Lovesick Blues Read online

  What Hank didn’t realize was that this wasn’t exactly the enabler he craved, an acquiescent partner content to stand by her man through hell and high water, but rather a strident control freak. He would make that discovery soon enough, at noon the very next day, when Audrey showed up at the trailer and found him reeking of alcohol, unshaven, shirtless, drinking some hair-of-the-dog to get his day jump-started. She went to work—raising hell about his drinking, making him shave and shower, getting him dressed properly—before they got into her car for a drive. Aimlessly riding around, feeling each other out, they began swapping life stories. He admitted to her that he had been fired from WSFA for his drinking. She told him that she was a singer herself, and wasn’t it a coincidence that they were both interested in show business? Maybe they could become a team, make music together. The physical attraction was pulling them toward each other like steel to a magnet. Audrey hung around for that afternoon’s performances, and before the night was over he was asking her to marry him.

  If he had asked more questions, he would have found out that this girl, Audrey, was a headstrong force of nature with a mind of her own, a virtual clone of the mother who had bedeviled him for most of his life. Growing up in a house full of women whose titular head was a man often weakened by drink, she had learned early on to take charge; the sort of little girl who insisted on laying the ground rules even when the game was only playing “dress-up” or orchestrating a doll wedding. She had been ignoring her daddy’s rules and forging ahead on her own for a long time—driving a car when she was twelve, running off to marry a neighborhood boy when she was seventeen, mothering a child at eighteen—and it had always worked in her favor. “I knew what I wanted and I went after it,” she would say years later. She could see that this boy had promise (there was his insouciant country manner and, my, how he could sing!) and with a little guidance . . . well, they could really go places together. She could see it now, their names in lights: Tonight, Hank and Audrey Williams! “And that,” Audrey said portentously in her autobiography, “is how it started.”

  She wasn’t quite ready to say yes to Hank’s insistent marriage proposals, her first order of business being to ditch her serviceman husband, but she was tentatively signing on for the roller-coaster ride that Hank’s life had already become. Escaping the medicine show, moving back into his old room in his mother’s boardinghouse, alone and not yet ready to introduce Lillie and Audrey, Hank went his slipshod way. He managed to get into the Montgomery city auditorium before a big Labor Day country-and-gospel show, and when somebody noticed him drinking and lollygagging around backstage it was suggested that he go out and introduce the emcee, a performer named Hardrock Gunter. Hank grabbed Hardrock’s guitar, hit the stage and began singing, got the crowd going, and the promoters had to drag him off so the show could proceed as scheduled. Now and then he took to visiting the Sears & Roe-buck store in Montgomery, putting down his money, wriggling into a cramped booth with his guitar, and recording himself on an acetate disc, coming out with an audio equivalent of a Foto-Mat snapshot. Hank was part of the troupe accompanying the polka band of Pee Wee King on a short tour of south Alabama, and it was then that he sold his first song, a war ditty entitled “(I’m Praying for the Day That) Peace Will Come,” written to order for a singer who needed a patriotic song, Hank’s half of the rights being fifty dollars cash, up front, plenty of money for booze. There would be the inevitable rambles down to Pensacola, where he would hunker down in a room at the San Carlos Hotel, to drink and hide from both Lillie and Audrey, now and then emerging to take the wide marble steps to the ballroom to join Pappy Neal McCormick’s band. And there was one final return to the shipyards in Mobile, where Hank and Audrey shared a seedy hotel room for a couple of months, working side by side with blowtorches in the innards of Liberty ships during the day, but that would be Hank Williams’s farewell to physical labor. “This isn’t it, Hank,” she told him, and he was in full agreement.

