Lovesick Blues Page 7
Obviously, Fred felt he was on to something. Three months after that first session, in February of ’47, Hank was back in the same studio for another. By now Rose had thoroughly combed through Hank’s songbooks and “demo” tapes, and this time he had picked four secular songs—among them “Honky Tonkin’ ” and “Pan American”—that veered toward a vision he was beginning to develop, of Hank as a rawboned roadhouse balladeer. Hank had written “Pan American” as a tribute to one of the trains that blew through Greenville and Georgiana during his youth, the Pan American Clipper, and its melody was so close to Acuff’s “Wabash Cannonball” that the writers of that one, the Carter Family, could have sued him for plagiarism. Every country singer needed a train song, though, and this would be Hank’s first. The most notable aspect of “Honky Tonkin’ ” was that Rose, for the first time, chose to clean up Hank’s references to alcohol, the bane of both men’s lives: Hank’s “We’ll get a quart of whiskey and get up in the air” became Fred’s “If you go to the city, baby, you will find me there.” And there was another new wrinkle: working without drums to establish the rhythm, Fred and the WSM staff musicians he had hired to back this session came up with what they called a “crack” backbeat alternating with the bass fiddle—the pulse of the song, boom-chuck, boom-chuck, the basis for Johnny Cash’s signature sound a generation later—by keeping time on the deadened bass strings of an electric guitar. Closer, ever closer, a new voice was coming up over the horizon. Fred Rose wasn’t so much orchestrating the changes as he was allowing them to evolve.
As for Hank; well, hell, all he wanted to do was make music and have a snort of whiskey when nobody was looking. He might be able to flaunt his new status as a “Sterling recording artist”—something that thoroughly flummoxed his detractors at WSFA, who couldn’t quite understand his popularity and always seemed on the verge of firing him for his indiscretions— but to Hank it was business as usual. He was back on the road, playing schoolhouses during the week and gin joints on weekends, once even taking a regular gig playing at the stockyards in Montgomery (the promoters fired him, figuring they could save the money and the trouble he was costing them, only to rehire him when the usual crowds of 250 cattlemen fell to almost nothing the next Saturday). At a roadhouse in Fort Deposit, one of those places where a chicken-wire fence separated the band from the crowd, a drunk wearing work boots and overalls but little else bolted in from the parking lot, firing a pistol at random (“Talk about huntin’ for a table,” said one of the band members). On one of his sporadic toots, Hank passed out on a Montgomery street; with automobiles calmly steering around the prone body, the cops came, dragged him to safety, and took him not to jail but home to Audrey, a fate worse than the drunk tank. Hank and Audrey were still slugging it out, tensions abating only when Hank allowed her to thump the bass fiddle and sing off-key in her godawful church soprano now and then. Poor little Lycrecia was being steadily shuttled back and forth between the rental house in Montgomery and Audrey’s parents’ farm in Banks, depending on the level of hostilities between Hank and Audrey. The revolving members of the Drifting Cowboys loved it when Hank got his first full-blown “write-up” in a Montgomery paper, concluding with the revelation that “Mr. and Mrs. Hank Williams lead a model domestic life.”
Both Hank and Fred knew that Sterling Records wasn’t the answer, so Fred went shopping in New York for the right label. He knocked on doors at RCA, Columbia, Decca, and Capitol but something kept each of them from being the right fit. (Hank revealed his trust and loyalty to Fred when he got a call from the man at Decca the moment Rose walked out the door, asking, “What can Fred Rose do for you?” “He’s got you calling me, ain’t he?” Hank said before hanging up.) Then Rose discovered that the mammoth Loews Corporation, having seen labels like RCA make millions of dollars from selling songs from its own lavish movie musicals, had decided to start a label of its own, MGM Records (for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Better yet, the man in charge at MGM was Frank Walker, a veteran who knew music inside and out, the man who had discovered the black blues singer Bessie Smith for Columbia the very year Hiram Williams was born. Best of all, Walker had spent years scouring the countryside for talent of every ilk and had a full appreciation for the roots of Hank’s music. MGM was dead serious, pouring millions of dollars to convert an old munitions factory into a record-pressing plant, making distribution deals with Zenith radio stores and a network of independent distributors, promising to offer cut-rate “introductory” prices, and signing established artists like Jimmy Dorsey and Kate Smith whose contracts had run out. To that stable he was adding Hank Williams. Fred Rose would call all of the shots about what and how Hank recorded, and MGM would handle promotion and merchandising. This time, Hank’s contract as an artist called for him to receive royalties.
