Lovesick Blues Read online

  Down familiar old U.S. 31 they rode out of the undulating hills of middle Tennessee, through Chattanooga and Huntsville and Birmingham, onto the flat pasturelands and cotton fields of south Alabama—surely listening to Hank’s own songs on the radio, maybe “Honky Tonk Blues” or “Cold, Cold Heart,” for he was everywhere on the dial—finally rolling up to Lillie’s boardinghouse in Montgomery. Hank was passed out, drunk, in the recliner, and it took both his mother and Johnnie to drag his wasted body from the limo and carry him inside to the front bedroom downstairs, which had always been “Hank’s room.” They peeled off his boots and clothes, put him in a pair of pajamas, and slipped him between the sheets. There, he slept.

  He awoke the next morning as though nothing had happened. After all, Eddy Arnold was the biggest-selling performer out of Nashville and had done it without having to hustle back to the Opry every other Saturday night and perform for peanuts. Back in Nashville, although the news of his firing was in the Tennessean and the Banner, the Opry was saying only that he was “sick,” an old story that nobody was buying anymore, and the kindly Montgomery papers were reporting “blood poisoning” from an infected wound. What Hank needed most right now was a car, and within a couple of days he had one: a shiny used powder-blue Cadillac convertible he had bought on time in Nashville and had someone drive down to Alabama. On Friday morning, he and his mother got into the car and rode fifty miles down U.S. 31 to Greenville, where another Hank homecoming was to be held. Even though the Williamses had lived there for only two years, and Greenville never would lay claims on Hank as a favorite son, crowds totaling some 8,500 would line the streets for a parade and fill the high school football stadium for two shows. He made sure that his father was there, but it was Lillie who rode in the backseat of the new convertible while Hank—dressed in a fringed white “buckskin” outfit and a cowboy hat, visible bruises showing on his face—dutifully waved back at the crowd from the shotgun seat. At the stadium, the site of his spanking as a lackadaisical teenager by an incensed coach, he paid homage to Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne (dead since ’39, unbeknownst to Hank, and in an unmarked pauper’s grave in Montgomery), and then he performed like a prodigal son.

  The lost Cadillac was found in Philadelphia, returned to Nashville, and Hank got one of his old band members from the WSFA days to drive him up to fetch it. While there, they ran by Bobbie Jett’s apartment in order to bring her back to live at Lillie’s place for the remainder of her pregnancy. “Now,” as biographer Colin Escott put it, “Hank had one girlfriend [not counting Billie Jean in Shreveport], two cars, no band, no show dates, and far too much time on his hands.” Lillie, recognizing this, had arranged for Hank and Bobbie to spend a few days at a cabin on Lake Martin, east of Montgomery, situated near a slough known as Kowaliga Bay. Hank wound up spending his first night there in the jail at Alexander City, the result of his being spotted by fans and being given a jug of moonshine whiskey, but in the next few days at the cabin he managed to work on two of his greatest songs: “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “Kaw-Liga,” the latter inspired by a wooden cigar-store Indian totem he had seen at a crossroads store. He was particularly excited about the prospects for “Kaw-Liga”—coming back from a night run to a bootlegger’s shanty in the backwoods, he was beating out a tom-tom sound on the car’s dashboard, repeating the opening lyrics, “Kaw-Liga was a wooden Indian, standing by the door . . .”—so much so that he called Fred Rose in Nashville with a request that he get himself down to Montgomery so they could refine the arrangements.

