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  Meanwhile, in Canton, Ohio, the realization that Hank had really died this time was setting in. Many of the principals— entertainers, promoters, even the quack doctor Toby Marshall—had shown up in Charleston only to find that the New Year’s Eve show had been canceled due to bad weather and had driven through the night to Canton. When they arrived at the auditorium in the late morning to set up for the two o’clock show, they were met at the door by Bamford, who broke the news. Few took it harder than Don Helms, the steel guitarist, who had been Hank’s best friend since 1944. There was a full house of four thousand paying customers in the auditorium when the emcee, an Akron disc jockey, stepped to the microphone. “This morning,” he said, “on his way to Canton to do this show, Hank Williams died in his car.” There were some sprinkles of laughter in the audience, from people who had heard many excuses for his no-shows in recent years. “This is no joke, ladies and gentlemen,” he continued. “Hank Williams is dead.” Now there was open weeping, even crying from the cast members behind the curtain, and the lights were dimmed and a spotlight was thrown in a circle on the stage where Hank might have been standing, and then the audience heard the cries of Don Helms’s steel guitar playing the opening bars of “I Saw the Light.”

  And then the vultures came. First to arrive in Oak Hill was Lillie, who had flown up from Montgomery with Charles Carr’s father—when the Charleston airport was still fogged in, they had to fly to Roanoke, Virginia, and hire a cab for the perilous three-hour drive over the mountains to Oak Hill—and she promptly commandeered the Cadillac and Hank’s belongings: costumes, boots, guitars, jewelry, money, even his wedding ring. Somebody had already made off with his white fedora and a pistol. When Billie Jean, the grieving young widow, arrived from Shreveport with her father, a police sergeant, there was nothing they could do but fly back home and await the funeral. Audrey didn’t make it, but already she and Lillie were bonding in an unlikely conspiracy against Billie Jean in a power struggle that was sure to evolve over Hank’s remains; most important, over the staggering onrush of money about to pile up in royalties from his songs. Toby Marshall drove a rental car down from Canton and had the audacity to present Lillie and then Billie Jean a bill of $736.39 for “services rendered,” which each in her outrage threw back in his face. Hank had left no will, which meant Lon would be designated as executor of the estate, but when Lillie filled out the death certificate in Oak Hill she listed the father as “deceased.”

  Late on the afternoon of January 2, 1953, following a hearse holding Hank’s body dressed in a white stage outfit, the powder-blue Cadillac convertible, with Charles Carr and his father in front and Lillie and the shameless “doctor” Toby Marshall in the rear, began the long overnight drive back home to Montgomery. Oncoming truckers, taking a guess, tapped their air horns in salute. It was reminiscent of the mournful last rides home of two other recent American icons, when distraught citizens had lined the railroad tracks for hundreds of miles as the bodies of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Jimmie Rodgers, “the Singing Brakeman,” were towed to rest. It rained almost all the way as the tandem made its way southward, tracing the route Hank and Carr had made days earlier during the storms, and whenever they pulled in for gas or eats people crowded around the hearse with its West Virginia license tags. “Hank in there?” they would ask, for there had been great outpourings of grief all over the country since the news, almost as if a head of state had died, and they couldn’t keep themselves from trying to peer through the drawn curtains for one final look at the greatest man who ever sang a country song.

  The first weekend of the new year, 1953, broke cold and bright over Lillie’s boardinghouse in Montgomery, which became the center of everything. Hank’s body lay in state there (after morticians, per Lillie’s request, had to get back into the coffin and break the ankles so he could be buried with his boots on), to be viewed by the dozens of family and friends rushing in for the funeral service on Sunday at the city auditorium. Fred and Wesley Rose drove down from Nashville to serve as pallbearers, and a dozen stars of the Opry were flown in on a charter to perform at the public ceremony along with the Drifting Cowboys. Then came the clamorous arrivals of the two wives, Audrey and Billie Jean, creating a madness of its own in the close quarters of the cramped two-story frame house on South McDonough Street: after a frantic scramble to find what scribbled lyrics Hank might have left behind, a treasure hunt involving Audrey and Billie Jean and Lillie and sister Irene, a sheaf of them was found by Lillie in Billie Jean’s bedroom while she was in the bathroom and was eventually turned over to Fred Rose. The “deceased” Lon Williams, still hurting from having missed Hank’s impromptu visit a week earlier, had five dollars in his pocket when he arrived, having hitched a ride in from McWilliams—uninvited to his son’s funeral—and spent it all on a bouquet of flowers. There, at the boardinghouse, he and Lillie had it out over who would become executor of Hank’s estate, and he caved in: if that’s what it would take to finally get her out of his life, he said, she could have it. Meanwhile, in another of Lillie’s boardinghouses across town, the pregnancy of Bobbie Jett was nearing fruition.

