Lovesick Blues Page 13

  Figuring every cowboy ought to have a farm, Hank went out and bought one—a five-hundred-acre spread southward toward the little town of Franklin—writing a check for $15,000 toward the $60,000 purchase price. There was a dilapidated antebellum farmhouse on the land, and his long-range plans included refurbishing the house and making it their primary residence. He bought a Tennessee walking horse, moved the kids’ ponies from Franklin Road, added some white-faced cattle, had fences built, and hired a manager to look after the stock. It was his dream to be a gentleman rancher, going back to his days of watching cowboy-and-Indians “pitcher shows” as a kid in south Alabama, but nothing much came of it. His concert schedule kept him on the road most of the time; his bad back precluded his spending much time astride a horse; and Audrey was running from farm life, not toward it, meaning she visited the place only for photo ops or to bring the kids when they wanted to ride. Hank wound up spending a lot of time out there alone, drinking and thinking and firing his guns. If nothing else, he and his business manager figured, the expenses of buying and running the place would give him a tax write-off.

  Well, then, how about a country store downtown? Again trying to guess what might finally make Audrey happy, he envisioned a place—Hank and Audrey’s Corral—stocked with western clothing, records, songbooks, signed photographs, Hank and Audrey dolls, picture postcards, the kinds of doo-dads that visitors to the Opry would surely want to buy. He had envied Ernest Tubb’s Record Shop, around the corner from the Ryman, and this was his response. Renting a space nearby on Commerce Street, he stocked it with $7,000 worth of inventory, had it tackied up in faux log-cabin décor (wagon wheels, board-and-batten walls, oil lamps, lots of fake buckskin), and had great hopes for the endeavor during the grand opening on a summer’s Saturday. Hank and Audrey were there in their western finery, performing with the Drifting Cowboys, as was Roy Acuff. The plan was to broadcast live shows over WSM from the Corral every Saturday afternoon, to complement the post-Opry show from Tubb’s Record Shop, but crowds got so large that the show had to be moved to the WSM studios. As it turned out, people were more interested in hearing Hank sing up close and for free than in buying his boots and hats and shirts. In short order, the business became a drag; Hank had to go in on weekend mornings to write checks, and the only times Audrey came around was to tap the till for spare cash on the first leg of a shopping spree. It became a hangout for footloose musicians, eager to see Hank and pitch their songs, and before long he was hiring a full-time manager for the store and walking away from it. It had turned out to be more trouble than it was worth.

  It’s not that he was bored; far from it. In spite of the squabbling with Audrey and his drinking disasters and back problems, Hank filled two hundred dates all over the country that year. Now and then he would settle in one city for a few days, headlining a spectacular package show, but for the most part he was out there on the road playing one-nighters from town to town. The two-hour Hank Williams road show had a familiar beginning, middle, and end: a warm-up by the Drifting Cowboys, including a cornball routine by the bass-playing comedian; Hank being brought on for forty-five minutes; an intermission, during which the band members went into the crowd to hawk songbooks and photographs; Hank coming back onstage to close out the show. He had been at this long enough to know how to pace an evening’s entertainment: a slow weeper here, some country patter there, something to get ’em jumping, a little introspection from Luke the Drifter, then a show-stopping closer. He was a handsome scoundrel—dangerous—and the women, especially, greeted him with screams and wild applause when he sauntered out onto the stage in his double-breasted western-cut outfit from Nudie’s of Hollywood, the Stetson and the high-heeled boots making him loom taller than his lanky six-one. The lessons he had learned from Tee-Tot Payne as a kid pitching songs on the sidewalks of Georgiana and Greenville were serving him well. “Here’s one we been eatin’ off for a while,” he would drawl before announcing “Hey, Good Lookin’ ” or “Cold, Cold Heart,” hunkering over the microphone, strumming the guitar, tapping his feet, swaying to the sounds of Don Helms’s crying steel on the introduction, seeming to pick out one face in the crowd with his piercing brown eyes before he took off running. He had a way of connecting with an audience that made each song sound like a private serenade, something he had been saving for just this crowd, on this night only, because y’all been so good to me. Indeed, when he was in the very midst of crafting “Jambalaya,” he did something Helms had never seen before: previewed a work-in-progress. They were playing an auditorium in southern Louisiana, where the Cajuns were wild about Hank, and he knew they were going to love this one: “He told ’em he was still working on this song and he’d like to know what they thought. So he started it—‘Goodbye Joe, me gotta go, me oh my oh; Me gotta go pole the pirogue down the bayou’—and they went crazy. He sang all he had at that point and then stopped. Said he’d sing the rest of it next time back, when he’d finished it.” And always, there was the close: “If the good Lord’s willin’ and the creek don’t rise, we’ll see you next time.”

