Lovesick Blues Read online

  The question of whether Hank would have weathered the coming of Elvis, had he lived to see it, is a moot point, hinging on the wildest conjecture. He had shown some signs in his last year or two of composing tunes that would meet the new criteria—“Kaw-liga” and “Jambalaya” were, after all, light entertainments with a catchy beat—but at heart a Hank Williams song depended on themes drawn from despair and disappointment. Young Hiram was a child of the Depression and the war years, when everybody was suffering, and his music reflected that. America had gotten enough of all that when the fifties arrived, with its newfound muscle and hope for a brighter future, and the time had come to celebrate. “Jailhouse Rock” and “Blue Suede Shoes,” noisy blatherings whose bouncy lyrics were beside the point, fit the bill. Had Hank miraculously survived to compete against Elvis and the waves of other rock-and-rollers, we can only guess whether he might have succeeded. The odds say no. He was too much a poet for his particular time, and that time had passed. His death while at the top of his game was, as the saying goes, a good career move.

  Throughout the decades since, the coming of a new year had always brought a special chill to the millions of his fans around the world. Charles Carr, who grew up to become a successful dealer in real estate, had learned to leave his cell phone connected in Montgomery as the clock ticked toward midnight on New Year’s Eve, waiting for the calls sure to come from people who just wanted to talk to him about that surreal night of the snowstorms when Hank passed away in the backseat of the Cadillac, and he took a record number of them on the last day of 2002. Marking the fiftieth anniversary of Hank’s death, the year 2003 would see an outpouring of commemorations and reexaminations of the life and music of the man who was, to most fans of a certain age, the only country singer and songwriter who ever really counted. It promised to be a busy year not only for Hank’s son and daughter and grandson (no other members of the immediate family survive, including Audrey, who died in 1975) but everybody else with the most tenuous connections to the legend: Drifting Cowboys, natives of south Alabama, Nashville musicians, even the handful of Hank impersonators roaming the land. Just released were a photo album and an expensive boxed set of every recording Hank left behind; coming up were paperback reissues of some of the Hank biographies; Hank, Jr., and Hank III would host the televised portion of the Opry on the first Saturday night of the year (a special guest being Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne’s eighty-two-year-old son); and cable TV’s Country Music Television was releasing another documentary on Hank’s life and times. In the spring, a musical entitled Hank Williams: Lost Highway was to open Off Broadway in Manhattan.

  The year was kicked off shortly after dawn on the first day of January at the Williams family plot in Montgomery, on the hill adjacent to the Alabama state capitol building. Buried beside Hank’s soaring marble tomb are Audrey and Lillie (Lon, who outlived Lillie by fifteen years, is buried in McWilliams). It was, someone said, “Hank’s kind of day”—bleak, overcast, windy—and some 250 fans from as far away as Massachusetts and Germany huddled around the headstones to hear a few words from the son of the preacher who had conducted the funeral services for Hank at the Montgomery auditorium fifty years earlier. Charles Carr was there, of course, along with a few of the surviving Drifting Cowboys. Absent were Hank, Jr., and, more pointedly, Jett Williams, ever the outsider. “Is it his daughter, or is it not?” said Hank’s half sister, Leila Griffin, echoing persistent doubts held by a remarkable number of family and friends in spite of the facts of Jett’s lineage. Afterward they trundled off to the Hank Williams Museum downtown, which is dominated by the powder-blue Cadillac convertible, for hot coffee and plates brimming with black-eyed peas and corn bread, and soon a sort of hootenanny broke out: Don Helms began playing Hank’s greatest hits, and aging fans who had brought along their guitars were scrambling to join the greatest Cowboy of them all to play and sing along and shed a tear or two in memory of their long-fallen hero. When dark had fallen over the city, scores of the “mourners” gathered in the cold mist around the bronze statue of Hank down the street from the museum, holding candles and singing “I Saw the Light.”