  With yet another version of the Drifting Cowboys, this one featuring the steel guitarist Don Helms, a Pappy Neal protégé who would turn out to be his steadiest band member, Hank soon got his career back on track by booking regular gigs in the neighboring south Alabama towns of Andalusia and Opp. In Andalusia, they worked the Riverside Club, one of the biggest dance halls in the state, even busier than Thigpen’s Log Cabin, with crowds of six hundred on weekends. Hank rented a trailer and Audrey moved in with him, Helms and the others driving in for the shows every night from their homes in nearby towns. Hank was being a good boy, going easy on the booze; the money was good, and Audrey was getting a monthly allotment from her husband overseas; she turned out to be an awful cook, but at least she was trying; now, if she would just ditch her husband, they could get married and live happily ever after. Joviality reigned among Hank and Don Helms and a third band member, all of them with fiancées: maybe the Cowboys would marry their cowgirls in a triple-wedding ceremony. But Hank and Audrey couldn’t wait. It hadn’t been easy, divorcing a soldier serving the nation overseas, and ten days after Audrey finally pulled it off early in December of ’44, she said yes to Hank. They were married at a gas station in Andalusia by the owner of the place, the handiest justice of the peace they could find. Attending the service, such as it was, were a couple of pals and their girlfriends, who had to empty their pockets to help pay the justice of the peace.

  The honeymoon ended in short order. Hank got royally drunk the night the Andalusia gig ended, and Audrey went ballistic. The lovebirds flew into each other, shouting and flailing away, Hank throwing all of her clothes into the mud outside the trailer and Audrey calling the cops. It was poor Don Helms’s lot to go fetch Hank from the police station the next day, and when he walked in, greatly embarrassed, he saw Hank sitting morosely on a bench in his cell, staring bullets at him: “Well, what do you want me to do, stand on my head? Get me out of here.” Helms paid the thirty dollars, and they headed out the door. “Come back and see us, now, Hank,” one the policemen chirped sarcastically, an indication that it had been a long night for everyone concerned. “Y’all can all go to hell,” Hank snapped over his shoulder as he took his leave.

  There was no putting if off any longer. The time had come for Hank to introduce his bride to his mama. Leaving her daughter, Lycrecia, behind with her parents until she and Hank could get settled, Audrey got behind the wheel of her Oldsmobile for the drive to Montgomery, Hank navigating from the shotgun seat, having long ago lost his driver’s license on drunk-driving escapades. Hank had barely been introduced to the boarder Lillie had married, a husky Cajun-bred Army Air Corps sergeant named J. C. Bozard, but it was about to become a moot point the way Lillie and the sergeant were slugging it out. Lon Williams, on the other hand, had found peace with a placid second wife back home in McWilliams after his final release from VA hospitals and fathered a little girl who was walking by now. Parking at the curb in front of 236 Catoma Street, Lillie’s latest boardinghouse, Mr. and Mrs. Hank Williams walked onto the front porch, with not a little trepidation, to announce that they were home.

  In fairy tales, in the best of all worlds, a man’s mother graciously steps aside when he brings home the girl he has chosen, after all, to take her place. Welcome to the family, dear, is what he will hear from his mother if he’s lucky. The bride’s proper response is May I call you Mom? But this was no fairy tale. Sparks arced between Audrey and Lillie from the first instant they made eye contact. “She’s probably going to ask, ‘Where’d you find this whore?’ ” Audrey had said to Hank, and that’s more or less the way it went. There was this to be said for Lillie: for twenty years, throughout the Depression and into the early years of the war, and without any help from a stable husband and father, she had thrown herself into the earnest support of a talented but troublesome son who often resented the way she went about it. There was this to be said for Audrey, however new she was to the scene: she knew talent when she saw it, and if she could straighten this boy out, truly become his helpmate, it would get him
off the medicine-show and honky-tonk circuit and sure as hell spring her from the drugstore in Brundidge. Both women loved Hank, in their respective ways, but the only way this arrangement would benefit him was if they teamed up and worked together. That turned out to be too much to ask of either of them. They were so alike in personality—needy, domineering, unforgiving of Hank’s weaknesses, desperate to share his successes—that they spent their efforts fighting over him like dogs shredding a rag doll. So Hank and Audrey moved into the boardinghouse as man and wife, and thus was engaged a tempestuous three-some that would give pause to several generations of curbside psychologists.

