Lovesick Blues Page 11
As for Hank, whose only real experience with women was with another of the same breed, mama Lillie, he could only try to appease her with things: jewelry, clothes, cars, money for the house. He was still continuing to plead her case to Fred Rose, hoping to calm her down with another shot in the studio, but Fred had already advised him that MGM had heard all it could stand and maybe they could dump her off on somebody else. Hank’s hairline was receding; his back was killing him from all that travel in a cramped car; his weight was sometimes dipping into the 130s from the drinking and eating on the run; and it’s quite likely that his libido was waning from the stress. Audrey had a good question—What’s in it for me?—and her husband was damned if he had an answer. He had a monster to feed, a public that suddenly couldn’t get enough, and maybe he could give them a piece of his soul.
Three Chords and the Truth
For the first time the word genius was being used to describe Hank, often with tortured attached, but that seemed overly simplistic. Tortured he was, mainly due to his lack of self-esteem and his bad luck with women and his dependence on alcohol to make things better, but “genius” connotes the inexplicable, and if you look deep enough you can find an explanation for just about anything. The Hank Williams who had evolved by 1950, scant months following his dramatic debut on the world scene, was the sum of his parts. He was a simple but sensitive man, poor and uneducated, just looking for love, and that’s where he was coming from when he began expressing himself through his songs. He had no musical tricks up his sleeve, wouldn’t know a simile or a metaphor unless somebody spelled it out for him, hardly knew a flat note from a sharp—indeed, some in the business would sneer, the boy couldn’t even read music—but by now he was too rich to quit. Onstage and in the studio, he was doing what came naturally: desperately telling the story of his life, which kept getting worse. If he had a genius, it was for simplicity.
His partnership with Fred Rose was just that, arguably the most fortuitous collaboration in the history of American music. Rose took pains to downplay his role in the relationship (“Don’t get the idea that I made the guy or wrote his songs for him,” he said, insisting that Hank had “made himself”), but the more he denied his part in Hank’s success the more his disclaimers were regarded as just further evidence of Fred’s natural inclination toward modesty. True, he had been slow in the beginning to fully comprehend the sheer power of Hank’s work and its appeal to the common man—Exhibit A would always be his utter misreading of “Lovesick Blues”—but as time went on he began to see that this could be a match made in heaven: the uneducated Hank would supply the raw material, and the technically proficient Fred would clean it up. Any writer in any discipline, from poetry to fiction to journalism, knows that Mitch Miller had it right when he said every good writer needs a good editor. Fred Rose had lived a hard life, himself, but he was either incapable or unwilling to write about it in such a direct manner; choosing, instead, to write catchy little ditties like “ ’Deed I Do.” Surely, it took his breath away when he saw a writer who could and would confront his hopes and fears and disappointments with such straightforward pain and clarity. Some of the songs were rough, needed work, and Fred figured that’s where he came in if Hank would let him.
As it is in any relationship between a writer and an editor, they had their disagreements in the early days of working together. Fred learned early on not to force-feed Hank any more unsuitable material like “Rootie Tootie” and “Fly Trouble,” stuff that was more Fred than Hank, preferring to sit back and look forward to those days when Hank would come in off the road and drop by the office (conveniently, a couple of miles from the house on Franklin Road), so they could go behind closed doors to tweak. What you got? Fred would say. Folks kinda like this one, Hank would tell him, producing a page from the spiral notebook he had filled with scribblings, everything from possible song titles to key lines to completed lyrics. Alone in Rose’s office behind closed doors, or else at Fred’s home studio, Hank would trot out a song’s first draft, as it were, strumming and singing, closely watching Fred’s eyes for a reaction. Fred might go to the piano to make a point about a chord change or a shift in rhythm or a better rhyme—How about this?—and so it would go for hours. Reluctantly at first, but with more confidence as their relationship deepened and the hits piled up, Hank became a willing partner. He would go along with Fred’s changing the title from “I Lose Again” to “You Win Again,” whatever “nuance” meant, as long as he’d let him continue speaking English as he and his fans in the countryside understood it: pitcher for picture, keer for care, purr for poor, and pre-haps for perhaps. Fred was beginning to get the hang of it, anyway; once, during a recording session, when one of the musicians asked if a take seemed “too country” he shot back, “It’s never too country.” (Well, maybe. Fred surely would have gone over the edge if he had heard Hank’s pronunciation in a rendition of Acuff’s “The Battle of Armageddon” during a show over KWKH in the pre-Rose days: am-yer-gettin.)
