Lovesick Blues Read online

  Hank’s contract didn’t require him to appear on the Hayride each and every Saturday night, but he knew he would have to if he wanted this move to pay off. Within a month, he was picking up dates at schoolhouses and auditoriums and honky-tonks in northern Louisiana and eastern Texas, putting together various versions of the Cowboys as he went along, and soon he found a sponsor for his morning radio show: Johnnie Fair Syrup, a modest local family operation that aspired only to sell a few bottles of syrup. It turned out to be a propitious marriage, great for the business and so good for Hank that the tapes of those shows would become rare collectors’ items. He was in his element. Alone in the KWKH studios before daybreak, entertaining himself and a half-awake engineer, Hank (“the Ol’ Syrup-Sopper”) strummed and sang what he liked, wrapping his soothing country twang around tunes like the Sons of the Pioneers’ “Cool Water” as though staging a private concert for the farm families just beginning their day. Between songs he pitched syrup and his upcoming personal appearances, and at the close of the fifteen-minute show, as the sun was rising over Shreveport, he would pretend he was talking to a maid at his house: “Get the biscuits ready; I’m coming home and I need something to put my Johnnie Fair Syrup on.” The show became so successful that the station began prerecording versions to be played when Hank was on the road.

  Those first few months in Shreveport represented the one extended period of calm in the otherwise chaotic life of Hank Williams. Audrey not only was several hundred miles away from Lillie, but she had become pregnant and, as her belly swelled, was unable to perform onstage. Hank thoroughly enjoyed having Lycrecia around—the only reason he never formally adopted her was Audrey’s fear that he would take her away in case of a divorce—and he was lulled by the idea of being part of a cozy family unit. Sober, relatively happy at home, quickly becoming the best-known performer on KWKH and at the Hayride, he happily rode off in his new Packard limousine (likened to a “stretch Dachsund”) to play the road. “He was a great boss,” said Clent Holmes, a guitarist who often accompanied him. “If I told him I couldn’t reach a certain note, he’d say, ‘Don’t worry about it, hoss, just stomp your foot and smile.’ ” There were always fishing poles in the car, prompting Hank to stop any time he saw a likely pond, lake, or stream. Once, with Holmes driving, they came upon a hitchhiking hobo and Hank ordered Clent to stop. “We’re full up and can’t take you anywhere, friend,” Hank told the man, “but here’s some money so you can buy some food.” (The way he spread the wealth when he had it, you can be sure he didn’t just give the fellow a couple of dollar bills.) Hank had slipped into his repertoire a yodeling version of an old orphan of a show tune called “Lovesick Blues,” sending crowds wild and, for the first time in his experience, teenaged girls were treating him like a country Frank Sinatra: after a show at an auditorium in Corpus Christi, Texas, a gaggle of them came after him with razor blades, intent on cutting off his necktie or a hank of clothing as a souvenir, even letting the air out of his tires to keep him from leaving. He was becoming as easygoing onstage as he was in the studio. “Ladies and gentlemen, to a country boy like me it makes you feel real good when people like a song you wrote,” he would say, “like this one I’m fixin’ to sing for you right now.” There would be the cornpone patter with Lum York, the bass-playing comedian: “Well, let me ask you, if they had to graft some skin when your face got tore up in a car wreck, where’d they graft it from?” Lum: “Let’s just say sometimes my face gets tired and wants to sit down.” Except when working a roadhouse, there was always a hymn to be sung (“You boys gather around here now and let’s do this old gospel song”). And, always, there was the familiar closing he used on the radio show: “If the good Lord’s willin’ and the creek don’t rise, we’ll see y’all Friday night at the Jasper High School auditorium.” When he got home, his pockets full of money, he would kiss his wife and check out how the baby was coming.

