Lovesick Blues Read online

  Most artists of any genre, whether poets or novelists or performers, have begun their careers by emulating those they most admire. Hank wasn’t yet writing his own songs, except for the juvenile “WPA Blues,” so at this point he settled for covering anything recorded by his hero, Roy Acuff, the first big star of the Grand Ole Opry. Fans who paid for a show by Hank Williams and the Drifting Cowboys first heard the tune Hank had adopted as his opening theme song—“Happy Roving Cowboy,” written by a Canadian, recorded by the Sons of the Pioneers—and then got an earful of Acuff’s “The Great Speckled Bird” and his bathetic ballads about train wrecks and the folks back home. Between those tearjerkers and at least one “sacred” song, equally maudlin but regarded as de rigueur in the southern Bible Belt, they would hear cornpone comedy exchanges between Hank the boss and Hezzy the village idiot: “You ain’t got enough sense to know you ain’t got no sense.” The kid was good, no doubt about it, slick and earnest before his time—But he looks so young!—and he owed much of it to Tee-Tot Payne’s informal tutorials, those years of selling himself to strangers on the sidewalk, and a tyke’s eagerness to please a whip-cracking mother who couldn’t be pleased.

  Lillie, in fact, was becoming the ultimate stage mom. Most single middle-aged mothers would be relieved to be shed of their parental burdens, ready to make a life of their own before it was too late, but she saw it differently. Fat, old, and tired before her time, cantankerous and settled into her ways, she knew the limitations of her attraction to successful men whose star she might ride. She might as well do it through her son. Hank’s sister, Irene, had taken a fling as manager of the Drifting Cowboys in the beginning, even performing briefly as their “gal singer,” but Lillie soon took over the operation. She bought herself a station wagon, began booking dates and negotiating fees, and accompanied the band to shows, where she stood at the door like a bouncer to count the gate so the boys got their fair cut. Nobody was especially pleased about this turn of events. “Hell, Aunt Lillie wouldn’t even let her own relatives in for free,” said J. C. McNeil, Hank’s cousin. Stuck in the confines of Lillie’s station wagon as they rode over the undulating asphalt roads to their next date, the randy young musicians felt severely constricted: no cussing, no drinking, no farting, no bragging about their amorous conquests. Further ingratiating herself—And after all I’ve done for you!—Lillie charged minimal rent at the boardinghouse for Hezzy Adair and other unattached young men in the revolving cast of Drifting Cowboys. She fancied that she was in charge, and that they owed her. She had found her destiny.

  And so the apprenticeship of Hank Williams continued; in stops and starts, with or without his mama, with or without his band. Free of any obligations to hustle back home to make the opening bell at school, Hank put together mini tours or extended engagements whenever he could. He and three of the Cowboys thought they had made the big time when they borrowed Lillie’s station wagon and drove a hundred miles to a town near the Georgia line to play three shows at a movie theater, at three, six, and nine o’clock, grossing $100. They felt like desperadoes robbing a bank: ride in, take the money, ride out. (On such occasions, if Hank got drunk or they wheedled more money than Lillie had bargained for, he would caution them, “Don’t tell Mama.”) They followed that bonanza with a series of shows in south Alabama and the panhandle of Florida for a theater chain. In November of ’39 Hank and Hezzy arrived on a Sunday at the Ga-Ana Theater in Georgiana, where young Hiram had seen his first cowboy movies, for an event one of his childhood buddies never forgot: “It was their third stop on a tour of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida, and they rolled up in Hezzy’s Ford with his bass fiddle on top. The manager had some peach brandy waiting for ’em, and when they ran out of that they found some home brew. Hank got up and said, ‘I love this place,’ sang ‘WPA Blues’ and a couple of others, but he was too drunk to stay on so he sat down. The manager thought it was funny as hell. Lord knows how they finished the tour.”

