Lovesick Blues Read online

  You would think that Fred Rose would be beside himself with joy by now, seeing Hank’s career take off like that, but he seemed to be lagging behind as though he couldn’t quite believe it. He had badly underestimated the power of “Lovesick Blues”—hadn’t even wanted to record it, in fact—and he was still having reservations when Hank pulled into Cincinnati for another session at Herzog Studio as the summer ended. For starters, Fred still didn’t think the Drifting Cowboys were ready for prime time and so he made them stand around and merely listen in the studio while the core of the band from the “Lovesick” session, most noticeably the more gossamer steel guitarist Jerry Byrd, played backup. Fred liked two of the songs Hank offered—“I Just Don’t Like This Kind of Livin’ ” and “A House without Love”—but not the others. Especially troublesome was a bluesy number called “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” which many would swear Hank had first heard from Tee-Tot Payne as a kid, but actually was a tune that had been floating around in African American jazz and blues circles since the thirties. Here, again, Fred was concerned for the sake of Hank’s image; specifically, a line reading “I can’t buy no beer.” (“Bucket” is the only recording where Hank can be heard playing solo, in an acoustic guitar riff.) The other was a song that Hank had first envisioned as a recitation—“I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”—before deciding at the last minute to put it to music. With the newly appointed Cowboys morosely standing by in the studio, and Hank and Fred done with their squabbling, they got down to cutting the records. As it turned out when they were released, Fred was wrong again: “Bucket” hit No. 2 on the charts when it was released three months later, and “A House without Love” sank like a rock, although “This Kind of Livin’ ” topped out at No. 5. As for “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” the marvelously poetic dirge that Hank himself would call the favorite of all the songs he wrote, its fate would wind up in the hands of the historians. Rose had put it on the flip side of “Bucket,” a mere afterthought, and—get this—the best it ever did on the charts was No. 43, in 1966, more than a dozen years after Hank’s death, when a reappraisal of his work was under way. Never has so great a piece of songwriting been so egregiously overlooked.

  Meanwhile, back at the ranch house Hank and Audrey had finally picked out, near the governor’s mansion on Franklin Road in Nashville, Audrey was sending the ladies of the “Athens of the South” into apoplexy. Just as they had feared, the barbarians were, indeed, at the gate. Hank had paid $21,000 for your basic three-bedroom redbrick cottage, the postwar “ranch” design beginning to sprout up all over the new American suburbs at the time, and Audrey had gotten out the checkbook. She would teach these old biddies to poke fun at “hillbillies.” She would show them what real class looked like. At all hours of the day, and sometimes into the night, there was a steady hum of traffic up and down bucolic Franklin Road bringing tradesmen of every ilk: plumbers, carpenters, masons, electricians; designers, landscapers, lighting experts, sound technicians; burly men lugging brand-new chairs and tables and sofas and beds and rolls of lush carpeting. This was going to be . . . amazing! Oriental was her thing. Why, they could have luaus, those little Hawaiian parties where you wear leis and grass skirts and go barefoot, and maybe Don Helms could play some of that island music, you know; the steel guitar is a Hawaiian thingie, isn’t it? . . . Before MGM could release Hank’s record of “I Just Don’t Like This Kind of Livin’,” Audrey had transformed the house into a place where he was reluctant to sit down beneath the glassy chandeliers. Black lacquer and gold dragons dominated the décor, not to mention beaded curtains and rickety bamboo seats and faux waterfalls and a jukebox, and all of it was a way of saying that they—she, actually, Audrey Mae Sheppard of Pike County, Alabama—had made it. And wait until passersby got a load of the pièce de résistance: a wrought-iron railing across the front porch that displayed the opening chords of “Lovesick Blues.”