  The one thing the two women could agree upon was that something had to be done about Hank’s drinking. By now, ironically, as he neared the official drinking age, he could be clinically classified as an alcoholic. It had begun innocently enough—it always does—with those first sips of filched moonshine as a twelve-year-old outside the lumber-camp dance halls in the deep woods. It continued when he shared nips of Tee-Tot’s exotic mixture of whiskey and tea on the streets of Georgiana and Greenville. Alcohol was everywhere, cheap and available in spite of Prohibition laws, and he could argue that it gave him temporary relief from his back pains and the incessant demands of his domineering mother and now his wife. He was willing to forget the downsides of hangovers and general fuckups—as alcoholics always do—in exchange for the good times. His dance with liquor had intensified when he entered the adult world of honky-tonks, where booze was the oil that put everything into motion, making that the last place someone who can’t do without the stuff should be. Hank was capable of going months at a time without giving whiskey a thought; but something was always coming up to send him into a spin—a fight with Lillie or Audrey, a nasty crowd, unseen demons—and that’s all it took. He simply couldn’t “hold his likker,” as the boys put it, and once he opened a bottle there was nothing to do but drain it dry. He was unsupervised, working for himself instead of a boss who might check his breath at the door, and the condition thus was overlooked: Just be there on time and give us a good show. When he got away with it, everything was fine. When it didn’t, there was hell to pay.

  Whiskey, everyone agreed, was the curse of the working class. In the middle of the Depression, in Akron, Ohio, a surgeon and a broker had come up with the idea of a self-help group called Alcoholics Anonymous, an approach, at once simple and sophisticated, to break the cycle of drinking. Alcoholism was being called a disease by then, something that could be brought under control if the “afflicted” understood there was a problem and was willing to correct it by gathering regularly with other alcoholics at AA meetings to share experiences. Try telling that to an Alabama country boy who’s been told all his life that drinking is a sin, a moral weakness. (Drunk: “Help me out, Doc. Drinking’s cost me my wife, my kids, my house, my car, my job, and my health.” Doctor: “Have you ever thought about AA?” Drunk: “Aw, hell, it ain’t that bad.”) In the Bible Belt South of Hank Williams’s time, a propensity for drink was not something to be handled with hope and forgiveness; it was, rather, the Lord’s business in the eternal struggle with Satan, and that’s exactly what he got from the two women in his life. When he was sober Audrey and Lillie were fully behind him, but when he got drunk they came down on him like buzzards. So he went underground—as alcoholics always do—trying sobriety as long as he could stand it, until he snapped and went off on another binge. He drank to celebrate his joys, and he drank to forget his sorrows. It was a cycle he never learned to break.

  Early in 1945, with the entertainment business beginning to pick up as the war neared its end, Hank returned to WSFA with a live show every day from the studio at the Jefferson Davis Hotel. This was the anchor he needed, both a place to call home and a showcase for his talents, and he took full measure of the opportunity no matter what was going on at the big house between Lillie and Audrey. Always quick to learn, a “fast read,” Hank had become a slick radio host with an inviting demeanor—a guy whose natural pronunciation of “picture” was “pitcher” and who didn’t have to practice his y’alls and ain’ts—and the show became so popular that the hostess of an afternoon talk show bitched to WSFA about his flood of sponsors, and so many fans began crowding the lobby of the Jeff Davis in hopes of seeing Hank and the Cowboys that the hotel’s management insisted he and the boys use a backdoor entrance when they came to work. All good things flowed from that radio show: fan mail began piling up, sponsors clamored to buy time, honky-tonks and civic groups all over the listening area started upping the price for personal appearances, and word of this new talent began to spread among such stars of the Grand Ole Opry as Ernest Tubb when they happened to be in town to play concerts at the auditorium. Hank had clearly become the biggest name in country music in south Alabama, and when he insisted that WSFA give him an exclusive deal—no other country acts on the station—he got no argument from management.