  The downside was this: Hank was so happy that he couldn’t write a word. There had been some half-assed attempts as he rode along in the backseat with Clent Holmes and Lum York—“He tried a title on me once,” said Holmes, “called ‘Swimming a River of Blood,’ and when I told him it was an awful title he never finished”—but the fire was gone. Life was too good. With steady work, money in the bank, and a peaceful home to come to, what wasn’t to like? He had no complaints. Everything in life was fine, steady, downright comfortable; enough to make one think Ol’ Hank might up and join the Kiwanis Club or the Rotarians. One couldn’t help but think of Ernest Hemingway’s pronouncements about the creative process: “In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.” Hank had found happiness, and it didn’t suit him. The anger was gone. It was as though he couldn’t write without being mad about something. The instrument he used—his heart and soul—was bright and shining, smooth and well-oiled, and he had nothing to say.

  The silence had so puzzled Fred Rose that he sent his promotion man, Mel Foree, out to Shreveport to check up on Hank. Acuff-Rose and MGM had been releasing a new Hank Williams record about once a month during the recording ban by the musicians’ union—“I’m a Long Gone Daddy” had peaked at No. 6 during its three weeks on the Billboard chart, but nothing much had happened with “I Saw the Light,” “Pan American,” “Honky Tonkin’,” and the others—and the well was about dry. Hank seemed glad to see somebody from the home office, and Foree dutifully went on the road with him for a few dates before reporting that things were going well with Hank—too well, he noted—and then nudged him into making demos of some new songs the two had worked on together. When the package of demos arrived on Fred’s desk in Nashville, he broke out in a clammy sweat. It was crap, pure crap, as far as he was concerned; especially the one called “Lovesick Blues,” a borrowed tune one year older than Hank himself, which was out of meter, had no bridge, and was full of difficult chord changes. Time was running short. Due to the recording ban, Hank hadn’t been in a studio for more than a year, when they had cut those eight tunes back in November of ’47. How they were going to advance Hank’s career with this mess was inconceivable, but they had to have something new. Fred booked a three-hour session at a recording studio in Cincinnati—the E. T. Herzog Studio—simply because that was home base for Red Foley’s Opry band, the ones he wanted for the session. They gathered there three days before Christmas of 1948.

  Shouting matches erupted in the studio before the musicians even had time to uncrate and tune their instruments. It was all about “Lovesick Blues.” Hank had been performing the song since his days in south Alabama, had experienced the wild reactions of audiences everywhere from Thigpen’s Log Cabin in Georgiana to the meanest roadhouses in the piney woods of the violent Big Thicket area of east Texas, and he was adamant about putting it on a record. When he was advised that the original first verse (“I’m in love, I’m in love, with a beautiful gal”) was being used as a chorus, and the original chorus (“I’ve got a feeling called the blues”) was being used as an opening verse, Hank didn’t know what they were talking about. “I’ll tell you one damn thing,” he yelled at Rose, remembering the packs of teenaged girls rushing to tear his clothes off after he had performed it in Texas, “you might not like the song, but when I walk off the stage and throw my hat back on the stage and the hat encores, that’s pretty hot.” Never were their artistic differences clearer—Fred was a musical technician, a stickler for symmetry, while the untutored Hank couldn’t write a note but understood the raw emotions in a song because he had lived them—and Fred responded by repeating what a disaster he felt the song represented, finally saying he wasn’t going to have anything to do with it. The musicians stood aside while the debate raged, but they didn’t like the tune
, either: “That’s the worst damn thing I ever heard,” whispered steel guitarist Jerry Byrd, who later would record with Rosemary Clooney, Patti Page, Jimmy Wakely, and Jimmy Dean, but on this day had never even heard of Hank Williams.