To be sure, there was some ammunition available for the songwriters who argued that Fred played a much larger part in the making of Hank’s music than he publicly admitted, but it was scant and had more to do with arrangements than with lyrics. “Move It on Over” had a touch that was purely Fred Rose, with his Tin Pan Alley orientation—a recurring answer from the band members, who would chant “move it on over” every time Hank sang the title line—a technique used by the big dance bands, most notably Glenn Miller in his version of “Pennsylvania 6-5000.” In one of Hank’s last recordings, “I Won’t Be Home No More,” the lyrics were decidedly Hank, but the sassy swing rhythm is just as surely attributable to Rose. The lyrics and the tom-tom drumbeat in “Kaw-Liga” (credited as “Words by Fred Rose, Music by Hank Williams”) were mostly Hank’s creations, as is well documented in accounts of his last days on earth, but Fred fine-tuned the title and came up with the “envelope” for the story (a shy cigar-store Indian misses the Indian maiden “down by the antique store” who has been sold away) and recommended changing chords between the opening and the driving chorus. Except for trying to keep Hank away from mentions of booze, and for finding a better word here or there, that was about it. What really seemed to discombobulate Hank’s disbelievers was the poeticism of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” They simply could not believe that this barely literate hillbilly could write lines like that—of lonesome whippoorwills, purple skies, weeping robins, midnight trains whining low, a moon going behind a cloud to hide its face and cry—forgetting that young Hiram Williams had spent a lonesome childhood in the dark forests of Alabama with those as his only companions. The city boy, Fred Rose, probably cried like everybody else when he first heard it.
Where Fred truly excelled, as a producer, was in the arrangement of a piece of music—finding the right meter, the proper key, the instrumentation, the perfect sound to complement the lyrics—and it hadn’t taken long at all for him to discover the secret to a Hank Williams song: the simpler the better. One of the Willis brothers had played accordion during Hank’s first recording session, but that was dropped. During subsequent sessions, the same fate befell mandolins, organs, pianos, and drums. All were deemed out of character with Hank’s minimalist imagery. More than one sideman had been excoriated for trying to get too fancy—“A lot of pickers has educated themselves right out of a job,” Hank once warned one of them—and “vanilla” became the byword onstage and in the studio. Fred tried to put himself in the seat of a listener, whether in the cheap seats of a large auditorium or on a bar stool in a noisy juke joint or in the cab of a truck with wind whistling and gears grinding, and he knew that the sweet nuances of, say, a string quartet would be utterly lost. He wanted a sound that could be heard above all of that. Thus, he had boiled the instrumentation down to a thumping bass fiddle and the countering “crack” of a guitar to set the basic beat, a rhythm guitar to carry the key, an electric guitar to rhyme with the melody, a fiddle played the old-fashioned way (two strings in harmony, not one
, which made it too tempting to go off on riffs), and an echoing steel guitar played in the highest ranges so it could be heard above any outside noises. Only the fiddle and the steel would take turns on solos, merely as brief respites before the spotlight went back to Hank resuming his confessional tales. Years later, a highly regarded songwriter named Harlan Howard would famously coin a phrase to define country music in general but in fact describe the entire Hank Williams oeuvre: “three chords and the truth.”
When he turned the calendar to bring on a new year, 1950, Hank for the first time was feeling the pressure to come up with a hit record. “Bucket” and some others had done well enough, kept him on the charts and in the money, but he needed another blockbuster like “Lovesick Blues.” He and Fred were moving ever closer to their own understanding of what a Hank Williams song was all about—the haunting sound and the aching intensity of the lyrics to express the simple needs of a man in pain—and by now Hank himself had coldly calculated how to go for the jugular. Methodically, word by word and line by line, he had been scribbling away on a song that contained all of the buzzwords and phrases: lonesome, cold as ice, pay the price, wanted to die, a woman who couldn’t be true and made me blue, those long gone but not forgotten blues. Just as the title of “I Saw the Light” had come from a chance remark, so did he make a discovery that would kick-start the tune he would entitle “Long Gone Lonesome Blues.” On a fishing excursion to one of the lakes north of Nashville, with Hank’s mind somewhere else, his impatient partner had said, “You come here to fish or watch the fish swim by?” Hank said, “That’s it, that’s the first line,” and he couldn’t wait to get back home and write it down. Written to order, it had everything, including room for the heartbreaking blue yodels that had distinguished “Lovesick.”