  He was writing songs now, too, and when there were enough of them he paid a local printer to publish a collection in pamphlet form, Songs of Hank Williams, “The Drifting Cowboy.” The price was thirty-five cents for “handling” (“You send the money and I’ll handle it”). When that edition sold out within a year, he followed it with another, this one a more effusive issue containing thirty songs and three photos: Hank Williams and His Drifting Cowboys, Stars of WSFA, Deluxe Song Book. In the grand tradition of touring musicians, the songbooks were pitched over the radio and hawked at the door before and after road shows. There wasn’t a keeper in the bunch, at least none of the tunes that would remain as his legacy, but there were some hints of the mournful autobiographical dirges to come. There was the rough draft of “Honky Tonkin’,” one of Hank’s signature songs, and three angry love-gone-wrong ditties that surely gave Audrey pause as she stood at the front door of auditoriums and clubs selling the songbooks: “I Don’t Care (If Tomorrow Never Comes)” and “My Love for You (Has Turned to Hate)” and “Never Again (Will I Knock on Your Door).” Tossed in for good measure was a smattering of moralistic gospel musings like “Wealth Won’t Save Your Soul,” not that Hank was a Bible-toting proselytizer but because Jesus was good for business. The songbooks contained the lyrics, not the music, for the simple reason that Hank couldn’t read music and he wasn’t about to pay somebody to translate it for him.

  Life out there on the road was more profitable than ever, with Hank’s rising popularity, but more violent for the same reason. Flush with success, he had gained a strutting confidence that came across to many as cockiness. Often, as the troupe was riding back home after playing a juke joint in south Alabama, Hank rode in the backseat holding a towel of ice to his bruises; once, a drunk had bitten a chunk of meat from around his eyebrow; more than once, he and the band were forced to fight their way to safety by brandishing guitars and whiskey bottles and even the screw-off legs of the steel guitar. “Hank never started any trouble,” said Don Helms, “but it sure came to him. It was always the guys. They were jealous of him for the money they figured he was making, and they resented the way the women swooned over him. Hank didn’t win many fights, but he sure as hell didn’t back down.” (A hulking professional wrestler named Cannonball Nichols took a brief fling as a Drifting Cowboy, not for his proficiency on the bass fiddle but because he knew a mean half nelson.) Hank had shifted into full songwriting mode by now, buoyed by the success of his songbooks, and he found inspiration everywhere. The Cowboys always knew they were nearing home when they caught sight of the searchlight sweeping above the Montgomery airport; “Wake up, Hank, I saw the light,” somebody said from the backseat on one of those late-night returns, and he knew he had the title for a song, albeit a gospel: “I Saw the Light.”

  Home wasn’t necessarily a place where Hank could kick back and lick his wounds before heading out again. Audrey—“Miss Ordrey,” in his twang—had begun wresting control from Lillie almost immediately, taking over booking dates and paying the band and generally orchestrating Hank’s life. Worst of all, she bought he
rself a fringed cowgirl outfit and insisted on singing with the band in a voice so shrill and indescribably bad—like the off-key soprano in a church choir who always manages to screech above the rest—that Hank resorted to turning off her microphone without telling her. (“It’s bad enough to have a wife who wants to sing,” he said, “but it’s hell to have one who wants to sing but can’t.”) Now, when he got home, Hank had both of the women in his life on his case, almost always about his drinking, and sometimes things turned violent. Lillie’s boardinghouse had the makings of a television sitcom with its varied characters, a mélange of squabbling couples and ambitious young secretaries and rural politicians and, of course, its full-time residents. Fearing for his physical safety, J. C. Bozard literally fled his brief marriage to Lillie, who was soon romancing yet another boarder. A couple named Bernice and Doyle Turner joined the band and moved into the house when Don Helms was drafted toward the end of the war; but Doyle was an alcoholic, like Hank, leading to violent fights with his wife that once ended in gunfire. Now and then Hank would snap, lying up drunk in his room when he found himself unable to write, finally hauling ass to the San Carlos Hotel in Pensacola. On such occasions, Audrey would slink home to her parents’ farm near Banks, threatening never to return. Teeming with animosities, Lillie’s place resembled a war zone.