  With that kind of money going out the front door, it was a good thing Hank was bringing plenty of it in. A lot of the songs that had started slowly now were rising high in the charts on a tide lifted by “Lovesick.” He was still second in record sales to Eddy Arnold, “the Tennessee Plowboy,” a velvety baritone more pop than country, but all of the talk in the business was of Hank. Now this is country, they were saying, while Arnold was just playing at it. Eddy belonged in a nightclub up east somewhere, in a tuxedo, with violins, not fiddles. Hank, on the other hand, came across as some old boy who really was a plowboy, headed at day’s end for some beer joint to sing and play for the neighbors about his troubles. Country music, in fact, was beginning to expand and grow beyond its roots for the first time. Most of that was due to the outward migration of white southerners during the war years and afterward, when they carried their music with them to military posts around the world and to ports and factories all across the United States. You still had the Appalachian shouters and stompers, personified by Acuff with his fiddling and wailing about Mama and trains and sin. Tubb was sort of the eastern representative of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys’ western swing, with his Texas Troubadours and their signature dance tunes like “I’d Waltz across Texas with You.” Arnold and George Morgan represented the new stuff—slick, smooth, dreamy, apropos of hardly anything in real life—and then there was Hank Williams. Hank wrote and sang as though he was running scared, which wasn’t far from the truth. “Those fears are part of the talent,” said Mitch Miller. “Who else could write ‘How can I free your doubtful mind and melt your cold, cold heart’? That’s a man who’s really terribly afraid he’s going to lose that woman. He was a shy man. The best way he could say it was in his songs.” The public didn’t know the half of it at that point, didn’t know about the tragedy of Shakespearean proportions that the Hank-and-Audrey marriage was becoming, but they could sense it in his outpourings.

  Since a major part of his education had come from listening to WSFA as a kid, Hank was a natural on radio. Alone in a studio, he had a way of speaking quietly and confidentially to a person at the other end, almost like a preacher offering consolation: Look, friend, I know exactly how you feel because I’ve been there myself. His skills had been sharpened during his stint in Shreveport, cozying up to his unseen audience as “the Ol’ Syrup-Sopper” for Johnnie Fair Syrup, and WSM was keeping him busy with similar shows for sponsors like Duck-head overalls and Pops-Rite popcorn and Mother’s Best flour. (Hank was earning $100 a week to perform the fifteen-minute Mother’s Best shows, aired daily on WSM at 7:15 every morning, and the seventy-two recorded shows he left behind are valued items today.) None of this was lost on one of the station’s advertising managers. A state senator in Louisiana named Dudley LeBlanc had concocted a classic “patent medicine” that he called Hadacol, its twelve percent alcohol base being good for what ails you, especially if you lived in a legally “dry” county, and he had become giddy with the possibilities of advertising since cashing in on the rise to the charts of an unsolicited tune entitled “Hadacol Boogie.” LeBlanc remembered seeing Hank during his Shreveport days, and he was an easy mark when the ad man at WSM proposed a syndicated radio show, starring Hank and Audrey, to be called “Health and Happiness.” The irony in the title was priceless, of course, Hank never experiencing much of either in his lifetime, and he used the programs to showcase the hymns and gospels he was fond of singing almost in atonement for what Lillie and Audrey regarded as his sins. There were eight shows in all, fifteen minutes each, perfect for radio stations in the rural South’s Bible Belt to schedule on Sunday mornings. Hank and the Cowboys taped them at WSM’s studios on two successive Sundays in October of that year, and if Hank got anything out of it besides the considerable money and more exposure it was yet another heavy message that Audrey had to go; she jumped in during the first session, to Dudley LeBlanc’s chagrin, but was so bad that she wasn’t invited back for the second.

