Lovesick Blues Read online

  He was supposed to work Cook’s Hoedown Club in Houston that night, but he had continued drinking and switched hotels, and nobody could find him. Panic set in. Toby Marshall was summoned from Oklahoma City, as was the booker out of Austin, and when they finally found him drunk at another hotel they went to work on him: Marshall gave him some beer, injected a drug that made him throw it up, poured some black coffee in him, then gave him some Dexedrine tablets. Before a sellout crowd, Hank was booed off the stage. At intermission they pumped him full of coffee, but he was booed off the stage again. He called Billie Jean and told her he had never been sicker. In Victoria, Texas, on Tuesday, he had what might have been a heart attack and missed the show entirely. This time, the handlers called Lillie in Montgomery and had her flown in to see what she could do. Hank began to come around, performing at a huge hall in Dallas on Wednesday and at a roadhouse in Snook on Thursday, and Lillie was with him in the car as the troupe rolled into Austin for a big show on Friday that would close the brief tour before they were to head back to Shreveport for the Saturday night Hayride.

  What happened the night at the Skyline Club became the stuff of legend. The only advertising had been the usual country-radio spots and a one-column ad in the local paper, but a sellout crowd of about one thousand was lining the walls when the curtains opened. Lillie and Toby Marshall, new best friends united in trying to save Hank, were in the audience. Hank wasn’t in the best of shape—disheveled, sweating copiously, his nose running from a cold he’d had for weeks—but he was sober and pumped. Tommy Hill performed, then his sister Goldie, and it was while the Texas singer Billy Walker was doing his show that Hank began prodding Tommy, the emcee: “Get him off, get him off, I’m ready to go on.” Normally, Hank would have performed a forty-five-minute medley that would lead to the intermission. But there would be no intermission this night. Once he strolled onto the stage and bent over the microphone, strumming his guitar, weaving like a cobra, they couldn’t get him off. He sang every song he knew—more than once, if the bellowing crowd wanted it—going for three solid hours without a break. “It was,” Tommie Hill said, “the best show I ever witnessed.” It was also Hank Williams’s last hurrah.

  Lost Highway

  Not wanting to linger in Austin after the show, Hank and Lillie made the six-hour drive to Shreveport through the bleak stretches of east Texas, arriving in time to awaken Billie Jean in the early-morning hours of Saturday. Lillie promptly sought out Horace Logan to advise him that Hank was truly sick, couldn’t make the Hayride that night, and she was taking him home to Montgomery for a rest during the holidays. Logan had no choice but to grant Hank a leave of absence, reminding Lillie that he was paying Hank enough money to enable him to fly back in order to fulfill his obligations. Soon the three of them, Hank and Lillie and Billie Jean, were piling into the car for the long haul across Louisiana and Mississippi and on into Montgomery. There was no way Hank could drink under those conditions, of course, but his mind was swirling with contradictions. He had left behind a maddening trail of mixed signals—that he was done with the Hayride and headed back to the Opry; that he was going to take a cure in the Caribbean; that he was going to divorce Billie Jean; that he’d found another farm to buy in Franklin; even that he and Audrey might get back together—but the only thing anybody knew for sure was that he had two big shows booked for the holidays: at seven o’clock on New Year’s Eve in Charleston, West Virginia, and a two o’clock matinee in Canton, Ohio, on New Year’s Day.

  It was no picnic for Billie Jean, being holed up with Hank in his bedroom at Lillie’s place. The two women had been speaking to each other only to be civil ever since Lillie learned that Billie Jean had talked Hank out of lending his mother money to buy yet another boardinghouse (she already had two, and Bobbie Jett was stashed at the other, riding out her pregnancy). Hank was in terrible shape, weakened by the flu and his recent bouts with the bottle and the painkillers he was taking for his aching back, and between visits from old friends like Braxton Schuffert (to whom he boasted he was booked up solid until May) he was trying with little success to sleep, often flopped on top of the sheets with his clothes on. This wasn’t Billie Jean’s town, and there was little she could do except make a run to a drugstore to pick up another prescription for chloral hydrate ordered up by Toby Marshall after a phone call from Lillie. They did make the rounds one night, when Hank got drunk, took to dancing on the counter, and hit Billie Jean in the face when she tried to make him stop. (Obviously, she struck back; Hank is bruised about the head in nearly every snapshot from the final months of the year, dating back to the day of the wedding ceremonies in New Orleans.) Through all of this, Hank managed to slip away long enough to pay a doctor in advance for the delivery of Bobbie Jett’s child and to leave fifty dollars for expenses with the cousin, Marie Harvell, who ran the boardinghouse where Bobbie was staying.