  He had enough money now that he could afford to charter a plane if there was a long jump to the next date, or if he had to rush back to fill his obligations to the Opry on a Saturday night, the band pushing ahead with the equipment in the Cadillac limo. (The air taxi for the stars in those days belonged to Minnie Pearl’s wealthy husband, Henry Cannon, who owned a spiffy single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza.) For the most part, though, Hank and the Cowboys stayed to sign autographs, pose for snapshots, sell some more records and songbooks, and collect the cash—he had stopped taking checks after being burned once too often—before loading up the car and driving on to the next stop, sometimes eight hours down a two-lane asphalt highway that cut right through the middle of every city or town along the way. They would sleep, shower, and eat whenever they could get around to it. For example, they began one two-week stretch in the spring of ’51 on Friday, March 23, with a recording session in Nashville, working the Opry on Saturday night, then hitting the road: Sunday, concert in Evansville, Indiana; Monday, traveling through Indiana and Illinois; Tuesday, concert in a gymnasium in Decatur, Illinois; Wednesday, playing the Community Center in Centralia, Illinois; Thursday, working the Arena Theatre in Paducah, Kentucky; Friday, the high school auditorium in Mount Vernon, Illinois; Saturday, the Opry; Sunday, matinee and evening performances in Little Rock, Arkansas; Monday, appearing in Monroe, Louisiana; Tuesday, at the high school auditorium in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Wednesday, a return to Municipal Auditorium in Shreveport, the scene of Hank’s triumphs during his days on the Louisiana Hayride; Thursday, outdoors in the ballpark in Corpus Christi, Texas; Friday, Municipal Auditorium in New Orleans; Saturday, back to the Opry and home. The advent of the cushy touring bus was a few years away, and the road was literally a killer. But they were young and eager and relatively healthy, doing exactly what they wanted to do, and when things were going well with Hank—no booze, no fights, no cooling heels in the parking lot of a motel while Hank bedded a girl inside—it was good enough for men who otherwise might have been spending their lives at hard labor in fields or factories. (“Quit?” said Don Helms. “Hell, I was in show business.”) One time they piled into the limo at seven on a Sunday morning, for an afternoon matinee in Birmingham, a five-hour drive in those days, and when they arrived Hank had written “Hey, Good Lookin’ ” from start to finish.

  Between road shows, they managed to work in the bread-and-butter recording sessions, the ones that would seal Hank’s true legacy. Like a baseball player who knows he’ll be remembered not for his performances in spring training or during the dog days of a waning summer but in the high-intensity play-offs and World Series, Hank was fully wired when he walked into the studio: stone-cold sober, all business, thoroughly concentrated, knowing this was for all time. Six times he went into Castle Studio that year, and he came out of it with an astonishing number of recordings that would shame anybody who had ever sung a country song. To name only the t
ruly great ones he recorded that year, there were “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love with You),” “Hey, Good Lookin’,” “(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle,” “Crazy Heart,” “Baby, We’re Really in Love,” “Half as Much,” and “Honky Tonk Blues.” Except for Bennett’s rendition of “Cold, Cold Heart,” none of the crossover versions topped Hank’s original recordings in sales and critical acclaim, and they certainly aren’t remembered half a century later, because they simply lacked the earnest emotional tug, the credibility, the oomph, delivered by Hank himself. Now Mitch Miller had his hands full, deciding which of the pop singers he should choose from all of those clamoring to cover Hank’s latest.