  Finish they did, landing Hank at the front door of another man who would serve him as both a mentor and an enabler over the years. Pappy Neal McCormick had his own show on WCOA radio, whose giant antenna sprouted from the roof of the ornate San Carlos Hotel in Pensacola, on the western end of Florida’s panhandle. Seven stories high, sparkling beside the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the San Carlos was the center of what action there was in Pensacola: the best accommodations around, surrounded by banks and movie theaters and department stores. Pappy, a Creek Indian who had moved to the coast from rural south Alabama, had developed a large following as leader of the Hawaiian Troubadours, who played for dances every night at the hotel’s gaudy ballroom on the second floor. When Hank and Hezzy worked the club that night, the last stop of their three-state tour, it amounted to an audition. Pappy had no need for Hezzy, but he took a shine to Hank and let him know he was welcome any time he was in the area. Hank was smitten by Pappy on two counts: the older man was a dazzling showman, and he was doing things the kid had never heard with the steel guitar. Pappy’s, in fact, was a marvel: four guitars in one, really, electrified strings on each side of a block of wood that turned on a barbecue spit. He played it more like a Hawaiian instrument emulating soft Pacific breezes than as a complement to country music (like most other early steel players, he avidly tuned in to a musical program, “Hawaii Calls,” on his shortwave radio). The layover would lead to a long friendship between the two. Whenever Lillie’s carping got to be too much for Hank to bear, he always knew he could vanish to Pensacola to make some music with Pappy, hole up with a bottle at the San Carlos, or both.

  Then, to top off Hank’s basic education, he encountered the roadhouses, the “fightin’-’n’-dancin’ clubs.” They littered the countryside all over America, but the ones in the rural South, from the Appalachian hollows to the scruffy plains of west Texas, had a particular edge to them; which is to say you could get killed in there. In the more sophisticated big cities the moneyed had their sedate restaurants and nightclubs and dance floors for wining and dining, with linen tablecloths and candlelight, music provided by waltz kings and jazz quintets and full-blown dance orchestras. But cowboys and farmers and lumbermen had their needs, too. Out there in a harder America, they would open the doors of a barn or a Quonset hut or a roller-skating rink out on the edge of town on a weekend night, hire a country band, toss some sawdust on the dance floor, crank up the fiddles and the steel guitars, announce that the bar was open, and you had a bubbling volcano. (Indeed, one day when Hank was assembling another edition of the Drifting Cowboys he escorted the boys to a pawn shop in Montgomery and bought each of them a billy club, a leather blackjack filled with lead. “You’ll need these if you’re gonna work with me,” he said.) “In some of those places,” said Don Helms, the most famous of Hank’s steel guitarists over the years, “they wouldn’t let you in until you showed ’em your switchblade and could prove you’d already thrown up once. When you paid and got in, you’d pick a table, slap your bottle on it, and throw your blade in the floor. That thing was still vibrating when they brought you a bucket of ice and some glasses.” Choose your weapon: a knife, a pistol hidden in your boot, a broken beer bottle, a guitar, a chair. In the livelier houses, a chicken-wire fence was strung up to separate the band from the drinkers, and management either hired its own bouncers or had the sheriff’s department on call. Some old boy would stand on a chair and shout, “By god, I wanna hear ‘Tumbling Tumble-weed, ’ ” and the wise musician broke into “Tumbling Tumble-weed” if he knew what was good for him. A country singer learned to accommodate the crowd, to sing and play loud enough to be heard over the noise of the revelers in those days before amplifiers, and how to make a fast exit when things got out of hand. The money was so good that you had little choice.

