Lovesick Blues Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Young Hiram

  The Singing Kid

  Miss Audrey

  Fred Rose

  The Lovesick Blues

  A Star Is Born

  Three Chords and the Truth

  Lonely at the Top

  The Crash

  Lost Highway

  Better Dead than Alive

  Epilogue: Legacy

  Acknowledgements

  OTHER BOOKS BY PAUL HEMPHILL

  FICTION

  Nobody’s Hero

  King of the Road

  The Sixkiller Chronicles

  Long Gone

  NOTIFICATION

  Lost in the Lights

  The Ballad of Little River

  Wheels

  The Heart of the Game

  Leaving Birmingham

  Me and the Boy

  Too Old to Cry

  The Good Old Boys

  The Nashville Sound

  COLLABORATIONS

  Climbing Jacob’s Ladder

  (with Jock M. Smith)

  Mayor

  (with Ivan Allen, Jr.)

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in 2005 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Paul Hemphill, 2005

  All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” by Hank Williams. Copyright 1949 Sony/ATV Songs LLC and Hiriam Music. All rights on behalf of Sony/ATV Music Publishing, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Hemphill, Paul.

  Lovesick blues : the life of Hank Williams / Paul Hemphill.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-0-143-03771-2

  1. Williams, Hank, 1923-1953. 2. Country musicians—Biography.

  I. Title: Life of Hank Williams. II. Title.

  ML420.W55H46 2005

  782.421642’082—dc22

  [B] 2004065113

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  In memory of Marshall Frady

  Hear that lonesome whippoorwill,

  He sounds too blue to fly;

  That midnight train is whining low,

  I’m so lonesome I could cry . . .

  —HANK WILLIAMS

  Prologue: Summer of ’49

  On Friday afternoons, he would suddenly loom like a ghost at the top of the hill above our house in Birmingham, announcing his arrival with a long blast on the air horns, hovering there long enough to shift into his lowest gear, then grandly descending for a triumphal victory lap in the dusty red Dodge truck while we kids in the bottoms ceased our ball-playing to gawk as he eased the rig to a shuddering stop at the curb. Those clamorous homecomings never failed to draw a gaggle of neighborhood boys whose own fathers were mere clerks or salesmen, and it went without saying that my daddy and his mighty steed represented something a son could sink his teeth into. “How-dee,” he would chirp as he dismounted—Minnie Pearl at the Opry—“I’m just so proud to be hyar.” After a hug for my little sister, a handshake for me, and a kiss for Mama, he was in the living room before we knew it, seated at the black upright piano, winding down the best way he knew: a self-taught honky-tonk man tinkling his way through Hoagy Carmichael’s greatest hits. My hero, the King of the Road, was home from the wars.

  Over supper, as we dug into pork chops and corn bread and the trimmings, he held forth with tales from the road, a born liar refining his art: “I seen this waitress that had a face so ugly it’d already wore out two bodies. . . . They got watermelons in Texas that grow so fast, the bottoms wear off before you can pick ’em. . . . The ‘boys’ [state troopers and weigh-station cops] don’t take their work near as serious as your daddy does. . . .” He spoke of full moons in the Blue Ridge, of overtaking Greyhounds, of dodging deer caught in the headlights, of wrecks on the highway, of violent thunderstorms and insufferable heat and fog so thick he had to “get out and feel the signs.” He was a lanky, garrulous east Tennessee hillbilly by birth whose passions were country music and baseball, pinto beans and peach cobbler, thick black coffee and cheap cigars, his wife and two children, and finding what lurked beyond the next curve in the road. Of my adolescent yearnings, my most desperate was that one day I would be invited to ride along and see what all the fuss was about.

  That day finally arrived on a Sunday afternoon in August of 1949, when I had turned thirteen. At dusk, as the cicadas cranked up their late-summer serenades, I found myself swinging up into the wide seat of the cab while Daddy walked around the rig to make what amounted to his final preflight inspection of the tires, the lights, the brakes, the air hoses, the mirrors, the gas and oil and water levels. The cavernous trailer had been loaded with huge spools of cotton twine, headed for the tire plants in Cumberland, Maryland, due for delivery at first light Tuesday morning. The interior of the cab was cluttered with the things we would need: ditty bags for our clothes, pillows and blankets, road maps, a tool kit, flares, a flashlight, dirty rags, oil cans, kitchen matches and spare cigars, Mama’s roast beef sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, a thermos of coffee. Dangling from the dashboard was a radio, whose importance I would discover in due time. As I settled deeper into the shotgun perch that would be my home for the next five days and nights, I discovered something that might become problematic for a boy my age during the 1,500 miles of jostling that lay ahead: taped to the ceiling of the cab, smiling back at me and wearing just about nothing, there was Rita Hayworth in her famous cheesecake photograph.

  Mama leaned in for a last good-bye. “Now, Paul,” she said, “I don’t want him to come back wanting to be a truck driver.”