  On Sunday, Hank’s funeral became the biggest spectacle to hit Montgomery since the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederacy on the steps of the Alabama state capitol in 1861. Some twenty thousand people milled around outside the auditorium, fewer than three thousand of them allowed inside to view the body in its open casket (about two hundred blacks crowded the balcony). Fitfully seated in the front rows were the three dueling women, wearing black and openly wailing, and on the stage were the Drifting Cowboys and the Opry stars and even a black quartet known as the Southwind Singers. It was all Don Helms could do to contain himself as he played his mournful steel guitar from the stage, looking down at Hank’s stone corpse in the casket below, while Roy Acuff and Ernest Tubb and Red Foley sang their good-byes: “I Saw the Light” and “Beyond the Sunset” and “Peace in the Valley.” The preacher opened his remarks by saying that Hank Williams had “just answered the call of the last roundup.” And they trekked off to witness Hank’s burial in a hillside cemetery in the shadow of the capitol, beneath an ornate headstone featuring a forlorn, carved cowboy hat.

  Better Dead than Alive

  During his lifetime, there were only four mentions of Hank Williams in the Nashville newspapers. That was partly because the Banner and the Tennessean more or less left the Opry and the burgeoning music business to their own devices in those days—it was only “hillbilly” music, after all, something the pooh-bahs of the “Athens of the South” still held with contempt—but there was more to it than that. Only three years and seven months had passed between his debut on the Opry and his death, at the age of twenty-nine, and it was as though he had come and gone so quickly, like an unidentified comet streaking through the night sky, that the sheer power of Hank’s coming had barely sunk in on the city. Even the people in the industry seemed slow to pick up on it. There were the anticipated expressions of homage from the music-makers in town (“We’ll never see his likes again,” said Jim Denny of the Opry), while a few dared to agree with Jerry Byrd, the steel guitarist who had suffered Hank’s inconsistencies: “He did as much to hurt country music as he did to help it.” It wasn’t until reports began pouring in from the American outback, from Cajun shacks in the Louisiana swamps to mining towns in Appalachia to migrant workers’ camps in the San Joaquin Valley, that the idea began to register: the working classes had lost their poet, a proletarian prophet who had touched their souls with his simple heartbreaking lyrics. A traveling salesman out of Atlanta remembered stopping at a diner near Bristol on that New Year’s morning and seeing his waitress fall apart at the news as she was pouring his coffee; a memory that led him to begin work on a play about Hank, fifty years later.

  That was Hank’s true audience, the waitresses and the route salesmen and the farmers and the truck drivers of the world, and they began to be heard from almost immediately in their clamor to buy his
records in the aftermath of his passing. “The marketing of the Hank Williams legend began with Wesley and Fred Rose on the drive to Montgomery for the funeral,” said Hugh Cherry, an influential country disc jockey at the time. The Roses and MGM had gone into overdrive to produce Hank’s last recordings, and four in a row reached the top of Billboard’s country charts; the first being “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive,” a humorous novelty belying its ominous title. Of his ten No.1 records, four of them came in the six months following his death. The people had voted, but the industry would lag behind for years that stretched into decades. It wasn’t until 1961 that Hank, along with Fred Rose and Jimmie Rodgers, was elected as a charter member of the new Country Music Hall of Fame. His home state of Alabama was even slower to grant recognition; a statue of Hank didn’t go up in Montgomery until 1991, and the state finally got around to honoring him in ’97 by designating a thirteen-mile stretch along I-65 between the Greenville and Georgiana exits as Hank’s “Lost Highway.” There were a lot of self-serving memoirs printed as booklets or pamphlets, by family members or fans or fellow musicians, but the first bona fide hardcover book by a knowledgeable independent writer wasn’t published until 1970. The world is still waiting for a definitive movie about Hank’s life; the one attempt, Your Cheatin’ Heart, of 1964, turning out to be an almost comical fantasy starring a bronzed playboy Hollywood actor named George Hamilton and authorized by Audrey, who made of herself a tragic heroine and allowed no mention of Billie Jean Jones in the script.