  And so they went to work. The only one of the four songs that Fred Rose truly approved of was a classic Hank tune about a guy whose true love has wed another, “There’ll Be No Teardrops Tonight,” but the others were a pair of duets with Audrey and, of course, “Lovesick Blues.” If anyone had ever doubted how truly awful Audrey’s singing voice could be, they got a screeching earful when she and Hank teamed up on “Lost on the River” and “I Heard My Mother Praying for Me.” She yowled, jumped in whenever she felt like it, and practically drowned out the voice of a husband who one day would become the quintessential country singer. Whether they knew it or not, those in the studio that day were bearing witness to the ongoing battle that had raged between Hank and Audrey for all of those years: not a collaboration but a competition between the two. (None of this was lost, by the way, on the Hayride’s Horace Logan: “Audrey was a pure, unmitigated, hard-boiled, blue-eyed bitch. She wanted to be a singer and she was horrible, unbelievably horrible. She not only tried to sing, she insisted on it, and she forced herself on stage when Hank was out there. I’d never let her go out, but Hank would say, ‘Logan, I’ve got to let her sing. I’ve got to live with the woman.’ ” Logan solved it during performances on the Hayride with two microphones: a live one for Hank, a dead one for Audrey.) After they had put down “Teardrops” and the duets, with about half an hour of studio time remaining, they revisited the question of recording “Lovesick Blues.”

  With Rose fuming behind the glass, Hank was down on the floor of the studio strumming his guitar and going through the opening strains of the song for the studio musicians, restating his case. “It’s a yodel thing,” Jerry Byrd was explaining to Zeke Turner, the electric guitarist, before asking Hank where the break would come. “When you see me do this,” Hank said, nodding his head and stomping his foot. Byrd said, “Hank, that’s terrible. You ain’t going to put this thing out, are you?” Shrugging, eager to get on with it, Hank told him, “It don’t make any difference. We’ve got the ones we want, anyhow. This is just the ‘B’ side or something.” Rose had heard enough. “Look, Hank, if you insist on doing this, you go ahead and put it on, but I’m not going to stay and listen to it. I’m going to go get a cup of coffee.” As he was headed out the door he shouted to the musicians that he would pay them time-and-a-half if they finished the cut before the remaining ten minutes ran out. Hank knew that studio costs would come out of his royalties. “You’re mighty damn free with my money!” he yelled at Fred’s back.

  Like it or not, the band had the record Hank wanted after only two takes, just under the wire. “Well, what you got?” Rose said when he returned to the studio, back from having his cup of coffee. The engineer played the cut. Hank was pleased, and the backup musicians were at least relieved that they had successfully negotiated the intricate rhythms and chord changes. “My God, Hank,” said Fred, “I still say that’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

  Fred and Wesley Rose had to track down the publishing information before MGM could release “Lovesick Blues,” and they ran into a hornet’s nest. Hank didn’t help things when he told them he had bought the rights from an Alabama performer named Rex Griffin, even owned a copy of Griffin’s Decca recording from 1939, but what he really meant was that the two of them got drunk together and Hank paid a few bucks to “borrow” Griffin’s arrangement. The one thing certain was that the song had been around for a very long time and hadn’t succeeded for anybody. It had been first recorded as a bluesy number in 1922, by several artists, and then showed up in a musical about lovesick airmen, O-oo Ernest, that never made it as far as off-Broadway. At that time authorship was given to Irving Mills for the lyrics and Cliff Friend for the melody—Mills had been a force behind Duke Ellington’s music, Friend a down-and-out vaudevillian—and so they were the two who ultimately shared writing credits when Hank’s version was released in February of ’49. Whatever. Hank was the one man who had found the core of the song, the absolute despair of a man whose woman has left him at the end of his rope, and he yodeled it with such emotion that you would think he was going to drop dead on the spot from a broken heart. He had ridden this wild bull of a song and tamed it.