Sensing the importance of Hank’s first records on the MGM label, Fred trashed the cuts made during their first session when he deemed that the backup musicians, the Drifting Cowboys who were available, weren’t up to snuff. He wanted the very best, and that turned out to be, essentially, Red Foley’s Opry band. They went into the studio on a day in April of 1947 and came away with two of Hank’s first real keepers: “Move It on Over” and “I Saw the Light.” The latter was classic Hank in its inception (the title had come to him on that night, years earlier, when somebody in the car saw the lights from the airport signaling that they were nearing Montgomery) and its message: a misbegotten wretch finds the Lord, sees “the light,” and vows to turn his life around. Rose withheld the release of “Light” for a full year and a half, primarily because his partner, Acuff, wanted to release his own version first, but also because of what became of “Move It On Over” when it was rushed into stores only six weeks after it was cut. Hank’s good-natured and lively tale of a wastrel husband literally being forced to spend the night in the doghouse made the Billboard charts and took off. “Move It On Over” changed everything.
Predictably, on the charts and in the chips for the first time, Hank began to spend money exactly like somebody who’d never had any. He made a down payment on a $10,000 house in Montgomery. He picked out a touring-size Packard. He bought Audrey her first fur coat. He helped buy a bigger boardinghouse for Lillie, who had married yet another boarder, this one an amiable cabdriver turned carpenter named W. W. “Bill” Stone. With not a little bit of help from Audrey, the money was flying out the door—for clothes, for cars, for furniture, for booze, for five-dollar tips on fifty-cent breakfasts—and in spite of earning upwards of $20,000 on his songwriting alone in 1947 he was scrambling to keep up with his mortgage payment. Like a Roman candle, he had zoomed to his apex and then suddenly plummeted to earth.
When Rose failed in late ’47 to land a regular gig for Hank on WLAC in Nashville, one that would have put him literally steps away from the Opry, Hank fell apart. The four Drifting Cowboys had bought glittery matching outfits, in anticipation of making it to Nashville, but now they were having to pay for the thirty-dollar suits with little regular income. They were back on the road again, to the same low-rent venues they thought they would never see again, sometimes with Hank and sometimes without him. (“The last time I saw him, all I saw was his boots,” said J. C. Sims, an acquaintance from Hank’s childhood. “They were playing the schoolhouse in Starlington and those long ol’ boots were sticking out the back window of their car. Everybody knew he was passed out drunk, but the show went on anyway.”) WSFA ran out of patience and fired him again. Hank and the band got their last regular job in Montgomery, at a dance hall called the 31 Club, where too often he showed up drunk and unable to perform. There was a disaster of larger magnitude when he was booed off the stage at a downtown theater while warming up the crowd for a couple of Opry stars. That led to another incarceration, if that’s the word, in the sanitarium in Prattville, and, soon after, a letter from Fred Rose:
Wesley tells me you called this morning for more money, after me wiring you four hundred dollars just the day before yesterday. We have gone as far as we can go
at this time and cannot send you any more. Hank, I have tried to be a friend of yours but you refuse to let me be one, and I feel that you are just using me for a good thing and this is where I quit. You have been very unfair, calling my house in the middle of the night and I hope that you will not let it happen again, as it isn’t fair to Lorene. When you get ready to straighten out, let me know and maybe we can pick up where we left off, but for the present I am fed up with all your foolishness.
And then, thoroughly fed up herself, Audrey filed for divorce on the grounds that her husband “has a violent and ungovernable temper. He drinks a great deal, and during the last month he has been drunk most of the time. My nervous system has been upset and I am afraid to live with him any longer.”