  Fred arrived, and he and Hank set to work in the downstairs front room of the boardinghouse. “Cheatin’ Heart” needed little fixing, but Rose put his fingerprints all over “Kaw-Liga”: filling out the story of a wooden Indian’s unrequited love for “an Indian maid down by the antique store,” and most importantly determining that the opening should be in a minor key before switching to a major key for the driving upbeat bridge (“Poor ol’ Kaw-Liga, he never got a kiss . . .”). But Fred had bigger plans in mind for the biggest star in Acuff-Rose’s stable. He felt there was a way to get him back on track. “Jambalaya” was selling briskly, 200,000 copies already, and he used that as a wedge when he began talking to Horace Logan at KWKH about reinstating Hank on the Louisiana Hayride. Within days, the deal was set. Unloading Hank and Audrey’s Corral and the five-hundred-acre farm at great losses, Hank cleared Nashville for the last time and headed west to salvage his career and to reunite with Billie Jean, the latest love of his life.

  It had come to this for the acknowledged king of country music, whose “Jambalaya” was at the top of the country charts. Everything Hank owned was in the two Cadillacs he and a friend drove in tandem to Shreveport. Billie Jean had gotten him a room at a run-down resident motel, “a horrible, horrible” place, furnished with a kitchen table and not much else, said the promoter Oscar Davis, who had agreed to rejoin Hank. “He wanted me to meet Billie,” Davis said, “so every night we had to go out and sit and drink.” Hank had talked his way into getting $200 a show on the Louisiana Hayride, compared to the $18 he was being paid when he left for the Opry more than three years earlier, and his fans were eagerly awaiting his return to the stage of the Municipal Auditorium. Even so, try as he might, he couldn’t put together a band due to his inconsistency. There were no more huge concerts scheduled in places like Boston and D.C. and Dallas, just one-nighters in roadhouses and school auditoriums around the Southwest, and he was back to using house bands who counted on his strumming the key to begin a song and stomping his foot to signify the end. Those who still believed in him, or at least had a stake in his future, saw a blessing in these diminished circumstances: if he screwed up, not many would hear about it. On the night of his twenty-ninth birthday, working a dance hall in San Antonio, an eleven-year-old steel guitar prodigy was called to the stage to sit on Hank’s lap and play “Steel Guitar Rag,” and the kid never got over it: “His breath stank of whiskey, and there wasn’t nothin’ left to him.”

  A week later, following his return to the Hayride, Hank was back at Castle Studio in Nashville for what would turn out to be his last recording session. He and Billie Jean had flown in from Shreveport, and Hank had to do some explaining when, lo and behold, the pregnant Bobbie Jett somehow showed up in the studio as well. The faithful Don Helms was there with his steel guitar, as always, with young Chet Atkins on the electric guitar, and in barely more than two hours they would help churn out three records that would live forever. Hank began by cutting a tune he had written for Billie Jean, “I Could Never Be Ashamed of You” (as he was of you-know-who), and then sandwiched the megahit “Kaw-Liga” around two songs that would come to define his tortured life with Audrey: “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “Take These Chains from My Heart.” Fans and students of Hank were surprised to learn that the latter was written not by Hank but by Fred Rose and Hy Heath, who had written “Mule Train,” but “Cheatin’ Heart” clearly came from the depths of Hank’s very soul. He was about to fall apart on that day in the studio—skinny as a spider, suffering from chest pains, nearing impotence, incontinent to the point he was wetting his bed every night—and yet when he sang “you’ll cry and cry, and try to sleep” it was enough to break anyone’s heart. “Nobody had a talent for making suffering enjoyable like Hank Williams,” the songwriter Kris Kristofferson would say twenty years later, of Hank’s portfolio in general but “Cheatin’ Heart” in particular.

  In a very real way, it was as though Hank was kissing off a world that had been hurtful from the beginning. If only Audrey and Lillie had been present in the studio for the last session, joining Billie Jean and Bobbie, it might have resembled a hillbilly version of the Last Supper: the martyr, surrounded by the women he had loved to one degree or another, saying a last bittersweet good-bye while death was at his door. When the sales from this final session were tallied and added to all the rest, Hank would have sold an astonishing ten million records in a recording career spanning little more than five years. That was in the middle of
the twentieth century, when America was a much smaller place, before sophisticated mass-market schemes placed the “product” in the laps of “consumers” with ever-increasing expendable incomes. He was, in a sense, hand-selling one record at a time through appearances at one-nighters in roadhouses and high school football stadiums and small-town auditoriums. Hank recorded a total of sixty-six songs, thirty-seven of them making the Billboard charts, and the most important number is that he had written fifty of them himself. By contrast, Elvis Presley never wrote a song. Two blue-collar country performers who did were Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash, each of them making records during lives that lasted far beyond Hank’s twenty-nine years, but they couldn’t come close to reaching Hank’s percentage of hits.