  Although Fred would never get over his misreading of “Lovesick,” he certainly enjoyed the money it brought in. Hank’s recording sold forty-eight thousand copies in the first two weeks of its life in the stores, made the country charts after one month, and within three months—in the May 7, 1949, issue of Billboard—it had dislodged George Morgan’s saccharine pop song “Candy Kisses” at the top of the charts. Hank found that out while having lunch at the Bantam Grill, the hangout near the KWKH studios favored by Hayride performers. “I’d bought a Billboard at the newsstand [and] walked in and I showed it to him,” said Tillman Franks, a songwriter and performer who had begun booking Hank’s appearances. “It shook him up pretty good. He just sat there silent the longest time. He realized what that meant.” Later in the day, as a means of dealing with the idea that he might be on his way to stardom, Hank was adopting his usual aw-shucks routine: “I sure am glad it ain’t another damn ‘Pontchartrain.’ ” His “Lovesick Blues” remained No. 1 for four months, and was still hanging around on the charts in January of the following year. In the order of things in those days, the Grand Ole Opry couldn’t be far behind for Hank, but in the bigger picture there was this to consider: a sweet little ditty like “Candy Kisses,” more pop than country (“candy kisses, wrapped in paper, mean more to you than any of mine”), had been kicked aside by an anguished cri de coeur. A baton was about to be passed from one generation of country singers to quite another breed.

  Despite his misgivings about the quality of “Lovesick,” Rose had arranged two more recording sessions for Hank in March of ’49 in order to have plenty in MGM’s can just in case. Hank had been so dry for so long that he had little to offer in the way of fresh material of his own—the only “keepers” were “Mind Your Own Business” and “You’re Gonna Change (Or I’m Gonna Leave),” both written when his times were more desperate, which is to say more fertile for him as a writer—but the sessions paid off, nevertheless, thanks to songs by other writers, tunes that he so personalized that, like “Lovesick,” hard-core Hank fans would insist that they were his very own. One of them was “Wedding Bells,” credited to one Claude Boone but actually written by a drunk who had sold it to Boone for twenty-five dollars to keep the booze flowing (odd, how often that happened in those days). The other was “Lost Highway,” written by a blind singer out of Houston by the name of Leon Payne. “Wedding Bells” may have been just another maudlin weeper, with lines that might have come from one of Hank and Audrey’s romance magazines (“a blossom from an orange tree in your hair”), but by the time Hank was done with it the song rode piggyback with “Lovesick” to No. 2 on the charts and ultimately earned $40,000 for Claude Boone, the “writer,” a fine return on his $25 investment. As for “Lost Highway,” Hank claimed it for himself by putting the lyrics in the first person, and Fred Rose once again reworked it to soften his client’s references to booze and sin: “Just a woman’s lies and a jug of gin / Sent me down this road of sin” became a “deck of cards” and a “jug of wine,” rhyming with “a life like mine.”

  The ringing success of “Lovesick Blues” wrought remarkable changes in Hank’s life and career almost overnight. The Louisiana Hayride had a genuine superstar on its hands for the first time and was making full use of him. When the Shreveport Chamber of Commerce put together a unique whistle-stop tour of southern Louisiana and Texas by train, pausing at depots and crossroads and even remote “pig trails,” Hank closed each stop by singing two songs and autographing everything in sight before the train chugged away. Nobody wanted to follow him onstage anymore, whether in Shreveport or on the road. He was gettin
g clamorous encores whenever he performed “Lovesick,” and every time Hank announced a gospel was forthcoming, the house lights were dimmed and up came a spotlight at Municipal Auditorium. Pumped and full of himself, he took to backing away as the audience roared, tipping his hat and mouthing words that only the nearest band member could hear: “Ain’t it a shame, ain’t it a shame, ain’t it a shame.” His pockets were stuffed with dollar bills, almost like “found” money, from cash sales of autographed records, photographs, and songbooks everywhere he played. He hired a full-time band and put them on salary, bought a trailer to haul the equipment behind the Packard (unable to get the hang of it, he had to have a band member back it into the driveway for him), and he bought a house in a subdivision across the Red River in Bossier City. On the verge of making the really big money, he hired as a full-time manager one of the best in the business, Oscar Davis, the dapper, foul-mouthed, overbearing vaudeville promoter who had introduced country music to New York City with a concert at Carnegie Hall. He even took his first plane ride, for that second session at Castle Studio in March of that year, wiring Rose that morning: “Flight 58 will arrive 545 I hope.”