  “It’s good enough for me,” he said, “and I notice there ain’t nobody starvin’.”

  Ignition, contact. Vroom, vr
oom, vroom. With a roar of the engine and a farewell burp on the air horns, we eased away from the house. And then we were gone, father and son, off on the great adventure.

  Those were simpler times in America. The roadways were narrow two-lane asphalt, long before anyone had designed a high-speed interstate system. The trucks were rudimentary, a step up from farm machinery—no power steering, no power brakes, no air-conditioning, no sleeper cabs with king-size beds and stand-up showers, no citizens band radios—and under these conditions Daddy had to run a gauntlet fraught with logging trucks, drunks in pickups, cops hiding behind billboards, and women driving half a mile to the grocery store in the family sedan. He was not a company driver on salary but rather a “leased operator,” a freelance driver counting on net profit, which meant taking catnaps in the cab rather than checking in to motels; nibbling on snacks from home rather than loading up on meals at truck stops; placing collect calls to the house to speak to himself as a means of letting Mama know of his progress (“Just tell Hemp I’ll try again from Bluefield, about noon tomorrow”). The tire companies didn’t care how he did it; just deliver the stuff on time.

  Anything beyond Chattanooga was new to me, a wide-eyed kid seeing the world through the bug-spattered windshield of his father’s truck, and by ten o’clock we were rolling into the hills of east Tennessee toward Knoxville and Bristol. This was lonesome business, I could see, and without the radio it would have been downright tedious. It was a Motorola, jury-rigged to the dashboard by wires, and through it I was being hurled into a magical realm I had never heard before. Sure, we often picked up WSM out of Nashville to hear the Grand Ole Opry wavering in and out on Saturday nights at home, but what we were hearing now was exotic stuff. Here came XERF, an outlaw station in Ciudad Acuna, Mexico, booming up from the Rio Grande with 500,000 watts, enough power to blow away any local station between Texas and the North Pole, with a mixture of country music and earnest pitches for “magic prayer cloths” and oil-on-velvet paintings of The Last Supper and “one thousand baby chicks, folks, sex not guaranteed, for as long as He makes this offer possible,” everything short of autographed photographs of Jesus himself. Here came WHO from Des Moines, and WWVA out of Wheeling, and a half dozen others, all fighting for space on the airwaves as we rocked along the mountainous roads, the wind in our hair, listening to the all-night truckers’ shows to stay awake.

  Daddy’s favorite was WCKY out of Cincinnati, 50,000 watts reaching “forty-eight states plus Canada, Cuba, Mexico, and all the ships at sea.” These pronouncements came from Nelson King, the voice of country music, who had just kicked off the late-night “Hillbilly Jamboree” with a trademark theme song, “Steel Guitar Rag,” which had the twanging upbeat rhythm of a tractor-trailer rig shifting into overdrive. “And now,” King said after a tire commercial, “here comes that lovesick boy. . . .” The disc jockeys weren’t even bothering anymore to say it was “this newcomer Hank Williams” whose “Lovesick Blues” was riding at the top of the charts. Daddy leaned over to turn up the volume so we could hear the pained yodel and the whining steel guitar that echoed his nasal wail. Hank sang like a hurt animal. They were the loneliest sounds we had ever heard.

  I got a feeling called the blues, oh, Lord,

  Since my baby said good-bye,

  Lord, I don’t know what I’ll do-ooo-ooo

  All I do is sit and sigh-ee-yi-ee-yi-yiii . . .

  Startled, Daddy twirled his cigar. “Good Lord!”

  “Boy,” I said, “he’s pretty good, ain’t he?”

  “ ‘Good’? I ain’t never heard anything like it.”

  We had heard him before, of course, singing “Lovesick Blues” on the Opry broadcasts, but he had never sounded quite like this. Hank Williams’s songs were cries from the darkness; made to be heard, it seemed to us, while running through the lonely night, racing with the moon, the wind whistling through the cab, gliding past See Rock City barns and Burma Shave signs and spooky pastures milling with dumbstruck cows. With the whining of the tires keeping time, we laughed at each other’s attempts to emulate Hank’s yodel.

  Strung out along the highways like oases were the truck stops, their blinking neon lights invitations to come in from the dark, pull up a stool, take a load off. Bud’s Truck Rest. Thelma’s Eats. Dew Drop Inn. Outside: gravel parking lots the size of football fields, bristling with big rigs bearing Confederate-flag bug screens and fanciful monikers like Lady Luck and Long Gone Daddy. Inside: bacon and eggs, grits and biscuits, endless refills of coffee from steaming silver urns; truckers at the counters and in the booths and at the Formica tables, some dazed and jittery from the NoDoz and “bennies” keeping them awake; insolent waitresses named Mae and Ruby; a pulsating jukebox offering nothing but the twangy heartfelt country music of Ernest Tubb and Hank Snow and Webb Pierce and now, in this summer of his coming out, Hank Williams. No “Mairzy Doats” here.