  On the first weekend in June of every year, a Hank Williams Festival is held in Georgiana, on the grounds of the restored white frame house where young Hiram spent his childhood, and this one in 2003 was special because it marked the fiftieth anniversary of the man’s death. Torrential rains held the crowd to some two thousand, lugging coolers and lawn chairs, their fervor nevertheless running as deep as the quagmire formed by the relentless rain. The nearest motels in Greenville were fully booked, but the true believers came piling into Georgiana in pickups and campers, bearing tags and bumper stickers reading Gone Hankin’, crowding into yards and vacant lots to form little bivouacs whence came yodels and rebel yells and sing-alongs and smoke from campfires not unlike the encampments found at stock-car tracks on NASCAR weekends. It was a pilgrimage, pure and simple, some of the fans having come from Europe and Asia, and the incessant rain and the noisy passage of trains through their midst lent an eerie air to the celebration. It was all Hank, all the time, on a stage fronting an acre of land paved with asphalt and covered by a steel roof: the presentation of “Miss Hank Williams and Her Court,” Hank songs from some faded Nashville performers, appearances by the last of the Drifting Cowboys, a word from the president of the Hank Williams Fan Club (who maintains a spare bed in her house in case Hank shows up and “needs a place to rest”), and an hour-long show of Hank’s greatest hits by an impersonator from Ohio who turned out to be not at all bad in spite of his shoulder-length hair. Finally, at prime time on Saturday night, out pranced Jett Williams in a white outfit, singing “Jambalaya” to the accompaniment of “Uncle Don” Helms on the steel guitar, and she was greeted as one of the family until she called for quiet so she could dedicate a song to “my friend, my lover, my husband, my lawyer . . . without whom there would be no Jett Williams.” Hank, Jr., and Hank III had let them down by abandoning the music, and there were still a lot of the most fervent fans who didn’t want to believe the story of Hank’s long-lost daughter. They certainly weren’t prepared to hear her serenade the lawyer who had made it all possible, Keith Adkinson, and with a sensuous pop song like “Make Love to Me” at that. To them, it was like breaking wind in church. As the festival wound down that night, with fans queuing up at tables to get their CDs and photos and programs signed by the entertainers, the lines were longest for Don Helms, not Jett Williams. Forget, hell.

  Although he liked Jett and worked about two dozen shows a year with her, Helms understood how the fans felt. “I’m their connection to Hank,” he was saying one steamy morning in August of a year dedicated to memorializing Hank’s death. “I played for Hank, Jr., for a while at first, but when his music changed my steel wasn’t quite right. ‘Tricephus,’ now”—his playful nickname for the son of “Bocephus”—“forget it. But when I’m playing steel for Jett and she’s singing all of her daddy’s songs I might as well be playing with Hank. When they hear me, they feel like they’re hearing Hank.” Helms had just turned seventy-six, but he was staying busy: working the road with Jett, doing about a dozen of his own concerts every year, and putting in a star appearance at the annual convention of steel guitarists in St. Louis. He never failed to bring tears during his concerts: “I’ll get choked and teary-eyed, myself, when the crowd is good, it’s warm, and the music’s right. They’ll turn the lights down and I’ll say, ‘Close your eyes and think of Hank,’ and when I start in on ‘Cold, Cold Heart’ people get to crying. Me, too. I hope I never lose that feeling.”

  He was in the den of his house in Hendersonville, a town north of Nashville where most of the country musicians once lived, a rambling brick ranch house he and his wife, Hazel, had occupied since the fifties. He and Hazel had been married “forever”—they went back with Hank and Audrey to their courtship days in Andalusia during the Second World War—raised their children there, and now he didn’t go anywhere without her. There was barely a surface in
the house not covered by a piece of needlework fashioned by Hazel, and she was in the living room, knitting some more, while he sat at the steel guitar he bought for $100 in ’48. (Marty Stuart, the Opry performer who lives nearby and is a prime collector of Hank memorabilia, had made a standing offer of $100,000 for the most famous steel in the music business.) Don was noodling the strings, just messing around, fretting the strains of “Cold, Cold Heart” and whatever came to mind, thinking back over the years with Hank, both good and bad: picking up the pawn-shop billy clubs they would need if they were going to play roadhouses like Thigpen’s Log Cabin, dropping Hank off at the sanitarium’s forbidding stone “huts” to dry out, stepping aside as fights broke out between Hank and Audrey, watching the way crowds were mesmerized when Hank bent over the microphone and swayed as he began to sing his sad songs.