They gathered on a January afternoon at Castle Studio in the Tulane Hotel, where Hank would cut all of the remaining records in his career, and this would mark the first time the core of the Drifting Cowboys—Don Helms and Jerry Rivers—had backed him in a studio. Beginning with “Long Gone Lonesome Blues,” all four of the tunes on the docket for that day’s work were classic lamentations written by Hank. They had barely unpacked their instruments and begun to warm up when Fred left the booth and sidled over to Helms. “Don’t ever go below this mark,” he said, laying his finger on a fret: his way of signaling that the steel guitar on a Hank Williams record was to be played in the highest range, to complement Hank’s twang and to be heard over extant noise. “You want to make it cry, and we want to be sure it can be heard on a jukebox.” Rose had done his research, knew that three-fifths of Hank’s record sales were to jukebox operators. There might be some sixteen million people out there who owned home phono-graphs now, but each of them bought an average of only ten records a year; there were just 400,000 jukeboxes, on the other hand, and they had ravenous appetites—each of the nation’s 5,500 jukebox “ops” were buying 150 records every week. Helms certainly understood without being told. Hell, he had practically invented the way Hank’s steel should sound, as though he had been born to play for Hank Williams and nobody else. That understood, the day’s work began. Helms opened cold with the chorus, and in stepped Hank: “I went down to the river to watch the fish swim by. . . .” They cut four sides that day, including “Why Don’t You Love Me (Like You Used to Do),” another of Hank’s most-remembered hits, and went home to rest.
For some time, Hank had been badgering Fred to let him record some “recitations,” the moralistic little homilies that he had performed from time to time on his radio shows. With his childhood memories of the church, and his adult feelings of whiskey-driven guilt, through these he saw a way toward atonement. It was sappy stuff, for the most part: truly bad poems dealing with sin and salvation and country gumption and what all, begging for a church organ in the background. They were a long way from the songs that were making Hank famous, and Fred was adamantly opposed, out of deference to the jukebox operators if nothing else. Virtually all of the operators serviced honky-tonks, Hank biographer Colin Escott points out, “and the last thing they needed was for someone to punch up a Hank Williams record and get a sermon.” Bending to Hank’s pressure, Fred finally agreed but with a major request: that they not be recorded under Hank’s name. They finally settled on a nom de plume—“Luke the Drifter”—so the jukebox people wouldn’t be led astray. On that day following the cuts of “Long Gone Lonesome” and “Why Don’t You Love Me,” two sure smash hits that were classic Hank tunes, they put down four weepy recitations dealing with a poor black kid’s funeral, an old farmer’s optimism in the face of ruin, something called “Too Many Parties and Too Many Pals,” and even a piece of doggerel written by the Pittsburgh Pirates’ baseball announcer. The services of Jerry Rivers on the fiddle weren’t needed on these; only Hank’s voice, a bass fiddle and an organ, and Helms’s steel. When they had finished the first of them, “The Funeral,” both Hank and Helms were seen standing in the studio with tears streaming down their faces. To their credit, nobody involved in the recitations ever denied the true identity of Luke the Drifter—not that there was any doubt—and that particular genre had a separate life of its own, intended for what Hank dismissed as the “take-home trade.” No harm was done; like the British literary novelist Graham Greene, who kissed off his lighter works as “entertainments,” Hank had gotten it out of his system. Luke the Drifter was the flip side of Hank’s split personality: the penitent, moralizing about the bad things the other Hank had done.