  Two years after his debut on the Opry, Hank was the acknowledged king of country music. All of the others had receded in his wake, some of them his heroes before he got there. Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys had a fervent regional following, mainly in the dance halls of Oklahoma and Texas, but they were oddities east of the Mississippi. Ernest Tubb was an Opry regular, beloved in Texas, but he seemed to have topped out as a big man on the jukebox-and-roadhouse scene. Eddy Arnold was still selling more records than anybody based in Nashville, but he was more pop than country with his sweet uptown orchestrations like “Anytime (You’re Feeling Lonely)” and “I’m Sending You a Big Bouquet of Roses.” Roy Acuff had lost his recording contract and seemed content to anchor the Opry every weekend, singing “Wabash Cannonball,” reminding his aging fans of the music’s Appalachian roots. Much the same could be said of the revered Carter Family. New arrivals would come and go—George Morgan, Carl Smith, Lefty Frizzell, Louisiana governor Jimmie Davis (“You Are My Sunshine”), even the cowboy movie star Tex Ritter—but none had the staying power to threaten Hank’s domination. In his personal life and his demeanor, along with his natural talent, Hank had set the mold for the quintessential “hillbilly” singer: rawboned, emotional, tortured, unmanageable. Sing your heart out, country boy! He was to country music what Frank Sinatra was to pop, and what Elvis Presley would soon become to the teenagers all over the world. He was the Man. And he scared the hell out of the cautious Protestant guardians of the Grand Ole Opry’s family image.

  Almost as a respite from all of this, Hank was hailed as a local-boy-made-good when the Montgomery Jaycees staged a Hank Williams Homecoming in his adopted hometown on a Saturday in mid-July. He had come a long, long way since the wartime years when he nearly gave up the business out of despair—living in his mother’s boardinghouse, playing medicine shows, working off and on at the Mobile docks while many of the other men were in uniform, making his first lackadaisical attempts at drying out, reluctant to leave the safety of singing on WSFA and in the surrounding small towns—and the locals were coming to have a gawk at him. There would be a parade downtown, a benefit at the Veterans Administration hospital, and a big show at the new Cow Coliseum starring Hank, supported by Hank Snow and the Carter Family. He taped a promotional spot for WSFA: “When a boy grows up in a town and makes a little name for himself and the folks are nice enough to bring him back and designate a whole day as a homecomin’, well, folks couldn’t be no nicer. . . .” The city of Greenville would follow with a similar celebration the next summer, when he was on his final downhill slide, but this “how-dee-do,” as he called it with some pride, was the first major acknowledgment by the home folks that he had made the big time.

  Hank also saw the return to Montgomery as a chance to bring his family together after years of smoldering antagonisms. He would publicly thank Lillie for her help as the aggressive stage mom in his formative years—not getting into her continuing warfare with Audrey—and he made sure that Lon Williams would be there as well. Slowly, over the years, he and his father had circled each other and worked out a relationship that was more like adult acquaintances than father and son. Since his final release from VA hospitals in 1939, when Hank was beginning to make his mark as “the Singing Kid” with his first band on WSFA, Lon had settled into a quiet life in the little town of McWilliams, about eighty miles southwest of Montgomery, with his second wife and their daughter, living on his VA disability checks for the rest of his days. Before his career took him to Shreveport and then Nashville, Hank had made it a point to stop over in McWilliams with his various bands as they worked south Alabama, to visit his father and stepmother and stepsister (introducing himself to her, Leila, as her “half-a-brother”), trying to build some sort of a relationship. There wasn’t much there to build from, of course—Lon had missed Hank’s childhood and had long ago been replaced by Fred Rose as a father figure—but they had stayed in touch, no matter how much Lillie tried to keep them apart, and Hank saw the Montgomery homecoming as a way to let the folks know that he did have a father after all.

