Lovesick Blues Read online

  The trip went without incident. We dropped the spools of twine at daybreak on that Tuesday, ran empty to pick up a load of finished tires at a factory in Akron, Ohio, then turned south for the return to Birmingham. There were more days and nights of the same—catnaps in the cab, late-night snacks at truck stops, my furtive glances to see if Rita Hayworth had winked, more XERF and WCKY, “Hillbilly Jamboree” and “Lovesick Blues”—until finally, on Friday afternoon, the weary travelers poised on the hill above the house before slowly descending to the bottoms. This time it was I who was swarmed by the boys in the neighborhood, wanting to know how it had gone Out There. I assured Mama that truck-driving looked to me like a lot of hard work. Daddy, meanwhile, had slipped into the house and gone straight to the piano. He had suddenly dropped Hoagy Carmichael from his repertoire and gone directly to Hank Williams. And that was only the beginning. Over the ensuing decades our lives would imitate Hank’s art well beyond his death. In the best of our times, and most especially in the worst, Hank Williams was always with us. He simply would not go away.

  Young Hiram

  Not unlike the boy who would become its most famous son, the south Alabama of the 1930s was lean and hungry, untamed, isolated from mainstream America, and desperate to find a way out of the wilderness. The stark black-and-white photographs of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a book documenting life in rural central Alabama during the Depression, could just as well have been taken in Butler County, about a hundred miles to the south. Smack in the middle of the Black Belt, named for the rich black soil that once nourished cotton in profusion, the land had been in steady decline since the end of the Civil War, which had cost the cotton barons their free workforce and their plantations and finally their spirit. On the square in the town of Enterprise, they had erected a statue “honoring” the boll weevil, the nasty little critter that had all but wiped out cotton, thereby steering Alabama away from its tenuous one-industry economy. Now it had become mean country—sparse, exposed to the elements, virtually cashless—where it was every man for himself in the daily search for the next meal, a smile, an entertainment, some hope, anything. Out there in the dense forests of pines and hardwoods, sharing space with wild animals in a world apart from the small towns that had sprung up along the railroad lines, the people traveled by mule, built their own houses, made their clothes, grew their vegetables, hunted and fished not for sport but for the food. They were as one with nature, riding out summer thunderstorms of downright biblical proportions. They knew the terrifying scream of the panther in the night, the wail of a mother whose child had died at birth, the cries of hungry children weakened by pellagra and hookworm, the sighing of wind through the pines, the mocking call of a whistle from a train headed for somewhere else. From their outposts in the woods—a log cabin with an outhouse, a well, and a pea patch—they could only try to ride it out with the help of a Lord who didn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor.

  Among them was Alonzo Huble Williams, whose family had drifted in from North Carolina during Reconstruction. Having lost his mother to suicide when he was six and his father to a vague “fever” when he was a teenager, Lon Williams had spent most of his life as a lost child in scattered lumber-company encampments in the deep woods—as a gofer, a water boy, an ox driver, whatever was needed—while the burly older men spent long days driving off the poisonous snakes and working their two-man band saws. He was there when the tracks were laid for the new Gulf, Florida & Alabama Railroad, among the men who drolly noted that GF&A actually stood for “gophers, frogs, and alligators.” Since the few salaried jobs in those parts were with the lumber companies and the railroads, vigorously plundering the South’s virgin forests, he didn’t dare complain. In his adulthood he found himself assigned to the log trains that ran on narrow-gauge tracks, hauling away the trees as they were felled, and this was about as good as it could get. He felt he was on his way. Thus emboldened, he proposed marriage to a big-boned teenaged girl named Jessie Lillybelle Skipper, who lived with her sprawling family in a logging community called Chapman, and at the end of 1916 they became Lon and Lillie Williams. If they seemed an odd couple from the beginning, this laconic twenty-five-year-old and his high-strung eighteen-year-old bride, the worst was yet to come.