  Hank’s introduction to this underworld came early on, in his late teens, right there in his childhood hometown of Georgiana. Out on U.S. Highway 31, the rippled asphalt road connecting Montgomery and Mobile, there was a place called Thigpen’s Log Cabin, built and ope
rated by Fred Thigpen, a distant cousin of Hank’s, who also owned the local Ford dealership. There was a dining room in the front, opening onto a walled-in skating pavilion converted to a dance hall for weekends. With cars lining the shoulder of the highway for a mile each way of Thigpen’s and the adjoining Pineview Tourist Court, a collection of doll-house cabins handy for trysting, they were ready for business when the sun went down. Hank’s popularity had grown steadily during that time, the early forties, when he had his regular show on WSFA and he held forth as Thigpen’s major act, working three shows a night, every other weekend, for two solid years. Whenever Lillie came along, she stood beside Fred Thigpen at the front door—a formidable pair, Fred standing six-three and weighing 240 pounds—and insisted that they drive back home after the show to save money. When she didn’t come, Hank would show up in the afternoon, tear into a steak grilled for him by a black cook remembered only as Eddie, wash it down with some whiskey, do the shows, and spend the night with relatives still living nearby in Avant, Chapman, and Bolling. The patrons danced while the band was playing, but they tended to crowd around the stage and listen raptly when Hank began singing in his loud, clear voice. There was the inevitable trouble, to be sure, once forcing him to break his favored Gibson guitar with the lacquered sunburst finish over the head of a drunk, but he was learning. To be sure, the lessons were coming the hard way—dealing with boisterous crowds, alternating the music between danceable tunes and roadhouse weepers, dressing for success, dealing with management—and along the way he found that a curious relationship was developing between him and his fans. The women loved the way he swayed seductively when he sang (long before Elvis Presley), and that was precisely what pissed off the young bucks, convinced he had come to steal their women; but on the other hand there was a sniff of danger emanating from this cocky scarecrow with jug ears and a sardonic smile that caused crowds to part at his coming. Hank’s experiences at Thigpen’s Log Cabin, when he was still a teenager, taught him everything he would need to know for the long, dark journey that lay ahead.

  No sooner had the Depression abated, in the late thirties, than now there was something else to worry about. Another war was coming, the only question being when, and it had put the nation on edge. Uncertainty ruled. Do you get married and start your family and open a new business now, or do you wait to see what’s going to happen? Hank Williams didn’t find any of this in the comic books, his primary source of “news,” but there was no escaping it. For someone just beginning to show great progress in his chosen career, this was rotten timing. He had the steady radio show every weekday on WSFA and the usual appearances out in the countryside, where his name had become well known, and he was something of a star at Thigpen’s Log Cabin. He had a pretty good thing going, for a kid that age, but he got sidetracked in December of ’41 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

  Hank’s eyesight had corrected itself, but his back condition had steadily worsened over the years—hastened by an impromptu visit to a rodeo in Texas, playing out a childhood fantasy, where he was promptly thrown by a bull—getting him a 4-F deferment from the military draft. The Second World War was engaged now, but he wasn’t a part of it. One by one the members of his band were being drafted or volunteering, and he was at home with his mother, trying to carry on alone, but it wasn’t the same. (Lillie, in fact, had moved her boardinghouse to another address in Montgomery, and chosen a husband from among her boarders. His father had finally left the VA hospital system, moved back home to McWilliams, and remarried. And his sister, Irene, had taken a job at nearby Gunter Field.) The Drifting Cowboys who hadn’t gone into the military were being scared off by Hank’s increasing drinking. One of those was a steel guitarist, Boots Harris, who quit in disgust while they were backing up the cowboy actor turned Opry singer Tex Ritter on a tour: “We’d hear records on the jukebox, and Hank’d say, ‘Someday I’m gonna be doin’ that.’ But I didn’t see it coming any time soon, the way he was going. He was pretty bad into the drink then. I said, ‘If you keep drinkin’, ain’t nobody in the business gonna pay us no attention. ’ ” Later, when his hero Roy Acuff came to Montgomery for a concert, Hank dropped in backstage to visit, but he was drunk and received not comfort but a lecture: “You’ve got a million-dollar voice, son, but a ten-cent brain.” Finally, in August of ’42, the booze caught up with him. He was fired at WSFA for “habitual drunkenness.”

