Lovesick Blues Read online

  About thirty percent of the people living in Georgiana during the Depression were African American, descendants of the slaves whose sweat had made cotton king before the Civil War, and those six hundred or so souls had learned to keep a low profile. Although the Ku Klux Klan was a raging force throughout the deep South and even in the Midwest in those days, night-riding Klansmen were seldom seen in Butler County. The unspoken “Jim Crow” laws separating the races had sufficiently cowed the blacks to the point of utter submission. (When the big store in town, Morgan’s, raffled off a new Ford T-Model in the early thirties, the winning ticket turned out to belong to a black man. Dead certain of what would happen if he accepted the car—A nigger! Riding around town in a brand-new automobile!—the winner chose to take the cash instead, about $300, more than enough for a train ticket to get the hell out of there.) The black folks in town knew their place, all right, which was as domestics or as “snake men” paid to clear the woods of rattlers and copperheads in advance of the timber crews. If they wanted to entertain the white folks, now, that was quite another matter.

  Thus, Hiram, back in town for good after his tour of duty in the countryside, must have felt his heart jump up into his throat the first time he saw a sight that was new on the streets of Georgiana: an old black man with a guitar, strumming and singing for passersby, nodding and smiling and mumbling a thank-you whenever someone dropped a coin into the crumpled hat set at his feet. It was the boy’s first glimpse of a professional musician at work, if playing for nickels and dimes could be called such, and he attached himself to the man like a leech. His name was Rufus Payne, but everybody knew him as “Tee-Tot,” in a wry nod to his drinking. He wasn’t a drunk, but he certainly wasn’t a teetotaler, at all times packing a flask holding a concoction of moonshine whiskey and tea. He had lived a nomadic life himself, being born on a plantation up around Selma in 1884; living for many years in New Orleans, where his father was a “mule skinner” with a mule and a wagon for hire, and where Rufus had learned the blues and jazz; and now, finally, he was living fifteen miles up the L&N tracks from Georgiana in Greenville, the seat of Butler County. He was about fifty years old, lived somewhat fitfully with a wife who was not amused by his drinking, or his “evil” music, and a son Hiram’s age who was born to another woman. He picked up some steady income by working as a janitor and a delivery-man for a drugstore. Mostly, though, he regarded himself as a troubadour. He performed on the streets of Greenville, sometimes with one friend on a harmonica and another on a “wash-tub bass,” a thumping contraption consisting of an overturned galvanized tub and a broomstick and a rope. Now and then, to reach new audiences, he would get on the train alone and ride down the tracks to perform at the depot and on the sidewalks in Georgiana.

  Hiram was mesmerized. Tee-Tot had the temerity to dress as well as he could afford, wearing a jacket and a tie if the weather was right, hoping to give the appearance that he was a lot more than just some shiftless old black man begging for a handout. He sang the blues and threw in some gospel, adding a lazy effect on his guitar with the use of a slide stuck on a finger of his fretting hand (fashioned from the broken neck of a whiskey bottle), and he knew how to pitch a song: singing and strumming with much verve, stooping and bowing, laughing and crying; a serious performer at work. They became quite a pair, this skinny eleven-year-old white kid and the aging black man, moving from the train depot to the busier places like just outside the entrance of the barbershop or on the sidewalk near the music store. Hiram had already learned all of the chords he would need to know from his aunt Alice, and there was never any evidence that the future Hank Williams ever took any specific song ideas from Tee-Tot.

  What he did take was plenty. He learned the blues, and how to showcase it, and he couldn’t get enough. Hiram followed Tee-Tot everywhere when the old man came to town during that summer of ’34, pestering him, offering fifteen cents or whatever he could come up with to buy his companionship and maybe a lesson on certain blues notes (and certainly a nip of whiskey now and then), to such an extent that one time Tee-Tot, lured to Rose Street by the promise of a meal, warned Lillie that he was afraid white folks might start getting agitated over the sight of the two of them hanging out together all of the time. Lillie was too busy making a living to be concerned about that, on the one hand, but on the other she was delighted to see that her son had found something he was good at, something that might have a future.

