Lovesick Blues Read online

  Hank’s growing celebrity worked both ways, of course. More than once he showed up drunk and unable to perform, or didn’t show up at all, causing all sorts of consternation among promoters left holding the bag in the small towns and communities south of Montgomery. Often WSFA was forced to air canned reruns of his radio broadcasts when he called in “sick.” Early in 1945 he was delivered to a sanitarium in Prattville to be treated for alcoholism, which in those days, in Alabama, usually meant being dried out and bed-rested for three or four days. He was still popping in backstage at the municipal auditorium, sometimes drunk and unmanageable, whenever troupes came to town. Established stars like Tubb would report back to Nashville that they really ought to take a listen to this kid, that he had the stuff the Opry was looking for, but the word was already spreading: Williams, Hank. Unreliable. In that small world of south Alabama, Hank had gotten so big that WSFA couldn’t fire him in spite of his transgressions. But in a larger world, where there was more at stake, most especially the carefully preened reputation of the Grand Ole Opry as a wholesome “family” institution, managers quite frankly didn’t want to mess with him.

  A measure of calm came to the Williams household in late ’46 when Hank put together enough money to rent a house a few blocks away from his mother’s boardinghouse. It was the first time he had ever lived under what he might call his own roof. Audrey went to her parents’ farm and fetched her daughter, Lycrecia, now turning five years old, and the three of them settled in for what they hoped would be a normal family life. Peace settled over Hank like a warm blanket. He treated the little girl as though she were his own blood kin. The marriage wasn’t exactly the way a WSFA program director described it in Hank’s second songbook—“He is happily married and he and ‘Miss Audrey’ are already famous as a team”—but it was as close as he had ever been to domestic tranquillity.

  Fred Rose

  All news was local in the rural South of those days. You might have become a hotshot in New York or Paris or even Shanghai, bubba, but you’d better not have forgotten your raising. In the summer of 1932, a gifted athlete named Percy Beard had left his home in Pine Apple, Alabama, about thirty miles from where young Hiram Williams was living with his mother and his sister in Georgiana, and taken a train all the way across the country to compete in the Olympics in Los Angeles. Those games preceded the famous ’36 Olympics in Berlin, where the great African American runner Jesse Owens would literally trample on Adolf Hitler’s ideas of an Aryan master race right there in his own backyard. At any rate, Beard ran alongside Owens in ’32, bringing back medals of his own, and for days he sat at home savoring his triumphs, waiting for someone in Pine Apple to at least ask him where he had been and how things had gone. Weeks passed until finally he came across a brief item in the Personals column of the county’s weekly newspaper: “Percy Beard, son of Mr. and Mrs. G. W. Beard of Pine Apple, recently returned from California, where he participated in a footrace.”

  This provincial thinking was all too familiar to Hank. His wife and his mother certainly wanted to see him reach for the stars—indeed, pushed him relentlessly—but Hank and many other poor southern country boys of his generation felt a reluctance to “rise above your raisin’,” as they were repeatedly cautioned by their peers. A certain xenophobia was loose on the land, a fear of strangers and the dark unknown beyond the borders of one’s home country, and there was no doubt that this had its roots in the Civil War. The South was the only region in the nation that had suffered the degradations of defeat and occupation by a “foreign” army. That war was about slavery, not states’ rights or some other noble purpose, but never mind: the psychic fallout from the South’s loss was overwhelming in places like rural Alabama. Southerners born half a century after the war’s end, as was Hank, were still burdened with a sense that they were inferior to other Americans. The statistics were there, showing that the South might never recover from its foolhardiness, and people in the rest of the country made sure they never forgot. Rural southerners were constantly reminded that they were redneck “hillbillies” who dipped snuff, made their own whiskey, married their cousins, and talked funny. Consequently, they turned inward, gave the world twenty-four hours to get out of town, and stayed home. Given their lack of self-confidence, this was the easy way for them to go.