  When he and Billie Jean got into the convertible for a run down to Georgiana, it was almost as if Hank had a premonition that his days were numbered, that he was running out of time to say some last farewells. They visited his aunt and uncle, Erleen and Taft Skipper, who ran a country store, spending a couple of nights with them. Billie Jean made a strong impression on Hank’s kin, not only with her fresh beauty but with her willingness to help cook and wash dishes afterward (Audrey, whenever she had come around, seldom even got out of the car), and at one point Hank sang for them a song he had been carrying around for some time, “The Log Train,” a tribute to his father’s days in the lumber camps. He decided he wanted to see Lon on Christmas Day, so he and Billie Jean drove up to McWilliams that morning. Nobody was home when they got there—there was no way to call ahead, since Lon didn’t have a phone—and when Hank learned they had gone to Selma for the day he left a note and a gift-wrapped five-pound box of candy on the porch. (Lon was so heartbroken after his son’s death that he saved the note and wrapping paper for years.) Hank and Billie Jean then drove up to Pine Apple, across the highway from Greenville, and had dinner with Lon’s sister Bertha before returning to Montgomery that night. They had tickets for Saturday’s Blue-Gray Game, an annual college football all-star exhibition, but it was a cold and windy day so they left before halftime. The next night, Sunday the twenty-eighth, marked the very last time Hank Williams would perform in public. It could hardly be called a concert—more like singing for his supper—when he appeared as a guest at the annual holiday party of the American Federation of Musicians’ local, at the Elite Café (“Where the Elite Meet to Eat”) in downtown Montgomery. When he had finished his steak, Hank, in a dark blue business suit, slung a guitar over his shoulder, stood in front of a microphone at the head table, and sang four of his songs: “Jambalaya,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” “You Win Again,” and “Lovesick Blues.” The 130 members and guests, though primarily involved in jazz and classical and pop music, and not knowing or caring that much for country, gave him a big hand.

  Needing a driver for the long haul to West Virginia and Ohio for the holiday shows, but finding that old buddies like Schuffert were tied to day jobs, Hank had settled on the teenaged son of a friend who owned a local taxi company. Charles Carr had just turned eighteen, was a freshman at Alabama Poly-technic Institute (now Auburn University), had chauffeured Hank before, and could use the $400 to finance the entire coming term. Hank was dressed and ready to go when Carr showed up at the boardinghouse shortly after noon on December 30—crisp blue serge suit, white fedora and cowboy boots, a navy blue overcoat—and the two of them loaded up the trunk of the big-finned powder-blue Cadillac convertible with the things he would need: guitar and stage costumes, a change of clothes, songbooks and photos and records for sale. Billie Jean was there, still offering to accompany Hank on the trip, but it was finally settled that she would fly home to Shreveport and he would call her when he returned to Montgomery. It seemed to Carr that they would never get onto the open road. First they stopped to pick up a six-pack of Falstaff beer to keep Hank company, and when Hank spotted a friend in the p
arking lot of a diner, a saxophone player named Leo Hudson, who had been at the AMF banquet at the Elite, he insisted Carr stop while they chatted for more than an hour. (Quite unknown to Hank, a worried Lillie was on the phone to Toby Marshall in Oklahoma City, getting him to agree to fly to Charleston and stick with Hank until he got back to Montgomery.) At about 3:30 in the afternoon, under dark and ominous skies, with rain turning to sleet, they finally got onto Highway 31, headed north to Birmingham.