  Little more than a year after the wedding, Lon found himself in France, attached to a U.S. Army division in the waning days of the First World War, fighting not the chemical warfare and constant bombardment by the Germans but a fellow soldier over a French woman. He got hit in the face with a wine bottle and was kicked in the head while down, spent a week in a hospital, and was promptly sent back to the front lines. The war was about over, anyway, and after less than a year of service he was back home in the summer of 1919, driving log trains again, as though nothing had happened. Lillie had stayed with her family while he was gone, and upon Lon’s return they resumed the nomadic life of the logger: following the “crop,” as it were, living in abandoned houses or converted boxcars or with other logging couples all over that corner of the state.

  When their only son was born, Lillie and Lon were living on a dirt road a few miles outside the little town of Georgiana in a settlement known as West Mount Olive. Their abode was a double-pen log cabin bisected by a dogtrot—a breezeway separating the three-room living area from a country store, whence they sold vegetables and the strawberries harvested from a large patch beside the house. Lillie had given birth to a child who died in infancy, then to a healthy daughter named Irene, and they were getting by well enough with Lon’s salary and the meager proceeds from the strawberry operation, when she went into labor again. This time, at least, they could summon a doctor by phone, an amenity a man could brag about in those days, and on September 17, 1923, the doctor and a black midwife brought forth a boy. They named him Hiram, after the biblical King Hiram of Tyre, although when they got around to registering the birth it was recorded as “Hiriam.” That didn’t matter much, anyway. He would be known to all as “Harm,” in the southern country pronunciation, until he took matters into his own hands as a teenager and adopted the name he fancied most: Hank. Hank Williams.

  Problems abounded. He was a scrawny kid born with a deformity in the spinal column, a failure of the vertebrae to fuse properly, leaving a raised spot on his spine. This was worrisome to the parents, something they could only hope would work itself out, nobody knowing at the time that it was spina bifida occulta, curable if caught early, but potentially crippling if left to fester. And that wasn’t all. After seven years, the marriage was turning out to be a union from hell. Lillie, never dainty, had ballooned to lumberman proportions: well over two hundred pounds and nearly six feet tall, given to draping herself in tent-sized dresses, a fierce sight with her heaving bosom and mass of black hair and arched eyebrows, the sort of woman who, as the men were wont to say, “don’t take no shit from nobody.” Poor Lon, three or four inches shorter than his bride, almost dapper with his beady brown eyes and narrow lips, just wanted to get along. He drove his trains through the woods all day and then came home to play with the two kids, pamper his strawberries, sip his moonshine, and roll his cigarettes. He had learned to stay out of the way when Lillie went off on her tirades about shiftless men in perilous times.

  Well, Lillie and her in-laws would say in her defense, somebody had to wear the pants in the family. A frost that killed the strawberries prompted more moves, one to a converted boxcar in a lumber camp, and just about the time Lon had bought a house on ten acres in McWilliams, where he had spent much of his own childhood, he was revisited by the wounds suffered during his beating in France. He began feeling paralysis in the face, forcing him to take on a series of lighter jobs with various lumber outfits until, finally, he was unable to work at all. Lillie managed to deliver him to the Veterans Administration hospital in Pensacola, on Florida’s gulf coast, in 1930, and before he knew it he was being diagnosed with a brain aneurysm and being admitted to a VA hospital four hundred miles away from home in Alexandria, Louisiana. Young Hiram was s
ix when Lon left, getting his first taste of formal education in the woeful one-room schoolhouses in the countryside, and never again would he know what it was like to have his father around the house. Some years later, as a lonesome teenager, he would scribble a piece of doggerel entitled “I Wish I Had a Dad,” on how it might have been: The dad I’ve got, you see, he comes but once a year / I ask him why he stayed away and he said lookie here, and tried to take my mind away by pulling at my ear / Mom wasn’t there, she never is when Papa pays a call / When she came back I tried to talk, but Mom said that’s all. . . . The fact is, the boy wouldn’t see his father again for nearly ten years.