  “Would you look what the cat drug in. How you doin’, Paul?”

  “Fair to partly cloudy, Mae.”

  “That your boy? Looks just like you.”

  “Well, he can’t help it,” Daddy said.

  For me, the kid sitting on a bar stool, eating lemon icebox pie and washing it down with a glass of milk at two o’clock in the morning somewhere on the ragged fringes of civilization, it was an abrupt baptism into a larger world: a brotherhood of grown-ups making it through the night, wrestling with the lonesomes, dancing with the blues, wisecracking their way toward another sunrise that might bring a better day. In one of the booths, set against wide windows streaked with sweat, some trucker must have punched every Hank Williams song on the amazing technicolor jukebox because here came everything this self-taught Alabama country boy had to offer: not only “Lovesick” but “Lost Highway” and “Mind Your Own Business” and all the other lamentations he had been able to articulate at this point in his life. Here was “Move It on Over,” about a husband sharing accommodations in the doghouse; “Wedding Bells,” the tale of a jilted boyfriend; and “Mansion on the Hill,” about a poor boy’s losing the heart of a girl who figured rich was better. Shouted over the roar of the jukebox and the whirring of the floor fans, the tit-for-tat continued, unabated, with musical rhythms of its own:• You want grits with them eggs, hon?

  • Just a few.

  • Lookie here, Mae, I got me a bad case of the lovesick blues.

  • Take another one o’ them bennies, you’ll get over it.

  • How come you’re so damn mean?

  • You oughta see my husband.

  • No, thanks.

  • Where you headed, Tex?

  • Hell, far as I can figure.

  The years following the Second World War represent the golden age of country music, written and performed by southern boys and girls not a day’s bus ride from the cotton fields or Appalachian hollows whence they had come. Except for the complicated rhythms of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, a cowboy’s version of the danceable swing of the time, there was nothing fancy about it. All you needed was a stand-up bass and a rhythm guitar to set the beat, a jaunty fiddle, a crying steel guitar, and a singer with an ache in his voice. The lyrics dealt not with true love and harvest moons and life as it should be, but rather with the way it had turned out: broken hearts, dead mamas, whiskey, knife fights, prison, graveyards, unrequited love, loneliness. To people in cities like Chicago and New York, especially the more sophisticated songwriters on Tin Pan Alley, country music was for losers. But for people like my father it was the latest news from home. On another trip, at another time, upon hearing a dirge about a soldier in Korea getting “A Dear John Letter” from his girlfriend (“for my love for you has died like the grass upon the lawn”), he shook his head as though he had just heard it on the evening news: “Hell of a thing to do to some old boy, ain’t it?” It was music by the folks, for the folks, and the true believers in an audience that sprawled all the way from the Clinch Mountains in Virginia to El Paso in west Texas couldn’t care less what anybody else thought.


  Hank Williams had come to us from out of nowhere—sprouting like a wild dandelion in the dank forests of south Alabama, some primordial beast who had been let loose on the land, a specimen heretofore undiscovered—and by this summer of ’49 nobody seemed to know exactly what to make of him. Only two months after his debut on the Opry with “Lovesick Blues,” a startling performance raucously received at old Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville, a converted tabernacle referred to as the Mother Church of Country Music, he had suddenly become the best of the best in the best of all times. Born sickly, half-educated, virtually fatherless, an alcoholic by his teen years, untutored musically, unlucky in love at every turn, he had somehow emerged as a tortured genius, a raw poet, the “hillbilly Shakespeare,” a Vincent van Gogh of the southern outback. The more traumatic his personal life got, the better he became as a songwriter. To some, it was like looking at a bad wreck. If he wasn’t America’s greatest songwriter, then certainly he was its most enigmatic.

  During those glimmering days and nights of our odyssey into the southern Appalachians, Daddy and I knew little of that. We certainly had no inkling that the man who was singing to us over the truck radio would be dead of whiskey and despair in less than four years, at the age of twenty-nine. All we knew then was that he seemed to be living his life and writing his songs for us, an Alabama trucker and his young son, and that was all that mattered. It was as though he had opened our mail, eavesdropped on our dreams, felt our pulses, found the key to our souls. He was following us everywhere we went, mile for mile, turn for turn, as we chugged upward to reach narrow moonlit mountain passes and then swooped down like a hawk through broad valleys glistening with morning dew, the sound of his voice like a mournful overture for a movie that was certain to end in disaster. More than half a century later, he speaks to me still—Did you ever see a robin weep . . . I’ll never get out of this world alive . . . You’ll cry and cry, and try to sleep . . . I’m so lonesome I could cry—and it’s uncanny how those words have stayed with me, in my life and in my work, as they stayed with my father until he died.