  This was a big deal for the people of Montgomery as well. Except for the goings-on at the state capitol building, not much happened there to attract the outside world beyond a low-rent college football all-star game called the Blue-Gray Game, and big crowds assembled for the parade, madly waving at Hank as he rode in an open convertible in his fringed white cowboy outfit, and cheering for him during the show later in the afternoon at the Cow Coliseum. Inexplicably, Hank had come down from Nashville without a guitar, and his uncle Walter McNeil had to double-park in front of a music store while he went inside to buy one; when they refused to let him pay, he noted the irony: “Ten years ago, when I wanted to buy a damned guitar on credit, they wouldn’t let me have it; now they’re giving me one.” Lillie and Lon and their kin tried to mind their manners during the festivities (although Audrey was seen angrily snatching little Hank, Jr., away from Lon when he tried to hold his grandson for the first time). At Hank’s insistence, the Jaycees presented Lillie with a batch of roses and a gold watch. There was music that afternoon, in spite of a new sound system that was found lacking, and Hank surely found some redemption in a town where they still gossiped about Lillie’s boardinghouse and her scrawny teenaged son’s misadventures. The next time they saw him, only a year and a half later, he would be laid out in a coffin.

  Audrey and the kids had flown into Montgomery for the day and they flew right back to Nashville when it was over, leaving Hank and the Cowboys to spend the night at Lillie’s boardinghouse. The place buzzed all night with family, friends, and fans. All of this had been most satisfying to Hank, a time to celebrate his roots, but a look at his schedule for the remainder of the year was enough to give him the shivers. The success of Tony Bennett’s pop version of “Cold, Cold Heart” had, indeed, thrown him into another orbit by introducing him to the world at large. Fred Rose had scheduled three more recording sessions that year to capitalize on it. Hank had agreed to put his name on a booklet entitled Hank Williams Tells How to Write Folk and Western Music to Sell, actually written by a private-school math teacher in Nashville, an endeavor that might have shed light on the Williams-Rose collaboration had Hank chosen to contribute anything at all to it. Behind the scenes, negotiations were ongoing for a movie deal with MGM Pictures. In the waning months of ’51, working around the usual hectic schedule of one-nighters all the way from Louisiana roadhouses to concert halls up east, he was booked for the popular network television shows hosted by Kate Smith and Perry Como. All of that was promising and profitable for his career in many ways, but there was a dark side. He was a tired man—on and off the booze, certain by now that Audrey was working one-nighters of her own with other men during his long absences, the pain in his back becoming unbearable—and it seemed only a matter of time before he would collapse from the pressure.

  Compared to all of that, the next chapter in his life looked like a piece of cake, almost an all-expenses-paid vacation. His Cajun pal Dudley LeBlanc had hired him to headline what would turn out to be the last great traveling medicine show: the Hadacol Caravan. Only Coca-Cola was spending more advertising dollars on its product than LeBlanc was on his particular elixir, the foul-tasting “patented medicine” laced with alcohol, and this time he was pulling out all the stops. For six weeks, beginning
in Lafayette, Louisiana, Hank and some of the other biggest names in entertainment—Bob Hope, Milton Berle, Dick Haymes, Tony Martin, Cesar Romero, Jack Benny, Jimmy Durante, Rudy Vallee, even Jack Dempsey—would roll across eighteen states in the South and Southwest in a string of nineteen Pullman cars. At every stop there would be a parade, and then a spectacular show at a stadium or whatever was the largest venue in town. Admission was one Hadacol box top for kids, two for adults. Unbeknownst to the performers, LeBlanc’s empire was crumbling—he had lost $2 million in that quarter of the year alone, the country’s fascination with Hadacol had about peaked, and government drug enforcers were on his case—and this was his last-ditch attempt to salvage it. What could Hank care? He was riding the rails in an air-conditioned Pullman rather than being jammed into his Cadillac; eating fancy meals in a club car; having his laundry taken care of daily; free to chase the bevy of long-stemmed dancing girls assigned to the show, and getting paid well to be the star of an extravaganza that was drawing between ten thousand and twenty-five thousand in stadiums. He and Minnie Pearl had made an arrangement to miss the Saturday performances so they could get onto Henry Cannon’s plane and fly to Nashville for their performances on the Opry.