  “Sometimes I get tired of talking about him,” he said. A grand total of ninety musicians were Drifting Cowboys at one time or another, and Helms is about the last one alive and fully in charge of his senses. “Fans come up and ask me what Hank was really like and I’ve gotten to where I’ll just say, ‘Well, he was skinny, all right.’ Everybody’s got his own story, anyway, no matter what I say. ‘Whatever,’ they’ll tell me, ‘but, see, I was there that night, and I know . . .’ Well, I really was there for just about all of it. What really worries me the most is that when I’m gone that whole beautiful story will get done wrong. People keep wanting to hear new stories about Hank, but there are no new stories. They’ll make him out to be a junkie or a pill-head, but the only thing about Hank and pills was that he overused ’em. Everything he did was bad for his health, that’s all.” Helms stroked the opening lines to “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” the most familiar refrain in country music. “He was my fishing buddy, my bowling buddy, my boss, my best friend,” he said. “The hardest thing I ever did was stand on the stage at his funeral, looking right down on him in that coffin, and start playing for him. I miss him. He’s all I’ve got.”

  Epilogue: Legacy

  Daddy and I never got to see him in person. The closest we got was on my first trip to the Opry, at the age of sixteen, when we found ourselves among the families milling on the sidewalk out front of the Ryman late on a steamy Saturday afternoon in August of ’52. Mama and Sis kept our places in line while Daddy and I mounted the steps to peek at the night’s schedule of entertainers, posted on the huge double doors. Listed were the heroes of my youth—Roy Acuff, Little Jimmy Dickens, Minnie Pearl, Hank Snow, Ernest Tubb, Carl Smith—but no Hank Williams. “Guess y’all didn’t hear Hank got fired,” some old boy told us. Say it ain’t so, I thought. It was like finally making it to Yankee Stadium only to learn that Babe Ruth wouldn’t play that day.

  When we got the news that Hank had died, at the beginning of the new year some four months later, it was as though there had been a death in the family. It wasn’t that we could personally relate to his lyrics—Daddy was a one-woman man (“It’s all I can do to keep up with your mama”) and I hadn’t yet had a real girlfriend—but we, like any other southerners from the working class, could sense the pain and loneliness expressed in the simplest terms and certainly understood the language. While other boys my age were collecting baseball cards, I was buying every 45-r.p.m. recording Hank ever produced; and Daddy was intensifying his replications of Hank tunes on the piano back home. Music flowed from the open windows of our house, either me playing my Hank records or Daddy banging out “Your Cheatin’ Heart” on his piano, and our neighbors later told me of sitting on their front porches, Hank fans or not, enjoying the free entertainment.

  Like most Americans my age, I drifted away from the music when I went off to college in the fifties, forsaking Hank for Elvis and rock ‘n’ roll (“Forgot your raisin’, didn’t you?” Daddy put it), but I was soon back in the fold. Unhappily married, although for reasons entirely different from Hank’s, I was suffering my first defeats and, consequently, when I reached my thirties, found myself being comforted by the sad-ass blues lyrics that Hank had been writing before I fully appreciated them. I had become a writer, as it happened, and in trying to find my voice I turned to two men who were minimalists, masters of understated simplicity: Ernest Hemingway and Hank Williams. My first book was The Nashville Sound, the beginning of a portfolio that would be about southerners in various degrees of stress: stock-car drivers, lost girls, minor league ballplayers, drunks, bored teenagers in the Alabama boondocks. (While in Nashville, I asked Chet Atkins if he thought Audrey might talk to me. “You’re a handsome young man, so I don’t see why not,” he said. “Just don’t go over there alone and after dark. She’s armed and dangerous.”) By the late seventies I was a runaway husband and father, living in a dollar-a-day rooming house in Montgomery, only four blocks up the street from Lillie Williams’s first boardinghouse on South Perry Street, drunk and suicidal and unable to write, falling apart every time I heard Hank’s “My Son Calls Another Man Daddy.” Forgotten my raising? Hell, no. I was living it to the hilt, background music provided by Hank Williams.