Three years and four months had passed since their impromptu wedding at the service station in Andalusia, and many were in wonderment that the union had lasted that long. “I never doubted that they loved each other,” said Don Helms, speaking for those who knew them best, “but they just had some funny ways of showing it.” They cursed, drank, shouted, and threw things at each other, including punches. Hank had thought peace was at hand when he bought the house—Lycrecia would always contend that Hank was “a good daddy” who took well to the notion, at least, of being the breadwinner to a wife and daughter—but he quickly discovered that this wasn’t the way to Audrey’s heart. She didn’t want to be a cowboy’s sweetheart, somebody’s faithful cook and housekeeper, a rock in a storm. She wanted to be an equal partner, precisely one-half of the show, envisioning herself as Miss Audrey, in her fringed cowgirl get-up, yodeling and harmonizing beside her husband as they rode off together into the sunset. The problem with that vision was that she simply didn’t have the voice and she certainly didn’t have the patience to ride out the bad times—Lord knows, Hank had given her plenty—and when she couldn’t have it all now she bailed out and took her daughter back home to her parents’ farm.
Hank sold the house, recovered his $2,200 deposit for something to live on, and moved back into Lillie’s boardinghouse, where often in that spring of ’48 he was seen sprawled on the front-porch swing in his boots, cowboy hat, and spangled suit—all dressed up with no place to go—like a shell-shocked veteran home from the war. So lonesome he could cry, he slept late, piddled at writing songs, tried to ignore Lillie’s glares and deprecations, guzzled whiskey, listened to the radio, devoured his comic books (Joe Palooka and Ozark Ike were his favorites) and his romance magazines in order to escape reality, and might have found female comfort if he hadn’t gotten into the habit of passing out by sundown. His train had left the station without him, it seemed. Once more, Fred Rose typed a letter to his anguished protégé:
You are destined for big things in the recording and songwriting field and you are the only one that can ruin this opportunity. In the future, forget the firewater and let me take care of your business and you’ll be a big name in this business. . . . Remember that women are revengeful and do all in their power to wreck a man when they separate from him and the only way to win is for the man to become successful instead.
Back in the summer of ’47 there had been a disappointing recording session that produced a couple of songs Hank would always use as metaphors for failure: “Fly Trouble,” a talking-blues number, written by Fred Rose and a blackface comedy team known as Jamup and Honey, that was supposed to compete with the hit “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)”; and “On the Banks of the Old Pontchartrain,” a narrative Hank based on a bad poem scribbled on a postcard he received from a fan in Louisiana. Neither was right for him, and he knew it: “I just hope it don’t turn out to be another ‘Fly Trouble’ or ‘Pontchartrain,’ ” he would say over the years when a new record was about to be released. On back-to-back days in November of that year, he had put down the tracks for eight more songs, in MGM’s anticipation of a recording ban by the newly formed American Federation of Musicians, that would have mixed results: “Rootie Tootie” was another ill-advised selection of a clever little Rose ditty, but “A Mansion on the Hill,” “Honky Tonkin’,” and “I’m a Long Gone Daddy” (acknowledging a spouse who would “rather fight than eat”) would make the charts and eventually join the Hank Williams oeuvre. While Hank was frittering away his days and waiting for the divorce papers to wend through the courts during that sultry spring in Montgomery, Fred was still on the case in Nashville in spite of his deep concerns about his boy’s personal life. Just as he was orchestrating the release of some cuts from the November sessions and looking for a way to get Hank out of Montgomery, he was stunned to receive a giddy vacation postcard from Norfolk, Virginia, a month after the Williamses’ divorce was to have gone through: “Having Big Time, Hank & Audrey.”
The Lovesick Blues
Obviously, they could live neither with each other nor without. The “divorce” became final on the last week of May, but actually they had been merely separated for a few weeks—Audrey down there on the farm, Hank failing miserably to keep himself together in Montgomery—before they reunited at Lillie’s boardinghouse and suddenly, voilà, were traipsing off to sunny Norfolk on what amounted to the honeymoon they had never gotten around to the first time. If anybody was being true to Hank’s cause, it was the beleaguered Fred Rose, who, on the day he got that postcard, had already begun devising a plan. It was a given that Hank had to get out of Montgomery now, not later, or else be forever consigned to small-time glory at WSFA. The Opry was but a distant dream and would remain so until Hank produced a hit so big that they could deny him no longer, drunk or sober. Just as Audrey had shown her husband how to make it in Nashville, by going through the back door as a songwriter, Rose was mulling over a similar scheme for his boy to shorten his route to the stage of the Grand Ole Opry at Ryman Auditorium.