  There had never been any grand design in his career-planning, but now it was falling apart. Oh, he had written and recorded a song entitled “I’m Not Coming Home Anymore” in April of that year, a dark elegy backed by a steel guitar and a thumping bass, the first glimpse of the mournful classics still five years away, but nothing came of it; and he had recorded a bogus “Hank Williams Show”—a song and a few words of self-promotion from a make-believe Fort Deposit radio station, intended as a sample to pitch himself to prospective employers. The gig at Thigpen’s Log Cabin dried up, as did all of his radio work, and Hank was cut adrift for several months, the darkest period of his life. In the fall of ’42 he answered an ad placed by Kaiser Shipbuilding—which offered a one-way train ticket to Portland, Oregon, free rent, and a salary while he was being trained in the company’s shipyards—but he was drunk when he boarded the train, then rode all the way across the country, showed up for only one day of training and drank up his wages, and about three weeks later wired Lillie for money so he could get back home to Alabama. A month later he showed up in Mobile, ostensibly to take a job with the Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company, living with relatives down there. That didn’t last long, either. The sight of a scrawny Hank Williams trying to rivet steel plates together in the service of Uncle Sam was entertainment in itself. This boy was made for picking and singing, and he knew that better than anybody.

  Miss Audrey

  Late in the summer of 1943, Hank found himself serving as the star attraction of a tattered medicine show on the fringes of a south Alabama community called Banks. He was being housed in a trailer, whence he would emerge hourly, like a dancing bear or a trained seal, to perform on a flatbed trailer, descending into whatever crowd might have gathered to hear his personal pitches for a “medicine” that was little more than quasi-legal alcohol, ducking back inside for a rest and some booze of his own, then running through the same routine for a fresh batch of suckers. It couldn’t get much worse than this. Drinking had cost him his regular radio gig; he was a school dropout; nearly everybody he knew had gone off to war; his mother was on his case; and the wartime economy had narrowed the job opportunities. He was only a step removed from absolute rock bottom, in fact, perilously close to working the streets for loose change just as he and Tee-Tot had done during his childhood years. There had been all of that promise—as “the Singing Kid,” star of his own show on WSFA, leader of his own band, a wunderkind bursting with grandiose plans—but now he had reached the pits. It was remindful of the joke about the circus roustabout who was asked if he hadn’t had enough of shoveling up after elephants: “What? And give up show business?” On the cusp of his twentieth birthday, Hank seemed to have a great future behind him.

  In the middle of one of those sweltering afternoons, a big four-door Oldsmobile slowed down and then stopped at the sight. The car held Audrey Mae Sheppard, an attractive twenty-year-old blonde who lived on a nearby farm with her parents and her two-year-old daughter, and her aunt Ethel; Audrey and Ethel were headed for a country music show that night in Troy, the big town in those parts. Since neither had ever seen such a sight—a real medicine show!—they decided to check it out, if only from the safety of Audrey’s car. Through the windows they saw this skinny hillbilly in boots and a cowboy hat singing his songs and taking his bows before moving into the scattered crowd, and they were ready to fire up the engine and move on, when suddenly he was upon them, blocking their way. “Ma’am,” he said, coming face-to-face with the young woman at the wheel, “don’t you need some of these herbs?” But then he took a closer look, his piercing brown eyes
checking out this fine specimen. “No, ma’am,” he said, “I don’t think you do.” She was so taken aback by his audacity, and wary, that it was her aunt who issued the invitation for him to ride along with them to the club in Troy.

  Hank and Audrey got their eyes and ears full of each other that night during what would become their first “date.” He certainly knew which end was up on a woman, although most of his romantic explorations had come from groping with hot-blooded young girls—“snuff queens,” they would later be called in country music circles—in the weeds or in the back-seats of automobiles or in that very same medicine-show trailer. But Hank had barely had a speaking relationship with any women other than his mother and his sister and his cousins, and now here was this live temptress daring him to show her something. That night Hank learned that Audrey was the oldest of three daughters of a hard-drinking cotton and peanut farmer, separated from the teenaged father of her baby daughter, and now was a high school dropout clerking at a drugstore in the little town of Brundidge. He could see that she was quite a package: smart-mouthed, feisty, slightly older than he, with handsome Creek cheekbones and a figure so striking, their own son would say decades later, that it could “melt the wax off a Dixie Cup at fifty feet.”