  As more proof of the power behind being associated with WSM and the Opry, Hank was invited to join a troupe that would tour U.S. Air Force bases in
Europe for two weeks in November. He was in high cotton—the others were Opry veterans Foley, Acuff, Dickens, Minnie Pearl, and Rod Brasfield—and they lumbered across the Atlantic in Gen. Dwight Eisenhower’s former private plane. Audrey was with them, as were the other wives and WSM’s top executives, as they popped in on military hospitals and performed for the troops in Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin, and Vienna. Country music was the big ticket over Armed Forces Radio, its most popular program being “Hillbilly Gasthaus,” and huge crowds of soldiers and German natives greeted them with waves of encores when Hank sang “Lovesick Blues” and Foley did “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy.” Two of the performances were taped and played on the Prince Albert portion of the Opry. Surrounded by fellow stars and the men who called the shots at the Opry, Hank took pains to be on his best behavior, going so far as to sniff glasses at the dinner table to make sure they held water instead of wine. He may not have spent much time soaking up European culture on his first trip away from the North American continent—he had his comic books for reading and insisted on slathering catsup on his cooked-to-death steaks—but a good time was had by all. When he got back to Nashville, “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” was No. 2 with a bullet on the Billboard chart.

  Then, for the first time during his employ at the Opry, he lost it. Oscar Davis had dropped all of his other clients to concentrate on Hank’s career, and he had booked Hank and the Drifting Cowboys on an extensive tour of Canada and the Midwest that would wind down in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., just before Christmas. Oscar was an older man who reminded Don Helms of a New York dandy—short, stout, dapper in his crisp white shirts and good suits and pointy-toed black dress shoes—reminiscent of the old-school “drummers” who could sell anything to anybody. He had guaranteed WSM that Hank would stay sober for a year if they would put him on the Opry, but somewhere in the Midwest he began to see ominous signs of an impending disaster and hired a Pinkerton detective to travel along and keep his eye on Hank. Oscar had been in show business long enough to know that alcoholics are among the most cunning people on earth—when they want a drink they’ll find one—but Hank beat anything he had ever seen. He had discovered that half-pint bottles and airline miniatures could easily be transported, in his guitar case or his cowboy boots or even beneath the billowy hoop skirts of square dancers, and that adoring fans everywhere were eager to conspire with ol’ Hank in his time of need. A Pinkerton man was no challenge, as Oscar had learned in Indiana, where the detective posted outside the green room between shows was amazed to find Hank passed out from the miniatures, first floated in a pitcher of ice delivered to his hotel room and then stowed in his boots during his performance.

  He slipped his handlers again before they had even checked in at a hotel in Des Moines, Iowa; when Oscar turned and couldn’t find Hank after signing them in at the front desk, and asked a porter if he’d seen “the gentleman who was with me,” he was directed to the bar, where he found Hank knocking down his second double bourbon on the rocks. When they were finally ensconced in room 505, with the detective outside guarding the door, Hank got to teasing Oscar: “I don’t think I’ll play tonight.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Naw, I just don’t feel like it.”

  “You’d better, or you’ll never play any other goddamn place.”

  “Anyways, you keep needling me about drinking.”

  Oscar picked up the phone and pretended to call Jim Denny at his home in Nashville. “I’m gonna tell Denny, ‘I don’t ever want this sonofabitch to ever play the Opry again.’ ”

  “Aw, hell, I was just kidding.”

  “Here, then. I’ve got him on the line. You tell Jim Denny you were just kidding.”

  And he didn’t play that night. As soon as Oscar had left the room, Hank dialed room 405 and said, “Look out your window.” He had put a fifty-dollar bill in a laundry sack, with a scribbled note—saying he was just another traveler, too busy working, and needed two bottles of bourbon, keep the change—and lowered it with a “rope” made of sheets. Within half an hour he had hoisted the sack back up to his window and was having a party. When Oscar and the detective opened the door, they found Hank passed out drunk. Oscar tried to keep him away from the booze during the next stop, at the armory in Moline, Illinois, and a woman who was in the audience never forgot it: “Two men brought him out, one on each arm, his guitar around his neck, and stood him at the mike. He didn’t say a word, not even howdy. He was like a zombie. He sang great for an hour and then the two men came and got him and took him away.” Backstage afterward, she saw Hank propped up in a chair, “smelling like a brewery,” so drunk that he “probably didn’t know his name or where he was. But you talk about a performance. He never missed a note.”