  Daddy, meanwhile, never wavered. When he popped in to visit me in Nashville while I was working on my book there, he was much more interested in seeing Hank’s old house on Franklin Road than in meeting any of the new breed of country singers backstage at the Ryman Auditorium. He made his last run as a trucker at the age of seventy-one, in 1982 (personally loading a trailer with 250-pound surplus aircraft tires at an air force base in Texas), complaining about the demise of the all-night truckers’ shows on the radio, and then descended into an uneasy retirement. When Mama came down with Alzheimer’s and he followed her into a nursing home, he got thrown out and had to move back to the house when he insisted on sitting at the white baby grand in the atrium, frightening the blue-haired widows by playing Hank Williams all day. The last time we spoke was on a day when I visited him, drinking out of lonesomeness, and invited him to check out my new Chevy Blazer. A Chrysler man, he wasn’t impressed. “Probably got a bad transmission,” he said.

  “Yeah, but it’s got a real good radio,” I told him.

  “Will it pick up country music?”

  “Of course it will.”

  “Must be a hell of a radio, then,” he said. “Ain’t been no country music since Hank died.”

  He had become friends with a fellow named Eddie Burns, host of the live Country Boy Eddie Show on WBRC-TV. Every morning at daybreak, Birmingham would awaken to the sounds of Eddie braying like a mule—Hee-haw, hee-haw—and then breaking into a hoedown with a house band. Eddie had never met Hank Williams, but never got over seeing him once and loved his music. Daddy had taken to watching the show every morning, over his first shooter of bourbon, and more than once he had put on a coat and tie and driven across town to pop in on the set as an uninvited guest and, much to Mama’s chagrin, sit down and bang away on “Lovesick Blues” or some other Hank tune, live and on local television. Eddie had an hour to fill, enjoyed Daddy’s company, and didn’t seem to mind.

  When Daddy died in ’88, nearly forty years after that first trip I made with him during the summer of Hank, I chose to spend the night before his burial at the family house, to be alone with my memories of him. I wandered about the house that night, going through scrapbooks and snapshots, running my fingers over the keys of the old piano, and as it turned out I fell asleep on the sofa while a movie was running on WBRC-TV. I was startled awake at daybreak by the braying of Country Boy Eddie and the fiddle tune that introduced the show. Eddie came back after a commercial break, with a somber look on his face: “We’ve lost a good friend, folks. Y’all remember Paul Hemphill. He could play Hank better’n Hank could. . . .” So that more or less served as my father’s obituary notice. Later that day, as they lowered his body into the ground, a preacher had to shout to be heard over the commotion rising from below the hill. Swinging around the cemetery was Interstate 20, crowded with muscular eighteen-wheel semis, headed west, their drivers grabbing gears and jockeying for position and, surely, trying to find som
e good country music on the radio. I knew they would play hell finding any.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing fifty years after Hank’s death, when most of the principals are gone, I’m much obliged to those music historians who preceded me, especially Colin Escott. His book Hank Williams: The Biography (with George Merritt and William MacEwen) and his illustrated Snapshots from the Lost Highway (with Kira Florita) and, most particularly, his and Florita’s production of the boxed set The Complete Hank Williams, proved invaluable. For the material dealing with Hank and the Carter Family, I’m indebted to Mark Zwonitzer and Charles Hirshberg for their Carter biography, Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? Many thanks go to the archivists at the Country Music Foundation, whose transcribed interviews of people who knew Hank and his times are a treasure. I’m especially grateful for guidance from Don Helms and Marty Stuart and Tom Robinson in Nashville, and for the good people in south Alabama who shared their stories. It goes without saying that being my father’s son, a child of Hank’s South, informs much of what is written in this book; and it took my agent, Sterling Lord, aging like fine wine, to point that out. Finally, and once again, I embrace my wife, Susan Percy, whose enthusiasm for Hank and his music just goes to show that even Phi Beta Kappas get the blues.