  Lon was history, as far as Lillie was concerned. Early in 1931, when it had become official that America was in a Depression, she and the kids left the country for good and moved into a house in Georgiana. People could talk all they wanted to about Lillie’s abrasive personality—and talk they did, about just what kind of a deal she had made with the rich bachelor, one Thaddeus B. Rose, who gave her the house, rent-free, so she could open it up to boarders—but she was determined to make a better life for Irene and Hiram and herself. Georgiana, with a population of about two thousand, was a lively railroad town, a retail trading center serving as a magnet for all the surrounding communities, with names like Garland, McKenzie, Avant, Chapman, and Bolling. Everything centered on the Louisville & Nashville Railroad depot, where some two dozen freights and seven passenger trains stopped each day. There were cotton warehouses, a gin, livery stables, blacksmiths, and all of the attendant services: groceries, a dozen hotels and rooming houses, eateries, a mercantile store. There was even a twenty-four-hour barbershop with complete amenities—haircuts, shaves, shoe shines, showers—not only for the rail travelers but for the farmers as well: men who would move their ox-drawn wagons into line at the cotton gin, one of eight throughout Butler County; often faced with an overnight stay, they had plenty of spare time to get themselves preened, catch up on the news, swap stories, sip some whiskey, and inevitably get into trouble.

  Lillie’s place was four blocks from the depot, on Rose Street, beside the tracks as they entered town, headed south toward the ports at Mobile and New Orleans. It was an airy wooden structure raised six feet off the ground on stilts, a design Thaddeus Rose had brought from his previous life in the swamplands of Mississippi and Louisiana, with an outhouse and a single spigot for water and an open fireplace for cooking. She got busy making the best of what she had—stuffing corn shucks into feed sacks for mattresses, fashioning furniture from apple crates, accepting anything her neighbors had to offer—and did quite well for herself and the kids. Lack of cash was the problem for everyone in those days, even though a loaf of bread cost only four cents, and she alleviated that somewhat by taking in boarders, serving as the night nurse at a nearby hospital, working at a cannery, and sending the kids out on the streets to sell peanuts and sandwiches. And in due time, through the help of Lister Hill, a man embarking on a long career as an Alabama politician, she began collecting the departed Lon’s full military disability pension. This was a time for entrepreneurs, people with ideas and the energy to pull them off. There was a Czech in town named Pete Wolf, who oversaw the toppling of rare white oaks out in the forests, trimmed and bundled them, and then had them shipped to Europe to be fashioned into staves for barrels used in the aging of wine. Another man, Newt Rhodes, discovered a market in Mobile for the chickens he raised and put on the freight in crates. Lillie, as energetic as any man, brusque as a warden, had found her calling as a boardinghouse operator—some would say, unkindly, a madam—in a town throbbing with people just passing through.

  For young Hiram, fresh in from the country, this was like living in a toy store. A whole new world had opened up for him and he was gulping it in; an adventuresome barefoot boy on a bicycle, with people to meet, places to go, and things to explore. As soon as school let out each day, he was on his way downtown to see what was up. Unattended urchins roamed the streets in the afternoons, sniffing and poking around like kittens in strange new surroundings, and there was much to see. Henry Ford’s first automobiles had begun to appear in Georgiana, so there were those blatting wheeled monsters to be investigated; and Bunk Blackmon’s blacksmith shop; and “niggertown,” on the other side of the L&N tracks, where the kin of freed slaves lived crowded together in their hovels; and diners where people actually sat down and ordered their meals; and Jim Warren’s music store, holding an array of gleaming new guitars and fiddles; and the train depot itself. For a kid with wheels and orders from his mother to get out and hustle up some cash, the possibilities were endless. He sold peanuts and fruit and sandwiches, shined shoes, delivered newspapers and groceries, and was generally available to run errands of any sort.

  More to the point, the boy who would become Hank Williams was learning the fine art of ingratiating himself, of convincing people that they absolutely had to have his services; an imperative for someone in show business. The way to avoid the wrath of Lillie Williams was to do what she said, to kowtow with a smile, and that was the way to sell a bag of peanuts or a shoe shine to a stranger on the street as well. It doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to say that he was learning these elemental lessons in entertainment, as it were, as a small boy just trying to survive, and most likely his musical education got a jump start in the fall of 1933, as he was turning ten, when he was temporarily shipped out to live with relatives fifty miles west of Georgiana in a lumber community called Fountain. It was a simple swap—Hiram for his teenaged cousin, Opal McNeil, who would live with Lillie in Georgiana, where there was a high school she could attend—and the transaction sent the boy packing again for the country. He moved in with his aunt and uncle, Walter and Alice McNeil, in an L-shaped “house” composed of two converted boxcars (Uncle Walter drove a log train for a lumber outfit), was enrolled in a one-room school, and for at least that one school year enjoyed a normal family life.