  Before he prepared for one of the biggest shows of his career, his own wedding, there were a couple of pieces of business to take care of. Billie Jean was still officially married to the young airman who had fathered her child, so Hank paid a lawyer to start the divorce proceedings. All along, he had been paying for Bobbie Jett’s upkeep at one of Lillie’s boardinghouses in Montgomery, but now it was time to face up to responsibility for the child she was due to deliver early in ’53. Although the wording of the agreement he had drawn up was contradictory (“Hank Williams may be the father of said child” later referred to “the father, Hank Williams”), he clearly was feeling his obligations when he flew to Montgomery and signed papers specific to the point of giving Bobbie a one-way plane ticket to California, without the baby, thirty days after its birth. Both Hank and Bobbie would have visitation rights while the child lived with Lillie and her husband, Bill Stone, and Hank would assume custody from age three to age five, when custody would be shared. Though heavy with child, Bobbie had been popping up at concerts and even at the recording session that day in Nashville, and the heat was on for Hank to get rid of her before he married Billie Jean.

  In New Orleans, a town that appreciates ceremony, this must have looked like the wedding of the year. Oscar Davis had concocted not one ceremony but two—a rehearsal in the afternoon and the real thing at night, at the Municipal Auditorium, admission ranging from $1 to $2.80, music by some Hayride members and Hank himself—and had talked a handful of retailers into kicking in some wedding gifts. Hank had invited Audrey to the wedding, out of pure spite, but when he began thinking she might really show up and cause a scene he and Billie and another couple drove thirty miles east of Shreveport to the town of Minden, following the Saturday night Hayride, for a civil ceremony with a justice of the peace, just to be sure. (They had borrowed a ’50 Ford from Billie’s brother, to throw Audrey off the scent in case she came and tried to ambush them, and they ran out of gas on the way back. Hank stood on the side of the road in his white cowboy outfit, hitching a ride, and when they were picked up he grandly invited the driver to spend the night with them, on their wedding night, but Billie squashed the idea.) The bride and groom flew into New Orleans on the morning of the big day, Sunday the nineteenth of October, and checked into the Jung Hotel on Canal Street, where Hank began drinking to celebrate. They had to rustle up another preacher when the one originally hired balked, on the grounds that they had already been officially married. A sellout crowd of seven thousand paying customers attended the matinee “rehearsal,” and the house was full again for the real thing that night. The Hayride’s Billy Walker had barely begun singing “Anything Your Heart Desires” when there was a commotion behind him. Hank, in a dark cowboy suit and white hat, was coming toward him, dragging along Billie Jean in her elaborate white wedding dress. “When ol’ Hank comes to git married,” he said, “he wants to git married.” It was showtime. They were married (again), Hank sang “I Could Never Be Ashamed of You,” and they would have flown to Cuba for their honeymoon if he hadn’t passed out from the champagne stashed backstage. Audrey, the only person from Nashville on the invitation list, was a no-show.