  There were times when it seemed that Hank might be content to enjoy being the big frog in a little pond, just stick with what he had and forget about rolling the dice, even though it was clear that he had outgrown south Alabama. He had completed his basic training in the hairy world of honky-tonks and schoolhouses and medicine shows and low-watt radio stations—had paid his dues—and now it was time, as his fishing buddies were wont to say, to “fish or cut bait.” There he sat in sleepy Montgomery, an accomplished performer holding a growing portfolio of songs he had written, simply running in place, taking the easy way out. With no music publishers or recording studios in town, he had been forced to pay a printer to produce his songbooks and to run by the Sears store to make crude vanity recordings of some of his songs. Meanwhile, elsewhere, exciting possibilities were opening up. The commercial period in country music had begun on a day in 1927, in Bristol on the Tennessee-Virginia line, when a recording engineer-cum-talent scout named Ralph Peer uncrated his bulky equipment and announced he was holding auditions for local performers. He had a very good day at the office. When he packed up and left, he had signed the first commercial stars in what would be called “hillbilly” music: a group from the Clinch Mountains known as the Carter Family; and a tubercular Mississippi yodeler named Jimmie Rodgers, who had been driving a cab in Asheville, North Carolina.

  Two years earlier, in 1925, the 50,000-watt radio giant WSM in Nashville had introduced a Saturday night barn dance called the Grand Ole Opry, four hours of live music attracting scores of front-porch fiddlers and nasally warblers and other raw talents who were being flushed out of the distant crannies of the southern outback by men such as Peer. What had begun as a means of selling life insurance for the National Life & Accident Insurance Company (WSM stood for “We Shield Millions”) was turning into a wildly popular venture that was making Nashville a veritable hillbilly heaven. If you wanted to make it in country music, you got yourself to Nashville, where the foundation was being laid for what would later become Music City U.S.A., locus of all the nation’s country music publishers, recording studios, side musicians, managers, and agents. Now and then a singer based elsewhere might make it (“Aw, hell, it don’t matter where you cut [your record] at,” Merle Haggard of California would say decades later, “it’s what you put in the groove”), but in the postwar forties the rainbow began in Nashville.

  Hank had made a halfhearted run on Nashville toward the end of the Second World War, the only result being that he got his feelings hurt. He had taken a train up, found WSM, and, unannounced, asked to speak to one of the Opry announcers whose voice he had heard wavering in and out on his radio in Montgomery. “There was this guy with blue jeans and a white hat,” remembered Judd Collins. “He said, ‘I’m Hank Williams. Charlie Holt from WSFA told me to come up here and see you. He said you’d tell me what I have to do to get on the Opry.’ ” Hank was told there were no shortcuts, that he would have to audition for the Opry’s general manager, Jack Stapp. “He wouldn’t go see Stapp. He said, ‘You tell [him] I’m here.’ I think he was disappointed that I couldn’t take him by the hand and say, ‘Hank, you’re on the Opry tonight at eight.’ ” Hank had been on the right track toward the Opry, but he didn’t know how to capitalize on it. The system worked a lot like professional baseball, where a player steadily worked his way up step by step, from Class D on up to Triple-A, until he proved he was ready for the top rung, the major leagues. In country music, you worked the boondocks and little radio stations (Class D) moving up to progressively larger markets until you were deemed ready. Hank got back on the train and rode home to Montgomery that day, tail between his legs, and endured another year of working at WSFA and playing the joi
nts.

  Strut around he might, back home in Alabama—picking fights, lording it over the lesser talents, letting it be known that he had personally opened shows for the likes of Tubb and Acuff—but he still lacked the genuine confidence to insinuate himself in Nashville. There had to be a better plan before he made another attempt at cracking the big leagues, and this time the one true talent of “Miss Ordrey” came into play. Go through the back door as a songwriter, Audrey proposed, and there’s where you start. The one music publisher in Nashville at that time was Acuff-Rose, housed near downtown on Franklin Road, seeded in ’42 with Roy Acuff’s money. The “Rose”? That would be Fred Rose, a pianist and songwriter and music doctor who knew talent when he heard it. At daybreak on September 14, 1946, a Saturday, Hank and Audrey boarded a train in Montgomery and headed for Nashville.