  Although the unlikely pair made jovial travel companions— Carr said he couldn’t make any sense out of the Cajun patois in “Jambalaya,” and Hank, riding shotgun beside him, merely shrugged and began singing a cappella Red Foley’s dark “Midnight”—the trip seemed to be cursed. It was dark when they reached Birmingham. Looking for the Tutwiler Hotel, Birmingham’s finest, Carr was stopped by a cop for making an illegal U-turn and told to move on. They settled for lesser digs at the Redmont, dreaming of dinner and bedtime, but within minutes of checking in they were found by two randy female fans who spent a couple of hours cavorting between Hank’s and Carr’s rooms. They were late getting away the next morning after breakfast at the hotel—only a hundred miles covered from Montgomery to Birmingham, with 580 miles still to go to Charleston, a near-impossible day’s drive in good weather to make it by seven o’clock—and here it was New Year’s Eve with winter storms sweeping the South. They stopped in Fort Payne, Alabama, for a shave (and a pint of whiskey for Hank), and then they lunched at Chattanooga, where Hank punched Tony Bennett’s version of “Cold, Cold Heart” on the jukebox before buying sandwiches and then leaving a fifty-dollar tip for a waiter who reverently called him “Mr. Williams.” Then they were off again, and now there was a serious storm in progress. When they got to Knoxville they knew they would never make it to Charleston unless they flew. With snow blanketing the southern Appalachians, they got on a plane at the Knoxville airport at 3:30 in the afternoon, bound for Charleston, but after trying to poke through the blizzard the pilot turned around and returned to Knoxville. Nighttime had fallen in the Smoky Mountains. Hank was worn out, partly from the beer and nips of bourbon and the residue of alcohol that by now was nearly always present in his system, and he and Carr arrived at the Andrew Johnson Hotel at seven o’clock, about the time the show would have been opening in Charleston. Two porters had to assist Hank to the room they shared.

  The teenaged driver now had a genuine crisis on his hands. They were more than five hundred miles from Canton, up in northern Ohio, and he assumed the weather was much the same between there and Knoxville. The first thing he did was order two steaks from room service, and Hank took only a few bites before going to sleep, finally rolling off the bed and falling onto the floor. When Hank began hiccuping, sending his body into convulsions, Carr’s call to the front desk summoned a doctor, who came to the room and injected two shots, one of vitamin B6 and one of B12. Then Carr managed to contact the promoter, one A. V. Bamford, who told him the Charleston show had been canceled and strongly advised that they get back into the car and continue driving to Canton; the two o’clock matinee was a sellout, four thousand tickets already sold at $2.50 each, and if Hank didn’t make it he would owe $1,000 on a penalty clause. The doctor who had given Hank the vitamin shots said he was okay to travel, so at 10:30 a porter came to the room with a wheelchair, sat Hank in it, and delivered him to the car. Hank managed to get out of the wheelchair and crawl into the backseat without anyone’s help, cuddling up with the blanket Carr wrapped around him, and off they lurched into the storm.

  Leaning forward in the driver’s seat, peering into the mixture of snow and sleet, Carr hadn’t driven twenty miles up Highway 11 West before he nearly crashed head-on into a Tennessee patrol car while trying to pass a bus, and had to follow the trooper into the town of Rutledge to pay a seventy-five-dollar fine to a justice of the peace. The trooper asked who was in the backseat and was he all right; Carr told him it was Hank Williams, he was okay, just sleeping off a beer. Forging ahead, dog-tired, Carr stopped to gas up in Bristol, on the Tennessee-Virginia line. There was an all-night diner across the highway, next to a cab stand, and he got the idea to grab something to eat and look for a relief driver to help him. “You want something to eat?” he asked Hank, who had gotten out of the car to stretch, and Hank said all he wanted to do was sleep. It was approaching midnight when Carr was directed to the diner and found a cabdriver who had just finished his shift, one Donald Surface, and he hired him on the spot. Carr couldn’t sleep, not with a stranger at the wheel of a car carrying such valuable cargo, but at least he was able to relieve the tension of driving. A couple of hours later, past one o’clock in the morning, he paid Surface twenty-five dollars and let him out at Bluefield, the first town in West Virginia. The snow and sleet had stopped and now, with little more than three hundred miles to go, Canton seemed doable. Carr felt a certain elation as he got back behind the wheel: the traffic was light, nothing but open road lay ahead, the Cadillac’s heater and radio were in working order, Hank was finally asleep in the backseat, and he could relax. With luck, they could make it by daybreak. He was looking forward to the afternoon show in Canton, where Hank would be the headliner.