  The newly minted couple, Mr. and Mrs. Hank Williams, moved into a house in a new subdivision in Bossier City, the same suburb where they once had lived separate lives only four doors from each other; he as the swaggering star of the Hayride, she as a dreamy teenager. Billie Jean did the best she could: “He had never been held. I knew I had to be a lover and a mother to him. We wrestled, had picnics. I gave him a childhood. We held hands, and I’d sit on his lap. I wore short-shorts and T-shirts tied up in the front.” Unlike Audrey, she had no aspirations toward show business (“All I wanted was him”). She traveled with him when she could, always being proudly introduced to the crowd, and Hank loved it when she strolled through hotel lobbies barefoot like a Daisy Mae. Hank’s weight and composure were wildly fluctuating, and he always looked healthier when he had eschewed whiskey long enough for Billie’s mother to fatten him up with some home cooking. Billie tried to ration the booze, one beer before a show and “two of the coldest ones you ever had” afterward, but that didn’t last very long. Few people beyond the experts—sociologists, psychologists, and health-care workers—have much of an idea of how to deal with an alcoholic, and Billie was in over her head.

  Early in October, a week or so before the wedding, Hank had met a man he thought was the answer to his problems. He was in Oklahoma City for a Hayride package show, drinking and complaining of chest pains, when somebody told him of one Horace Raphol “Toby” Marshall, a “doctor” who specialized in treating alcoholics. After serving two prison terms, for armed robbery and then for passing a forged check, Toby Marshall had bought a bogus diploma and set himself up as an alcoholic therapist, vowing as a recovering alcoholic to devote himself “as unselfishly as possible to helping others as I could.” He was a quack, no doubt about it, conveniently equipped with official-looking prescription pads. Commiserating with Hank as one alcoholic to another, Marshall convinced Hank that he could be cured through empathy and pills. The trouble was, the drug he had in mind was chloral hydrate, a powerful sedative that could be fatal when mixed with alcohol (it was used, in fact, for making Mickey Finns). Hank bought the whole act and hired Marshall to be his personal physician, on a $300-a-week retainer. He had found the ultimate enabler, a doctor who could get him any drug he needed for whatever ailed him, whether it be the bad back or the chest pains or the plain old lonesomes.

  Through November and into December, the final months of his life, it was as though Hank was riding a roller coaster to hell. The travel was grueling—the gulf coast, east Texas, southern Louisiana—and he would be cold sober for a week before “somebody got to him,” as the bookers and performers explained it, and he fell off the wagon. Tommy Hill, a fiddler who traveled with Hank during much of that time, said, “He didn’t miss that many shows. If somebody said, ‘We’ve got a show to do today,’ he wouldn’t drink, but if somebody slipped him a drink it was all over. He’d wilt, just wilt from booze. His blood was full of alcohol and he couldn’t drink anymore. He was a sick man. When he crossed the line, he was a tyrant; the language, the lack of respect for anybody. He knew he had a problem, but he couldn’t leave it alone.” A couple of times, Hank’s drunken misbehavior nearly led to riots: the night when Hank responded to jeers by saying, “Now you’ve seen ol’ Hank,” and leaving the scene; and another time in a Catholic school auditorium when the crowd came up on the stage to get him and chased him to the limo before he managed to escape with the aid of the police. He began missing dates at the Hayride, or showing up drunk, testing the patience of even Horace Logan. Three times in the first eight weeks of the marriage to Billie Jean, Hank was admitted to the North Louisiana Sanitarium in Shreveport.

  Two days after getting out of the sanitarium again, on Saturday night, December 13, Hank performed at the Hayride. Immediately after the show, he got into a Pontiac coupe with Tommy and Goldie Hill, brother and sister, who were headed toward Houston to begin a series of dates. He was scrunched down in the backseat, drinking, and Tommy was paying no attention to his passenger until he heard a frightening growl. He looked back to see that Hank had passed out, his head between his knees, and w
asn’t breathing. They were in the middle of Nacogdoches, Texas, at two o’clock in the morning. “Goldie was hysterical. I stopped the car, dragged Hank out, stood him up, grabbed him around the waist, and began bouncing him up and down until he started breathing. The windpipe had been cut off.” Hill had unconsciously performed what amounted to the Heimlich maneuver, opening the air passage so Hank could breathe. They drove on to Houston and dropped Hank at the Rice Hotel.