  There were signs toward the end that Hank himself seemed to believe he might be better off dead than alive, and some of those closest to him surely felt that way when he actually took his leave. He had certainly stretched the patience of the people in the business—promoters like Oscar Davis, fellow musicians like Byrd, executives like the Opry’s Denny, even the devoted record producer and surrogate father Fred Rose—but none had paid such prices as Lillie and Audrey. From the very instant of Hank’s death, those two formed an alliance to make sure they got what they figured they had coming. Hank had left behind a gold mine, especially with the portfolio of songs he had written, and it promised to increase as the years passed and his legend grew to almost mythical proportions. Lillie had devoted twenty-nine hard years to nurturing her son, for better or for worse, Audrey nine, and few would contest that they were the rightful heirs to the fortune. The first thing they did after the burial was to box out Billie Jean, who had put in only three months as his bride, coercing her into accepting a $30,000 payoff to give up any future rights as Hank’s widow. (For a brief period, there were two “Mrs. Hank Williamses” working the road, Audrey and Billie Jean, but the buyout quickly ended that maudlin chapter.) As for the baby girl delivered by Bobbie Jett two days after Hank’s burial, Lillie obeyed the papers Hank and Bobbie had signed: she adopted the child and sent Bobbie on her way, ultimately to California, never to be heard from again.

  Hank’s name stayed in the news for the next couple of years. Two weeks after the burial, wild rumors began in Montgomery when passersby saw workmen digging up Hank’s coffin and moving it by lantern light in the middle of the night, but as it turned out Lillie had simply bought a newer and bigger space as the family plot. In March, when Toby Marshall’s wife died of mysterious circumstances, he was hauled into court; the ensuing investigation and hearings led to a side trip into Marshall’s part in Hank’s death, the bogus doctor being so bold as to claim it was a suicide, but the only thing they could nail him on was a parole violation. As MGM released new recordings, each of them zooming to the top of the charts, Hank’s worth was increasing month by month, filling Audrey’s bank account. Soon she became quite the party animal, insinuating herself wherever there were gatherings of music moguls and pickers and up-and-coming wannabe singers (who all understood that marriage was out of the question as long as she remained the single, grieving widow), and the first signs were appearing of her overuse of the drugs and the booze that ultimately would do her in. Hank was, indeed, of more value to her dead than alive. Hank, Jr., only three years old at the time of his daddy’s death, had to have it explained to him who these people were parking on the street and brazenly trying to peek into the windows of the house on Franklin Road at all hours. Reports came from Montgomery of fans flocking to the cemetery, leaving flowers and even bottles of whiskey at the new gravesite. When Fred Rose died of a heart attack in December of ’54, and Lillie died in her sleep in February of ’55, it was as though only then had Hank finally passed.

  And then, when a teenager named Elvis Presley came out with his first record in the summer of 1955, a new question arose: Had he lived, would Hank have been able to survive Elvis? An entirely new generation had arrived in America, the baby boomers, kids born at the end of the Second World War, and as they neared their teen years it became evident that country music was their parents’ music, not theirs. Relatively affluent, facing a promising new world free of war and economic depression, they were looking for something fresh that they could call their own. The grandfatherly president, retired general Dwight Eisenhower, wasn’t it, nor was Hank Williams. The dead Hank was to them just another old fart whose time had passed, a drunken hillbilly who whined about “pitchers from life’s other side” and cheating hearts and being so lonesome he could cry. They much preferred this new guy, Elvis, with his pegged trousers and pompadour hairdo and a sneer on his lips and a sensuous wiggle to his hips. They loved the anarchistic thrust of his music because, if for no other reason, it pissed off their parents. Elvis was a threat; Hank was passé.

