Lovesick Blues Read online

  And he was drinking again, no thanks to Audrey. She had ridden with Hank to Nashville to duet with him on the two gospel numbers in early March, but that would be the penultimate time she would ever record with him. Pregnant now, more irritable than ever, she was not amused by the success Hank was having without her at his side. He would buy jewelry for her, and she would throw it in his face. He would bring home a set of crystal to celebrate the new house, and she would shatter it by flinging it onto the carport. He got into the beer during a picnic for Hayride people, and when he got home, late and drunk, Audrey took an ice pick to the tires of his car. Hank didn’t know which way to turn: en route to a date in Lake Charles with band members Felton Pruett and Lum York, they had to stop at a doctor’s office to repair Pruett’s nose, bloodied and broken by one of Hank’s errant bony knees during a scuffle in the car. “The only thing he really wanted was to be loved,” said Mamie Holmes, Clent’s wife, who baby-sat Audrey during her pregnancy while Hank was out of town, “but she was as needy as he was.” Often Hank showed up for shows with battle scars on his face. He got to where he couldn’t wait to get back on the road, away from Audrey and into the arms of his ebullient, adoring fans. The raucous hard-drinking Cajun crowds he met in southern Louisiana loved everything about him: this rawboned, hungry, cocky hillbilly who seemed to be living a hard life and writing about it as it happened. Little wonder that, years later, when Hank wrote and recorded “Jambalaya,” they accepted it as a sort of love letter from one of their own: “Pick guitar, fill fruit jar, and be gay-o / Son of a gun we’ll have big fun on the bayou . . . .”

  And then, finally, the Opry beckoned.

  Not for nothing did they call Ryman Auditorium the Mother Church of Country Music. The Grand Ole Opry itself had originated in 1925, the idea of George D. Hay, a former Memphis newspaperman, who was hired as program manager for WSM only a month after the station’s founding. Sensing sales opportunities for the National Life & Accident Insurance Company, owners of WSM, Hay propped up an old mountain fiddler named Uncle Jimmy Thompson in front of a carbon microphone in the station’s studio and had him saw away for more than an hour on a Saturday night in November of ’25. He came up with a name for the program one night following the end of the NBC network’s weekly showcase of classical music: “For the past hour we have been listening to music largely from grand opera, but from now on we will present ‘grand ole opree. ’ ” (For years, Hay, now referring to himself as “the Solemn Old Judge,” opened the show by blowing on a steamboat whistle and ominously intoning, “Let ’er go, boys,” opening the floodgates for a procession of fiddlers, singers, and clog dancers.) The Opry wandered from one venue to another until 1941, when it was moved to Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville. A fierce redbrick two-story building with stained-glass windows and semicircular rows of severe church pews, sitting five blocks up the hill from the Cumberland River at the end of Broadway, the Ryman was the legacy of a freewheeling riverboat captain named Thomas Ryman, who had been brought to his knees by a tent-show evangelist’s sermon on motherhood, saw the light, threw all of the booze and gambling paraphernalia on his boat into the river, and built a tabernacle to honor the evangelist and the Lord.

  To the performers and their fans, the Opry was Yankee Stadium without the grandeur. Ryman Auditorium had been built before the turn of the century, and by the forties she had the aura of an antebellum mansion gone to seed. The cramped dressing rooms barely afforded space to turn around in; the worn wooden church pews were hardly cushy; nurses patrolled the balcony in those pre-air conditioning days, looking for heatstroke victims; a man might as well go out and pee in the alleyway as hope to find a respectable restroom; bulky hand-painted flats were lowered to form backdrops for the stage, one replacing another as each half-hour portion’s sponsor changed (from Prince Albert tobacco to Union overalls to Goo-Goo candy bars). It was, after all, primarily a radio show that went out over WSM to nearly half of the United States. (An apocryphal story deals with a farmer who has been listening to the Opry for years as its signal crackled in and out; when he gets back home, having finally made it to the Ryman for a live performance, he marvels to report the one thing that truly impressed him: “There wadn’t no static.”) Serpentine lines circled the auditorium, roiling with fans who had driven an average of five hundred miles, tired but giddy, craning for a peek at typewritten listings, framed and posted like restaurant menus on the heavy front doors, to see if their favorites would be performing that night. Paying their eighty cents at the door, they grabbed free funeral-parlor fans and clamored for the choicest seats, and then began popping flashbulbs as the stars began parading across the scarred and musty stage in their gaudy Western-cut costumes, like matadors wearing sequined suits of light.