Sure enough, “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” did the trick, replacing “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” at the top of the Billboard country chart upon its release in the spring and staying at No. 1 for eight weeks. It had sold 150,000 copies by August (“The Funeral,” by comparison, had sold only 6,600), to be replaced at the top by “Why Don’t You Love Me,” meaning that the work from that January session had more or less guaranteed Hank a handsome income for the year. Now all he had to do was hit the road and earn it, which was easier said than done. The real money in those days came from personal appearances, not from records or songwriting royalties or sales of sheet music and publicity photos. His income in 1950 would top out at $92,500, the great bulk of it coming from road shows, where he might pick up $2,000 for headlining at a big auditorium one night and settle for $250 to work a roadhouse the next. It’s inaccurate to say that now he had “only” to go on the road, because with every passing mile the road was becoming a killer. It seemed only a matter of time before Hank would have to look into surgery to address his back problems, and the long automobile trips (even if it was in a roomier Cadillac) weren’t helping. Trouble seemed to find him out there: young women throwing themselves at him, good old boys insisting on buying him a drink, the repetition driving him to get drunk soon enough, all of that ultimately leading to his falling apart in the midst of a tour and being shipped back home to face Audrey. Sometimes she might be there when he dragged in, unannounced, and sometimes she might not: The news is out all over town / That you’ve been seen a-runnin’ ’round. . . . It worked both ways. Each of the two, certain that the other was having an affair, would launch one in retaliation.
What to do about Audrey, as long as she insisted on sharing the bill with her husband, the most valuable commodity in country music? The bigger Hank got, the more problematical she became. Whatever went on behind closed doors on Franklin Road, and it surely wasn’t pleasant, the powers-that-were wanted nothing to do with her when it came to making music because she was awful at it. But who was going to tell her? Fred Rose and MGM and Oscar Davis and the Opry and WSM had left every hint imaginable—deadening her microphone, leaving her name off marquees, dropping her from radio shows, refusing to record her on duets, leaving it up to Hank whether she would accompany him on the stage of the Ryman—but still she wouldn’t go away. Both she and Hank knew that he owed her a big debt, that it was her burning drive that had gotten him to Nashville in the first place, and in her eyes only Hank could help her fulfill her dreams. The poor
man was stuck right in the middle.
Whether it was Hank’s clever answer to the quandary is open to conjecture, but in the spring of ’50 there came an opportunity to force the issue. After some horse-trading that ensued when Decca failed to wrest Hank from MGM, Audrey suddenly came up with her own recording contract. She would go into a studio and make records to her heart’s content—Sing it, babe!—and maybe she would get it out of her system, once and for all. She would start with Hank’s “Honky Tonkin’ ” and do a Hadacol tune called “What Put the Pep in Grandpa,” cutting a half dozen sides in all during a three-hour session. Hank was there, of course, and so were the Drifting Cowboys, getting union scale and a front-row seat for the showdown. Haddy-call! Haddy-call! Haddy-call! Helms and Rivers and the rest yelped in answer to Audrey’s refrain during “Pep in Grandpa,” surely making the folks from Hadacol cringe every time they heard it. Not surprisingly, the records bombed at the box office and with the critics when they were released in the fall, as did a couple of the Hank-and-Audrey gospel duets that MGM had been withholding for a couple of years. Did that cool her off? Of course not; it was, as usual, somebody else’s fault.
Audrey’s carping only intensified after that, her way of getting even for a career that now, obviously, would never happen. She adjusted her sights and aimed them full-time on her husband. “Just don’t tell Ordrey,” Hank was always reminding the band whenever he had gotten drunk or had a romantic escapade with a female fan or otherwise screwed up on the road, just as he once had pleaded that nobody tell his mother. He was expecting an ass-kicking when he got home, anyway, guilty or not, and usually he fell off the wagon as a tour was ending. The work was over, the money was in his pocket, and Audrey was waiting, so he might as well get drunk. There was a sanitarium in Madison, a town north of Nashville, near Don Helms’s house in Hendersonville, and it became routine for Helms to drop him off there without even bothering to call Audrey in advance. “We all had families by then, so nobody could take him home.” Out back of the place was a series of little stone cottages, each with barred windows and a cot and a toilet, and every time Hank saw them looming, as he awakened from his drunken stupor, he would bolt upright in the limo: “Oh, no, not the hut! Not again!” Once admitted, he slept, gobbled the food slipped to him, took the candy and comic books Helms brought him, and after a couple of days he would be ready to go again. “He’d say, ‘Reckon when they’re gonna let us out?’ I’d say, ‘We ain’t in, hoss,’ ” said Helms.