  Hank couldn’t have ordered up a more sympathetic ear. Slender and balding, with failing eyesight, Fred Rose was forty-nine years old on the day of their first meeting (Hank would turn twenty-three the next week) and, like Hank, had grown up virtually fatherless, on the Ohio River in southern Indiana. He had taught himself to play the piano at the age of seven, run away from home, and in his teens was making a living as a musician in Chicago during the jazz age. An accomplished pianist and a glib songwriter, he put together quite a portfolio for himself during the twenties and thirties. He was a featured performer for a while on radio WBBM in Chicago; had a show called “Freddie Rose’s Song Shop,” wherein listeners proposed a song title and he composed an original tune on the spot; was half of a twin-piano feature on the network radio show of big-band leader Paul Whiteman; toured the Midwest with a trio called the Vagabonds; and worked the speakeasies whenever times got bad. He was the prototypical Tin Pan Alley songwriter, able to conjure a song about anything, for anybody, at the drop of a hat. He wrote “Red Hot Mama” for Sophie Tucker, had hits of his own with “ ’Deed I Do” and “Honest and Truly,” and even went to California (on a thirty-five-dollar-a-week salary in the Depression) to write songs to order for the cowboy star Gene Autry.

  Rose had known his troubles, too. His drinking had turned into full-blown alcoholism during the Chicago days, getting him fired from WBBM and pushing him along to New York City, where he dabbled at doctoring tunes for musicals being prepared for Broadway, but shortly plummeted to playing the piano at strip joints and sleeping at night in the men’s rest-rooms with thoughts of suicide. Two divorces and all of that traveling had stripped him of his two sons and what money he had earned. He managed to get the alcoholism under control after becoming a born-again Christian Scientist, and finally found a home when he literally took a wrong turn during a rainstorm on a tour with his trio and wound up in Nashville. That was in 1942. The white-collar burghers were calling Nashville the “Athens of the South,” showing tourists their elegant Victorian mansions and Vanderbilt University and the city’s re-creation of the Parthenon, and they didn’t want to acknowledge the presence of all these hillbillies drifting into town for the Opry. Fred Rose was immediately hired as a pianist by WSM, which had built one of the premier radio orchestras in the nation. He didn’t know or care much at all about country music, but that changed when he saw Roy Acuff cry what Rose perceived to be genuine tears when he sang “Wabash Cannonball” and his sacred songs on the stage of the Opry. Acuff hired him to cowrite and produce songs of his own in sheet form, and soon they were creating Acuff-Rose, the first music-publishing venture in town. Fred married a third and last time, bought a modest brick house, and became a sort of guru to the writers and performers arriving in Nashville almost daily.

  The legend surrounding that first meeting between Hank and Fred Rose makes a lot better story than what really happened. In the fantasy, according to self-serving accounts by Lillie Williams and Wesley Rose, the long-estranged son who had by now joined Fred as the accountant at Acuff-Rose, Hank and Audrey stumble into Fred’s office, unannounced, to find Fred and Wesley playing Ping-Pong on their lunch break. This pushy, attractive blonde asks if they will listen to “some songs my husband has written.” Hank sings a half dozen tunes and the Roses are impressed, but Fred, wanting to make sure Hank is really that good—that indeed he has written the songs himself—proposes a test: go into that room over there and write a song about a girl who ditches her poor-boy lover and chooses to marry for money instead. Hank comes out thirty minutes later with “Mansion on the Hill,” signs a songwriting contract, and is on his way to greatness. Not true, by a mile.

  In fact, Hank was there by Rose’s invitation. Among the more promising performers in the Acuff-Rose stable was a Kentucky singer whose stage name was Molly O’Day, in search of new material for herself, who remembered a show in Montgomery when a local boy named Hank Williams got multiple encores for his emotional reworking of an old country standard entitled “Tramp on the Street.” Hank had tinkered with the original version, even published it in one of his WSFA songbooks under “Author Unknown,” and at Molly O’Day’s request gave her a copy of the lyrics. Word finally reached Fred Rose, who had been trying to find fresh material for O’Day, and he began to correspond with Hank. Fred’s interest was further stimulated when Hank sent him acetates of several songs he had written. He invited Hank to Nashville on that Saturday in September of ’46 for an audition.