  Oscar Davis and Fred Rose had been lobbying WSM to give Hank a guest spot on the Opry, a performer’s first step toward becoming a full-time member if all went well. Oscar promised a year of sobriety in Hank’s behalf, and Fred bribed the Opry’s two top managers with shares of the writing credit for a song he had written, “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy,” which would become No. 1 the following year. When they finally got a date—Saturday night, June 11, 1949—Hank was momentarily distracted. Two weeks earlier, on May 25 (the first anniversary of the divorce that never happened), Audrey had given birth to a boy they named Randall Hank Williams; a whopping ten-pounder who “like to killed the both of us,” Audrey said, adding that nurses had to hold Hank down when he heard her screaming during the delivery. He had sent another wire to Rose—“10 lb boy borned this morning at 145. Both doeing fine”—and whimsically nicknamed his son Bocephus, the name Rod Brasfield, Roy Acuff’s comic, had given to his stage dummy. He had to borrow $100 from the boys at the Bantam Grill to help pay the hospital and doctor’s bills. He signed off at KWKH with a rousing performance of “Lovesick Blues” that drew seven encores, a record that Horace Logan would never allow to be broken. Having cleared the base, as it were, Hank was on his way to the big time now, knowing that at least when he embarked on the trip to Nashville for the biggest moment in any country singer’s life, Audrey would be nursing the baby, too preoccupied to bitch about being left behind.

  In the eight decades since the founding of the Opry, untold thousands of performers have made their debut—the first step toward stardom for some, but for the vast majority three minutes to be remembered before they returned to oblivion—but only one debut has been memorialized. When the show was moved to a new venue far from downtown Nashville, the bosses at WSM were wise enough to have a huge circle of wood cut from the stage at Ryman Auditorium and have it implanted—The Exact Spot Where Hank Williams Made His Debut!—at the spacious, carpeted, air-conditioned Grand Ole Opry House, giving further pause to any hillbilly wannabe who wasn’t nervous enough already. It was that kind of night.

  Like a lone gunman, a stranger headed to town, Hank had driven the six hundred miles from Shreveport to Nashville and checked into the Hermitage Hotel on Friday afternoon so he would be rested. Toward dusk on Saturday, he locked the doors of his Packard in the gravel parking lot behind the Ryman, trundled down the hill to the stage-door entrance, signed in like everybody else, and entered the madhouse that was the backstage area on any Opry night. Fred Rose was there to greet him, along with Oscar Davis and a couple of WSM’s big-wigs, and Hank knew some of the stars from older times—Red Foley, Ernest Tubb, Roy Acuff, Minnie Pearl, Little Jimmy Dickens—but for the most part he was just another old boy in cowboy boots and a Stetson, carrying a guitar case. He had gotten there in time to watch and listen to the Opry’s prime-time show, sponsored by Prince Albert tobacco and hosted by the smooth-talking Foley, which was picked up by NBC and aired to 150 stations and ten million listeners throughout the nation; a program deemed so vital by the Opry and the network that it was scripted right down to the second and fully rehearsed earlier in the day. When that portion ended at nine o’clock, up went the Prince Albert backdrop and down came the flats advertising Warren Paints, the sign
al for Tubb and his Texas Troubadours to hit the stage.