  Always looking ahead, to something away from all of this small-town drudgery, Lillie packed up the kids and made what would turn out to be an intermittent move, fifteen miles up the tracks, in the fall of 1934. Greenville was the seat of Butler County, four times larger than Georgiana, with a population of about eight thousand, much more prosperous and, in a relative way, more sophisticated. There she found a large house for rent and opened up another boardinghouse, just off the courthouse square, and enrolled Hiram and Irene in purportedly better schools. By dint of her hard work, plus Lon’s pension checks and the pittances brought home by the children, she was doing much better financially now and the future looked more promising. The center of action in Greenville was the county courthouse, not the railroad depot as in Georgiana, meaning an upgrade in clientele: lawyers, politicians, and salesmen in place of red-dirt farmers. This was still the Depression, no way around it, but the accretion of time and the larger playing field meant more of everything: more automobiles, electricity and running water, more playmates for the kids, and a larger pool of possible male companions for a more or less single mother now in her mid-thirties, no matter how demanding and unattractive and downright mean she might be.

  For Hiram, the world just kept on expanding. Now there was a larger movie theater, where he was a regular at the day-long “pitcher shows” featuring cowboy singing stars every Saturday. Now Lillie had bought her first radio, an old Philco, on which for the first time he could listen regularly to stations like WSFA in Montgomery and even WSM in Nashville, home of the fairly new Grand Ole Opry. Now, of course, there was a much larger marketplace for the peanuts and sandwiches and shoe shines he was still expected to pitch, and for the music he had begun to beggar on the streets just as he had learned from Tee-Tot Payne in Georgiana. School be damned, anyway. Hiram was enrolled, but he wasn’t there in spirit, much preferring to spend his time reading comic books, going to the movies, listening to the radio, and making music of his own. He usually took his guitar to school, and it didn’t take much prodding from his schoolmates for him to break into the first song anyone remembers his writing: I had an old goat / She ate tin cans / When the little goats came / They were Ford sedans.

  Even as he approached his teens, he was a shy and introverted kid—gawky, wearing rimless spectacles (for the damage caused by a dose of hookworm he had contracted while going barefoot), sprouting like a weed, ears like barnyard doors—and as it turned out the only good friend he had during those days was, once again, Rufus Payne. Tee-Tot’s house was a shack near the railroad tracks in Greenville, and seldom did a day pass when they weren’t together: swapping licks at the old man’s house, playing for change on the sidewalks, peeking in on the blacks-only gin joints in town, performing on busy Saturdays at the courthouse square, running by Lillie’s boardinghouse for something from the kitchen. They shared the blues and they shared nips of whiskey from Tee-Tot’s flask, and more than once the boy wound up spending the night at his old mentor’s place, dragging his sad frame home at daybreak to face his mother’s wrath—Just like your no-good drunken father!—before changing clothes for school.

  Lillie and the kids weren’t long for Greenville, which was proving too small to satisfy her dreams, and it’s quite likely that an event that occurred at Hiram’s middle school in the spring of ’37 just about did it for her. On a regular school day, the seventy-odd boys were going through their routine of calisthenics out on the football field behind the school. The field was encircled by a plank fence separating it from the railroad tracks. The man in charge of physical-education
class was a brutish former University of Alabama football player who couldn’t abide slackers. Hiram Williams, the skinny kid with the glasses, was goofing off while everybody else obediently hut-hutted through their side-straddle hops. The coach came up behind Hiram and kicked him in the butt, sending him sprawling into the dust, and when the kid scrambled to his feet he was cussing a blue streak, enraged, charging the coach like a bantam rooster. The coach grabbed him by the nape of the neck, dragged him to the plank fence, ripped off a board, and proceeded to paddle him in front of his schoolmates. The boy’s tears were more from rage and embarrassment than from pain, and when he got home that afternoon he certainly told Mama. Lillie went on the warpath, threatening to take on the coach herself if the school board didn’t fire him, but the story grew stale in the summer’s heat and it went away. Came July, and the Williams clan was on the move again, this time to a big city where this sort of thing didn’t happen.