Rose thought he saw the answer for Hank in Shreveport, Louisiana, at KWKH, a 50,000-watt radio station that had just premiered a Saturday night jamboree fashioned after the Opry. They were calling it the Louisiana Hayride, a live four-hour show that could be heard over much of the eastern United States, wherever it wasn’t being blown off the air by the megapowered Mexican border stations booming up from the Rio Grande. Due to the sheer power of its own signal, KWKH had much the same clout in what the marketers called the Ark-La-Tex area as WSM did east of the Mississippi. Performers were pouring in from the vast countryside to play the Hayride, hoping the exposure would lead to an invitation to join the Opry. The people running the station and the Hayride weren’t nearly as savvy and forward-looking as the insurance barons at WSM, and thus were content to serve as a feeder of talent to the well-established Opry. They called it the Cradle of the Stars, and indeed it would serve as the last stop before the major leagues for scores of superstars including Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash.
In spite of the success of “Move It On Over,” which eventually peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard charts, placing Hank on the Hayride wasn’t going to be easy. “Hank who?” would have been a plausible response from KWKH. The guy was a big-time drunk among drunks, they could say, and his success on a drowsy 1,000-watt station in south Alabama meant little to them. First, Rose took care of Hank by agreeing to put him on a fifty-dollar-a-month draw, an advance against royalties, and then he began calling in his chits from old friends at the station. He went to work on Dean Upson, commercial manager at KWKH, a fellow member of the Vagabonds when Fred found Nashville and broke away from the group. That led him to Horace Logan, the man in charge of the Hayride, who proposed that if Hank could stay sober for six months and prove it they would give him a shot. “Hank called me every week,” Logan wrote in his memoirs, “and invariably he would have the manager of [WSFA] with him. ‘Hank has been sober, he’s been here every morning, he hasn’t missed a single morning. He’s sober as a judge,’ and Hank’d say, ‘That’s right, I’m sober.’ ” He was anything but, of course, in that spring of his deepest angst, but the ploy was working. What probably nailed it was a weekend trip Hank and Audrey made to Shreveport in midsummer, when Hank
presented himself to the bosses and later hung out at a diner across the hall from the KWKH studios with some of the Hayride performers: chewing the fat, bitching about low pay, generally showing that he was one of the boys.
Hank signed off at WSFA for the last time in the waning days of July 1948, and he and Audrey (with Lycrecia, now seven years old) were on their way to Shreveport in a Chrysler sedan with mattresses and box springs strapped to the roof. They rented a garage apartment there and, once again, tried to settle in like any normal couple. Hank’s deal with KWKH called for a fifty-dollar-a-week salary. He would host a fifteen-minute show at 5:15 every weekday morning, just him and his guitar, and perform on the Hayride most Saturday nights. He assembled a band, of a sort, the only member of the Drifting Cowboys willing to follow him to Shreveport being Lum York, the bass-thumping comic, but even that lasted only a few weeks. (Don Helms, the steel guitarist he wanted most, had a family and too good a gig at a skating rink in Andalusia to chance the move.) It would be tough going, financially, until Hank built a following in this new neck of the woods, and that began to happen the very moment he made his debut on the Louisiana Hayride on the first Saturday night in August. He was scheduled right after Johnnie and Jack, a duo who had also been placed there by Fred Rose, and when somebody backstage apologized for making him follow such a popular act, Hank shrugged it off with the comment, “I’ll eat ’em alive.” The packed house of 3,800 at the Municipal Auditorium, slightly larger than the capacity at the Opry’s Ryman Auditorium, was slow to respond at first when he came onstage to do “Move It On Over,” but when he had finished they were on their feet. After he and Audrey came out to sing “I Want to Live and Love” to lesser applause, he was done for the night.