  The coming of Elvis and rock ‘n’ roll nearly swamped country music. The number of full-time country radio stations plummeted, many of the faithful outlets like WCKY and even the Mexican border stations abandoning Hank for Elvis, and almost overnight the glory years of country music in the late forties and early fifties became history. The party was over for Ernest Tubb and Webb Pierce and Lefty Frizzell and the other great roadhouse troubadours of their time—the only ones who survived were performers like Johnny Cash, for instance, country “rockabillies” from the tag end of the era who could meet Elvis’s new sound halfway—and soon, by the sixties, country music as it once had been known could be found only on “golden oldies” radio portions or the all-night truckers’ shows or, God bless it, the Grand Ole Opry. Late in that decade, with rock ‘n’ roll flying high, producers like Chet Atkins, a technical whiz who had sometimes backed Hank on guitar, responded with something called “the Nashville sound”: at once simple but slick, soothing pop music with a steel guitar and a y’all behind it, using echo chambers and full string sections recruited from the Nashville Symphony. New releases of Hank’s tunes, either heavily orchestrated overdubs or new cuts by pop singers, were thin imitations that pleased neither the rock ‘n’ roll kids nor the old-timers.

  Even Hank’s own son eventually turned against his daddy’s music, if only as a matter of personal survival. Hank, Jr., was cursed by the name from the start, and his mother made things worse even while the boy was still tooling around Nashville in the convertible in which his father had died. Audrey was calling every shot in the poor kid’s life, forcing Hank’s music on him—she booked him for his debut at fourteen in the auditorium at Canton, Ohio, on the anniversary of the concert Hank never made—and for a while he put on an eerie act: the house lights would go down, an image of Hank, Sr., would appear on a screen, and Junior, in a spangled white cowboy suit, would sing a medley of “songs my daddy left me.” (The most chilling of all came in the late eighties when a lost demo was found of Hank’s “There’s a Tear in My Beer,” the ultimate drinking song, and technology enabled father and son to sing it “together” on a video.) The boy was himself screwed up on drugs and booze, fighting this career foisted on him all the way, until at twenty he nearly died in a mountain-climbing accident and determined, while laid up in the hospital, that he was going to become his own man. Thus was born the Hank, Jr., who survived: a bearded, dope-smoking, hell-raising biker of a goo
d old boy who attracted a frightening following of similar types who rolled in on their Harleys draped in Confederate flags. “I don’t have to do this to make a living, you know,” he liked to tell his fans at concerts nearly fifty years after his father’s death. “Every month I get a check for forty thousand dollars from songs my daddy wrote.”

  He would have been getting twice that from royalties had things gone differently for the baby born two days after Hank’s burial. Bobbie Jett had named her daughter Antha Belle Jett, giving up all rights and leaving the scene as per agreement with Hank, but a month later, when the girl was adopted by Lillie, she was renamed Cathy Yvonne (from “Jambalaya”) Stone. When Lillie died in 1955, she was adopted again, this time by a couple in Mobile who named her Catherine Louise Deupree. All records were sealed and Cathy was about to graduate from the University of Alabama, doing just fine and blissfully unaware of her heritage, until the day she turned twenty-one, in 1974, when she was notified that a check for $2,000 from the estate of a Mrs. Stone was being held for her in Montgomery. She spent the next fifteen years uncovering the secrets of her life, and finally in the late eighties she and her new lawyer-husband managed to satisfy the courts that she was, indeed, the illegitimate daughter of Hank Williams, Sr. This time she renamed herself, and soon she was touring as “Jett Williams,” singing her daddy’s songs and sharing his royalties with her dear half brother; creating yet another cut of the pie, Billie Jean having won a court decision when copyrights came up for renewal in the mid-seventies. Neither Hank, Jr., nor his own son, Hank III, a punk-rocking wraith with a remarkable physical resemblance to his wasted grandfather, was amused. But that was it, as far as anybody knew, the end of the line of succession.