  The Singing Kid

  In July of 1937, while thousands of Okies were bailing out and heading west for a new start (Well, I’m goin’ to California, where they sleep out every night, sang Jimmie Rodgers, the first king of country music, before he died of tuberculosis in ’33), Lillie Williams and the kids were relocating, too, if on a more modest scale. They would move not halfway across the nation, only forty miles up the road to Montgomery, the state capital. Montgomery’s population of seventy-five thousand made it the third-largest city in Alabama, behind gritty steelmaking Birmingham and the smelly port of Mobile, and it offered better opportunities for Lillie as a boardinghouse operator and for the children with its improved schools and broader entertainments. Enlisting the help of her brother-in-law Walter McNeil, who had moved his brood into town from Fountain, they lashed their belongings to a makeshift platform on the back of his logging truck and were delivered to a large house on South Perry Street, not far from the same statehouse where Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as president of the Confederacy. It was around this time that her son announced that “Hiram” wouldn’t cut it anymore. From his exposure to cowboy movies and country radio shows and comic books, he had determined that “Hank” was more in line with the career he fancied for himself, as a writer and singer of country songs.

  The newly reconstituted “Hank Williams” grew from boy to man almost overnight. He was expected to continue hitting the streets with his shoe shine kit and bags of peanuts, bringing home cash for the family coffer, but now he saw a dual purpose in that enterprise. WSFA, the radio giant of sparsely populated central Alabama, had its studios on the mezzanine of the Jefferson Davis Hotel, and he instinctively knew to commandeer the sidewalk below the station’s windows as his base of operations, where he would sing a little, shine some shoes, sell some peanuts, and sing some more. The Jeff Davis equated with the railroad depot in Georgiana for its centrality—downtown headquarters for traveling salesmen, notorious hangout for rural state legislators in town for some politicking and hoorawing, destination for musicians angling for work on WSFA’s many live music shows—and this skinny, bespectacled kid with a guitar had the audacity to insinuate himself in the middle of it all. Soon enough, an engineer was running a line out onto the sidewalk to pick up a remote broadcast of “the Singing Kid” at work, inspiring the boy’s proud mama to advise her friends to call the station and demand more, leading the music director to invite him inside to actually sing into a live microphone. Toward the end of that year, as a fourteen-year-old with the singing voice of an adult, Hank entered an amateur talent contest at the Empire Theater with a song he had written, the “WPA Blues”—I got a home in Montgomery / A place I like to stay / But I have to work for the WPA / And I’m dissatisfied, I’m dissatisfied—winning the fifteen-dollar prize money and promptly blowing it on booze and other treats for himself and what pals he had. Lillie wasn’t pleased about that part, just another reminder that he was his ne’er-do-well father’s son, but she nevertheless helped him buy a shiny new Gibson guitar with a sunburst finish to replace the old Sears Silvertone now showing its age.

  When he had won so many of those amateur talent shows that organizers began to dissuade him from entering them, a backward compliment signifying that attention must be paid, Hank found himself in the process of becoming a major player on a small stage. In a blink, it seemed, “the Singing Kid” went from making casual unpaid appearances on a WSFA program featuring a house band to being the star of his own show. Twice a week he appeared on fifteen-minute segments, strumming and singing the country standards of the day, fetching a princely fifteen dollars a week at a time when that was enough money in Depression Alabama to support a couple with two kids. Radio was the ticket for a musician during the thirties, in little Montgomery as well as in such larger markets as Nashville and Chicago, where established on-air “barn dances” stoked bigger things. It was synergy at work, one piece spinning off onto another. You sang and played on the radio, prompting requests for personal appearances, leading to show dates; and then, if things worked out, you published songbooks and finally—who knows?—you started making records in a studio. The system was a monster that required constant care and feeding. Little did the fans who had begun phoning and writing WSFA with pleas to see and hear this Hank Williams in person know that he was actually a scrawny teenager who lived in his mother’s boardinghouse, had neither a car nor a driver’s license, got drunk every chance he could, hated school, and was barely a step beyond being just another fatherless urchin selling peanuts and shining shoes on the sidewalks of downtown Montgomery.