  Given the financial struggles and the caterwauling that had raged between strong-willed Lillie and the ever-weakening Lon before he left, Hiram had spent his first go-around in the deep woods lying low and trying to stay out of the way. His first taste of music had come at his mother’s knee, literally, as he perched on a stool beside her on Sunday mornings, lustily joining in the singing while Lillie played the organ and bellowed from the hymnal at the hard-shell Baptist church in West Mount Olive. Thrilled that the boy’s interest in music might be used to celebrate the Lord, she had bought him a Sears Silvertone guitar when he was eight and even enrolled him in a church singing school. There was no radio at the big house on Rose Street, but he had heard his share of recorded music at the music store and the diners and the other commercial establishments in Georgiana, where the strains of gospel tunes and the earliest country recordings drifted through the open windows. The arrival of the raucous roadhouses on the edge of town, the dangerous “fightin’-’n’-dancin’ clubs” where Hank Williams would serve his apprenticeship, was still a couple of years away.

  But young “Harm” found simple southern music at its source during his sojourn in Fountain. Little churches were everywhere in the countryside of Monroe County (scant miles from where a young woman named Nelle Harper Lee would write the novel To Kill a Mockingbird), sanctuaries for both the Scots-Irish lumber people and the freed African American slaves now toiling as sharecroppers and tenant farmers in what remained of the cotton fields. This time around, with no whip-cracking mother to stay on his case, the kid had a pal his age as a running mate, his cousin J. C. McNeil. The boys ran free in the woods—fishing, hunting, eavesdropping through the windows of the primitive white and black churches to hear the pained yowls of gloom and doom (“Sadly we sing and with tremulous breath . . . In the valley and by the dark river of death . . .”)—and on Saturday nights they hovered around the edges of the roiling country dances held in schoolhouses beneath the pines. Things may have been different in certain other parts of the South, where the fiercest Pentecostal churches held such sway that they woul
dn’t allow dancing, on the grounds that any expressions of joy would have to be deferred until the afterlife. But here, when the week’s drudgery was over, it was time for the men to find some booze, grab a fiddle, kick up their heels, and take their ladies dancing. Those places could turn into bloodbaths, passions being stirred by the volatile mixture of whiskey and live music, and the two young cousins on the sidelines found their own way to join right in. It was simple, really. Since Baptists, as the saying goes even today, “don’t like to drink in front of each other,” Hiram and J. C. watched to see where the men stashed their whiskey outside in the bushes, out of deference to the Lord and to their wives, and helped themselves when the grown-ups went back inside. The boys would be laid out stone-cold drunk in the woods before they knew what had hit them. This was the beginning of Hank Williams’s drinking, the curse of his life, and its pattern was set early on: booze made him feel good, helped him to forget his troubles, and if he came across a bottle he couldn’t give it up until it was empty.

  If at first it seemed the boy had simply been away at camp for a year, when he returned to Georgiana that summer it was clear that he had undergone vast changes. There had been his discovery of booze as an escape, of course; and learning the basic chords on the guitar from his aunt Alice; and experiencing the joys and sorrows of the heartfelt backwoods music in the churches and at the dances. And there was much more. It would be hard to argue that the sensitive Hiram, a quick learner who took every experience to heart, hadn’t filed away the observations that later would be hailed as some of his greatest lines as a songwriter: a robin weeping as the leaves begin to fall, having “lost the will to live”; a moon going behind a cloud “to hide its face and cry”; the “silence of a falling star” lighting up a purple sky. Rather than relying on secondary sources—commercial radio, tape recordings, songwriting lessons—he had gone straight to the roots: alone, in the woods, making mental notes of what he saw and heard and felt. Back in town, a frail kid who had seen enough of the bruising life of men whose lot was to cut down trees and drag them away, he seemed to have found an option even as he approached his eleventh birthday. He would make music.