  Fred needed original songs, not another singer, but when he met Hank and Audrey at the Nashville railroad station that day he was struck by what he saw: a swaggering hillbilly in jeans and a cowboy hat stepping off the train, guitar case in hand, with a panache that implied he must be somebody. The three of them went straight to the offices of WSM in the National Life & Accident Insurance Company building and set to work. Hank strummed his guitar and sang a half dozen of his songs, and before the day was over he had signed a standard contract with Acuff-Rose as a songwriter, but not as a performer. (There’s no evidence either way, but it’s hard to imagine that Hank and Audrey wouldn’t have finagled tickets to see the Opry that night, their first glimpse of the stage he would make famous within three years.) A couple of weeks later, in his primitive handwriting and on Audrey’s personalized stationery, Hank scrawled a note to Rose: “Here is the two songs you asked for, and the recordings of them. If you can use more at any time, let me know and what types.” Rose countered with a comment that would dog their collaborations forever, raising the lingering question of just who had written what in Hank’s songs: “I must change the lyrics around in order to make them consistent. These will be minor changes, and will not interfere with what you have already written.” In the ensuing months, Molly O’Day would record four of those tunes.

  Clearly, Fred Rose had seen in Hank Williams more than just a songwriter willing to work cheap. He had heard the warnings about Hank’s drinking from his partner, Acuff, and just about everybody else he asked, but he had also heard that voice—as stark and direct and pained as a van Gogh painting—and he couldn’t forget it. By the middle of December, only three months after their first meeting, Fred had Hank in a studio to make his first recordings. The Sterling label out of New York City had called, wanting to jump on the “hillbilly” bandwagon, and Fred said he had found just the right guy. Hank had gotten on a bus alone this time, leaving Audrey at home to stew, and showed up in Nashville two days ahead of time so he would be rested. Thinking the current Drifting Cowboys were just a bunch of amateurs, not quite ready for prime time, Fred had hired the veteran Willis Brothers and a fourth man; they would be called the Oklahoma Wranglers for this session. One of the boys, Vic Willis, wasn’t particularly impressed by Hank when they met for rehearsals the morning of the session: “None of us saw any potential in him. He was dirty, wore this beat-up cowboy hat, and looked a lot older than twenty-three. He was so thin and pathetic looking, he could sit down and cross his legs and both feet would be flat on the floor.” But let it be noted that when they all went to lunch and a waitress asked if they wanted a beer, Hank declined, saying, “You don’t know ol’ Hank. Hank don’t just have one beer.” Clear
-eyed and sober, ready to go to work, Hank signed his name to a contract Fred handed him, agreeing to work for union scale and waiving his right to future royalties.

  They set up in WSM’s Castle Studio (“Air Castle of the South,” the station called itself), in the downtown Tulane Hotel, to cut four songs in three hours, all of them Hank’s compositions: “Wealth Won’t Save Your Soul,” “Calling You,” “When God Comes and Gathers His Jewels,” and “Never Again,” the latter the only secular tune. The relatively sophisticated Willis Brothers winced at some of Hank’s backcountry pronunciations—“wealth won’t save your purr wicked soul”—but Rose overruled them when, try as he might, he couldn’t get Hank to say “poor” properly. When it was over, Hank took his check for $250 and had it cashed at the hotel before boarding the bus for Montgomery. The four backup musicians cashed their $500 check, and Vic Willis was still shaking his head: “For a man like that to make that kind of impression on mankind, he had to be a genius. Education might’ve ruined him.”

  Hank Williams’s first record was released the next month, in January of 1947—“Calling You” on one side, “Never Again” on the other—and if matters had been left to Sterling Records it would have died a stillbirth. They didn’t know how to cut records or press them; but, worse, they didn’t know what they had on their hands. In their own catalog, in fact, they gave high marks to the Oklahoma Wranglers but dismissed Hank as an “Acuff-type of hillbilly.” Billboard magazine, the bible of the music industry, thought differently—“With real spiritual qualities in his pipes, singing with the spirit of a camp meeting, Hank Williams makes his bow an auspicious one”—and that review, with enlightened promotion by Acuff-Rose, ensured decent sales. Rose hated the pejorative “hillbilly” label (indeed, he had recently run an ad in Billboard declaiming it), and he knew how to promote Acuff-Rose’s products at the source: mailing records and sheet music to country radio stations, following up with personal visits from the company’s in-house promoter.