  The last time he had seen Hank move and heard him speak was at the service station back in Bristol just before midnight, when Hank said all he wanted to do was sleep and promptly crawled back into the backseat, and Carr presumed Hank was in a deep sleep as the two-lane highway twisted away from Bluefield, tires humming, telephone poles zipping past in the glare of the headlights. He happened to look over his shoulder for a glance at the form in the backseat—Hank was stretched out on his back, his hands folded across his chest, nothing unusual—and when he noticed that the blanket had fallen away he reached over with his right hand, still driving with his left, to fumble for the blanket and cover Hank with it. It was then that he inadvertently touched Hank’s hand. It was stone cold. Terror hung in Carr’s throat. This was more than he could handle alone. He needed help. Seeing a sign reading “Oak Hill 6,” his heart pumping furiously, he floored the Cadillac. At the edge of the tiny town there was a cut-rate gas station. He brought the car to a screeching stop, rushed inside the station, and asked the old man on duty if he would come take a look at the fellow in the backseat. “Looks like you’ve got a problem,” the man drawled after he had done so, and directed Carr to the Oak Hill Hospital. There, he parked around back, walked into the hospital, and asked two interns to come out and check on his passenger. They followed him to the car and needed only a glance at Hank’s rigid body. “He’s dead, all right,” one of them said. “But isn’t there something you can do to revive him?” said Carr. “It’s too late,” he was told. “The man’s dead.”

  The interns hoisted the lifeless body from the backseat of the Cadillac, one holding it by the armpits and the other by the booted feet, and laid it out on a stainless-steel table inside the emergency room. While a doctor was being summoned, Carr went to a phone in the lobby of the hospital to call his father in Montgomery with the news. Just before daybreak, an intern officially pronounced Hank Williams dead, guessing that he might have actually expired around one o’clock in the morning on that New Year’s Day. Carr was exhausted and understandably distraught, but the police who had arrived wrote down that he seemed “nervous,” and when they noted that Hank’s head was bruised they rushed to a judgment that foul play might be involved. Soon the body was being moved to Tyree Funeral Home, across from the hospital, where an autopsy was performed by a doctor who had been called in from the larger hospital in Beckley, a Russian barely fluent in English. Blood samples were put in a bottle, some internal organs in a package, and the state trooper who was directed to rush them to a lab in Charleston for analysis vomited at the sight. The doctor almost casually noted that there were needle marks on the arms and that Hank had recently been severely beaten and kicked in the groin. No drugs were found in the blood, just traces of alcohol. A coroner’s jury later confirmed that Hank died of “a severe heart condition a
nd hemorrhage,” and let it go at that.

  So much for small-town police work and medical attention in the southern outback, in that time and during the early-morning hours of a holiday. Had they fully understood who they were dealing with, had any inkling of the repercussions Hank Williams’s passing would bring, they surely would have been more thorough about the autopsy. Needle marks? A “trace” of alcohol, but no mention of the deadly chloral hydrate? Evidence of a recent beating? Carr was “nervous”? Precisely when did Hank die? The police and medical personnel left enough half-answered questions to allow the most spurious rumors to fester after the death. It’s quite possible that Hank Williams had almost literally died of a broken heart, that his frail body had simply given out, but suspicions about what really happened that night would still be rattling around a half century later. Hundreds of songs would be written about Hank, dozens of them focusing on the night he died. Smarting from the early implications that he might be a suspect, Carr would go years before he would talk about it; and even then he would complain, with reason, that people kept getting it wrong. The legend quickly outgrew the vague facts.

  As the sun rose over the Blue Ridge on New Year’s Day and word spread of Hank’s death, there was a swirl of activity. Lillie dispatched a telegram to her daughter, Irene—“Come at once Hank is dead”—and then called Charles Carr in Oak Hill to say, “Don’t let anything happen to the car.” Billie Jean began screaming and crying when she heard, but soon she was calling Carr with the same message about the car. Audrey had been partying on New Year’s Eve with the wife of the promoter, A. V. Bamford, at a posh club in Nashville, and the fate of the powder-blue Cadillac was on her mind as well. Carr dutifully drove the car to the Pure Oil station in Oak Hill, where it was briefly impounded before being moved to the local Ford dealership, and then he tried to catch a couple of hours’ sleep in a suite at the funeral home. He had become something of a star-crossed celebrity in Oak Hill, the teenaged driver at the center of this terrible tragedy, and sympathetic townsfolk did their best to soften his grief: “An important man in town was throwing a New Year’s Day buffet at his house, and I was invited. They were really nice people, everybody was, and I was treated like a king. I even watched some of the bowl games on television.”