  In truth, Hank had already left his childhood far behind, back there in the days when he was chasing rabbits through the woods with his cousin and running errands for his drill-sergeant mother on the dusty streets of Georgiana. By the time he was turning fifteen, a growth spurt having put him close to his full height of six-one, he was practically a grown-up. He had been precocious from the beginning, missing little of what went on around him—the lack of any spark between his parents; his mother’s conviction that all men were sorry; the way a beaten old black man such as Tee-Tot could express his joys and sorrows only through a bottle and a song; and, now, how the business of music worked—and it must have been quite a shock to everybody when Lon suddenly appeared on the porch at 114 South Perry Street one day in August of ’38. Gone since 1930, Lon had managed to spring himself on a furlough from the VA hospital in Louisiana (not with any help from Lillie, who was as surprised as anyone), and now here he was, more or less testing the possibility that he might be able to take his rightful place in the family fold with his wife and children. It was too late, of course. He didn’t need Lillie’s clucking reminders to see that time had wrought dramatic changes. He had been replaced at the dining table by a cast of wisecracking male boarders competing for the bossy landlady’s favors; his daughter was juggling boyfriends and schoolbooks and a business of her own selling sandwiches to clerks and laborers; the son he had christened Hiram was a blossoming radio star who had gone and changed his name. With nowhere else to go, Lon hung around long enough to officially celebrate Hank’s birthday in September—now they seemed less like father and son than uncle and nephew—before skulking back to “serve out my sentence” at the hospital. Young Hiram’s plaintive ode “I Wish I Had a Dad” had lost its fervency.

  Hank performed alone on his fifteen-minute radio shows, singing to his own guitar accompaniment between reading commercials and shamelessly advertising himself, but if he was going to start playing show dates he would have to form a band. He began with a guitar player and vocalist, a married man seven years his senior, Braxton Schuffert, whose early-morning show on WSFA had been one of young Hiram’s favorites during the Greenville years. Every country band at that time included a comic, usually someone who played stand-up bass and was willing to play the fool to the star in routines between songs, and that turned out to be Smith “Hezzy” Adair, a teenaged orphan who happened to be living with the Schufferts. For a fiddler, Hank recruited another older man, Freddy Beach, whose portfoli
o including working the road with an early western swing band and wandering about the boondocks as an evangelist. Now and then they were lucky enough to flush out somebody from the ragtag group of aspiring young musicians hovering around WSFA who could handle what was, at the time, a strange new instrument of Hawaiian heritage—the electrified steel guitar—with a sliding whine that in later years would be the perfect complement to, and a virtual echo of, the tortured voice of Hank Williams. Thus was born the first edition of the Drifting Cowboys, a name waiting for a band, further homage to Hank’s boyhood infatuation with western movies. They rustled up some cheap cowboy hats and boots, bought a new set of tires and a case of oil for Braxton Schuffert’s chancy V-8 Ford, and pronounced themselves ready to do business.

  Because Hank was still attending school, however lackadaisically, they had to book their dates around that complication. Weekends, summers, and holidays were the prime times, anyway, and they had no trouble finding work. Mired in the Depression, feeling disconnected, broke, and out of meaningful work, people were desperate for a song and a smile. Hank Williams and the Drifting Cowboys rode in to help, crammed into the little black Ford sedan with a bass fiddle strapped on top, working Montgomery and the small towns within an eighty-mile radius where folks were hearing Hank’s radio shows, towns with names like Opp, Fort Deposit, and Grove Hill. They would play at any time, any place—private party or public gathering, it didn’t matter as long as they got paid—at barbecues, swimming parties, dances, carnivals, county fairs; in schoolhouses or auditoriums or movie theaters or under big tents. They played them all for nearly two solid years, for a fee or for the usual twenty-five-cent admission, their upcoming arrivals announced over WSFA and by posters slapped on buildings and telephone poles. In order to save money, and to ensure that Hank made it to class the following morning, they always made it back to their own beds in Montgomery every night. There was no way school could hold Hank’s attention in the face of all this excitement. When he did show up for classes he was so drained that he was useless. (“You want me to wake him up?” a classmate asked when Hank had fallen asleep in class. “Don’t bother,” said the teacher. “He’s not going to learn anything, anyway.”) Hank finally dropped out of Sidney Lanier High School in October of 1939, a month after his sixteenth birthday, having just begun the tenth grade. He was now a full-time professional musician. He never looked back.