  There was more of the same when Hank rolled into Baltimore to headline four shows a day for a solid week at the Hippodrome Theater. Even Don Helms, the most veteran of the Drifting Cowboys, had never seen him like this. (“Here I am in Baltimore,” Hank would say at every show. “I ain’t never been in Baltimore. If I come back, it’ll be twice I been here.”) Now Oscar had a genuine crisis on his hands. This was strike one against Hank, in case anybody in Nashville was keeping score, and Oscar knew they certainly were. He had to call in a mediocre country yodeler to fill Hank’s place on the show, the first time this had become necessary on his watch, and out of desperation he had Audrey flown in from Nashville to see what she could do; which was, of course, to jump Hank like a chicken on a bug, telling everybody how personally embarrassed she was, and, since she was already there, to stick around and sing with Hank if he ever sobered up. His pattern for years had been to take three days to get smashed and three days to come out of it. Sure enough, by the time they reached D.C. Hank was up and running again. By invitation of Sen. John Sparkman of Alabama, he and Cowboy Copas set attendance records at the Victory Room in the Hotel Roosevelt—nine hundred came and five hundred were turned away—and when it was over, Hank, drunk again, having a good time, gave Sparkman his wristwatch. The senator was still wearing it at his death thirty-six years later.

  As the year wound down, there was plenty to celebrate on Franklin Road during the Christmas holidays of ’49. It had been Hank’s breakout year—“Lovesick Blues,” Opry membership, the tour of Europe, eight singles making the charts—and now, having eclipsed his heroes Acuff and Tubb, he trailed only Eddy Arnold in sales by a country performer. “Lovesick” had sold two million records, “Wedding Bells” a million, and Hank had earned $65,000 in MGM royalties alone. A publicity photo taken at the house showed a dozen healthy-looking young Americans about to cash in on the postwar boom: Hank and the four Drifting Cowboys, all wearing grins and their stage costumes of boots and jaunty cowboy hats; their women, a bit more subdued but smiling for the camera nevertheless, guarding their young children. Out back the first of the ponies Hank would buy for Lycrecia and Hank, Jr., was biding its time in a corral, and the house was overflowing with the stuffed animals and other gifts Daddy was wont to bring home from the road in celebration of his fatherhood. The carport had already been expanded in anticipation of the two new fishtail Cadillacs on order: a green limo for Hank, and a yellow convertible for Audrey, both of them sporting the latest power steering, power brakes, and push-button windows. Hank’s price for a show was in the process of ballooning from $250 to $1,000-plus. There seemed to be nowhere to go but up.

  The possibility that Audrey would snap was always there, though, and Hank had given her reason enough when he refused to let her sing with him during the gala in D.C. She had left in a snit, returning alone to Nashville and the children, and she was seething—again—when Hank got home, hung-over and tired, pleased with himself; always himself, not them as a husband-and-wife team. She had accompanied Hank on a tour out west in the fall, and together they had run by Nudie Cohen’s Rodeo Tailors in Los Angeles, buying elaborate his-and-hers costumes, but now her fringed cowgirl outfits hung unused in the closet. It was always Hank this and Hank tha
t, but never Hank and Audrey. He already had all of the handlers and assistants he needed—Oscar Davis, Jim Denny, Fred Rose, the Cowboys, even a banker—and, as they all seemed to be making quite clear, he didn’t need anybody to help him sing. “[Audrey] was cocky, like Hank, and a tough character,” said Oscar Davis, remembering times when she, without Hank, would enter a club: “She’d be dressed in diamonds and furs, and people were in awe, figuring she must be somebody. When they found out she was Mrs. Hank Williams they’d assume she could sing. ‘Oh, just a little,’ she’d say, and when she did I wanted to hide. She was horrible, embarrassing.” If nobody had confronted Audrey directly, they had certainly sent her messages that it was Hank, not Hank and Audrey, who was being paid to perform. But she blamed Hank for all of that.