau, but that was just as well because the Hayride would have done what the Opry had done: flung Hank from coast to coast, using him as a standard bearer for the show. Fred Rose was clearly hoping that the shock of being exiled from Nashville together with the less demanding schedule would be sufficient to make Hank shape up. The thought also probably occured to him that if Hank screwed up, it would be in front of only a few hundred people somewhere in eastern Texas.

  As it was, the biggest show that Hank played after he returned to the Hayride was his own wedding. Oscar Davis came up with the notion of a public pay-per-view marriage in New Orleans on Sunday, October 19. “We had most of our meetings at a saloon in Bossier City,” Davis recalled during 1975 trial testimony. “No one had any money, and they were worried about what they would do for money. I suggested a public wedding onstage in New Orleans, and I made arrangements with Ed Pender-grass at WBOK.” Davis presold tickets at prices ranging from $1.00 to $2.80. Around fourteen thousand people would see Hank married at the Municipal Auditorium at a three o’clock “rehearsal” and again at seven. It appears as though no one from Nashville was invited, except Audrey. If Lilly was invited, she didn’t attend.

  The last unresolved item of business from Nashville was an exgirlfriend now six months pregnant. During the week before the wedding, Billie Jean went to New Orleans to do advance publicity for the wedding. Hank worked show dates in and around Oklahoma City on October 13 and 14, and then, on October 15, flew back to Montgomery to sign a document that provided for Bobbie Jett and her child. In the first sentence of the agreement, it was stated that “Hank Williams may be the father of said child,” and the document went on to note that Hank would provide for Bobbie Jett’s room and board in Montgomery, that he would pay all doctor bills and hospital bills, and that, thirty days after the birth of the child, he would provide a one-way plane ticket from Montgomery to anywhere in California that Bobbie designated.

  The child was to be placed in the care of Lilly and Bill Stone for two years, and during that time Hank was to pay for a nurse. The agreement then stated that “both the father [and here Hank was referred to as the father, not the possible father], Hank Williams, and Bobbie Jett shall have the right to visit said child.” Then, beginning on the child’s third birthday, Hank was to assume custody of the child until his or her fifth birthday. At that point, custody was to be shared; Hank would have custody during school months, and Bobbie Jett would have custody during the summer. On two other instances in the agreement, Hank was referred to as the father, although, contradictorily, the agreement concluded with the notation that the “paternity of said child is in doubt” and emphasized that paternity was not to be construed as admitted by the fact that Hank had entered into the agreement. It strains credibility though, to believe that Hank would have entered into such complex custody arrangements for a child he did not truly believe to be his own.

  For her part, Billie Jean contends that Hank signed the agreement partly at the urging of his mother and partly to get Bobbie Jett off their backs. “Every gig he played, she’d pop up,” she said. “Here she is fixing to drop somebody’s kid.” Billie also contends that Hank was incapable of siring a child in March or April when Bobbie Jett’s child was conceived, because when she met him in July he was still incapable of having sex as a result of his operation. “It was on his mind,” she says, “but, as my momma always said, ‘If it can’t get up, it can’t get out.’” But if, as Billie Jean says, Hank was impotent when she met him in July or August, i
t was probably because of the alcohol and pills he had been taking rather than the operation.

  On the trip back to Montgomery, Hank ran into his old bass player, Lum York. Lum was working with Lefty Frizzell and was resting up in town for a few days. Lilly tracked him down at the radio station and tried to get him to change Hank’s mind about marrying Billie Jean. Lum told her he was having no part of it, but she said that as Hank was just around the corner in the barber shop, Lum should go look him up anyway. Lum recalled their conversation:

  He was in the chair when I got there, so I went into the little coffee shop near the barber, and he come in and said, “Do you wanna go work for me?” I said, “Hank, how much you gonna pay me?” He said, “I’ll pay you seventy-five a week.” I said, “Hank, I’m making more than that.” He said, “Aw, that’s the way it is with Frizzell and them guys, they want to pay you all they make.” I said, “Well, I’m satisfied where I’m working.” He said, “How ‘bout catchin’ a plane with me and goin’ to Shreveport?” I said, “Naw, I’m staying around here a coupla days.” I never did talk to him ‘bout marryin’ Billie Jean. I figured he was a grown man.

  On October 17, two days after signing the agreement with Bobbie Jett, Hank was back in Shreveport. Billie Jean was back from New Orleans and went to court that day with her father. Judge Louis Lyons of Bossier City represented her. Billie was told that her decree would be granted on October 28, some ten days after she planned to marry. Either she didn’t understand the implication of what she was told, or she decided to ignore it. Hank wasn’t with her, and it’s unclear what, if anything, she told him. When the court reconvened on the twenty-eighth, the news of Hank and Billie’s marriage was public, and Judge Bolin asked her attorney, Louis Lyons, if he’d seen the newspaper reports. Lyons said that he hadn’t, and Bolin said that he would grant the decree on the understanding that Lyons would contact Billie Jean, to inform her that she should marry again, as the public marriage was invalid. Lyons said he would probably perform the ceremony himself and collect another fee.