  While “E. T.,” as Tubb was known, broke into “I’m Walkin’ the Floor over You,” Hank hovered in the shadows with the pickup band that would back him on his debut. If he was nervous, he didn’t show it. “Williams, you’re next,” said a fellow holding a clipboard, the Opry’s stage manager. As Tubb sang the closing refrain of “Walkin’ the Floor,” there was a rustle among the entertainers backstage, veteran stars and sidemen alike. “C’mon, y’all gotta hear this guy,” said Billy Robinson, who would back Hank on the steel guitar, and many of the Opry regulars closed in. They had heard of his performances, knew of the baggage he carried, and they were curious. Tubb finished his turn at the microphone, there was a commercial for Warren Paints, and then Cousin Louie Buck, the WSM announcer standing stage right and reading from a script, made the introduction: Making his debut on the Opry . . . that Lovesick boy . . . a great big Warren Paints welcome . . . Hank Williams!!

  There was some spontaneous applause, urged on by Cousin Louie’s waving his hands for more as Hank’s gaunt form suddenly loomed in the spotlight—a twenty-five-year-old who appeared older and taller than his six-one and 150 pounds—and the crowd of 3,500 didn’t need any more prompting when they heard the familiar opening strains of “Lovesick Blues.” Oh, so that’s the guy. They never really knew what had hit them.

  I got a feeling called the blues, oh, Lord, Since my baby said good-bye, Lord, I don’t know what I’ll do-ooo-ooo All I do is sit and sigh-ee-yi-ee-yi-yiii . . .

  It had been one thing to hear the song over the radio, but quite another to see him perform it in person. He was so skinny that when he leaned into the WSM microphone and began to sway with the rhythm, his legs appeared to dangle as though he were a marionette on strings. The yowling yodel of sigh-ee-yi-ee-yi-yiii brought almost everybody in the house to their feet—absolutely stunned—and the rush to the stage was on. Flashbulbs lit up the Ryman like Christmas tree lights. Young women stumbled all over each other to take his snapshot and get a closer look, hoping to be the one he chose to pick out of the crowd; older women simply wanted to take him home for a good meal, put some meat on those bones, and tell him everything was going to be all right. Even the Opry veterans in the wings were howling, back-slapping, rolling their eyes, gaping.

  And I’m oh so lonesome, I’ve got the lovesick blues . . .

  He strummed the final chord, bowed, tipped his hat, and began backing away from the near-hysterical crowd—Ain’t it a shame, ain’t it a shame, ain’t it a shame—but they wouldn’t let him go. He came back to give them more . . . and more . . . and more. Cousin Louie Buck had a radio show to run, a time schedule to follow, and he tried to stop them—

  She’ll do me, she’ll do you

  She’s got that kind of lovin’

  Lord I love to hear her when she calls me sweet daddy,

  Such a beautiful dream . . .

  —but they wouldn’t quit. Many thousands of fans claiming they were there, ten times the actual capacity of the Ryman, are still swearing Hank did six encores of “Lovesick Blues” that night. That never happened, exactly, but it’s beside the point. The fact is, you couldn’t tell where one “encore” ended and another began. Suffice it to say that there was a continuous uproar during his entire performance, nearly ten minutes of bedlam, and that the Opry had never seen anything like it before, or since. Two hours later, when Hank sang “Move It on Over” during the eleven o’clock Allen Manufacturing show, he was welcomed back to the stage as though he were already an Opry regular.

  A Star Is Born

  Royalty from the very beginning, Hank was whisked back the very next weekend for a spot on the networked Prince Albert portion of the Opry. This a time he was flown in from Shreveport, like a bona fide star, went through the rehearsal on the morning of the show, lolled around the hotel all afternoon, and got a proper introduction that night from Red Foley, who asked for “a rousing Prince Albert welcome to the ‘Lovesick Blues’ boy, Hank Williams.” In the scripted chatter that followed, Foley said he hoped “you’ll be here for a long, long time, buddy,” a tacit announcement that he had already been accepted into the Opry family. “Well, Red,” Hank drawled, “it looks like I’ll be doing just that, and I’ll be looking forward to it.” And here came “Lovesick Blues” again, with much the same audience reaction, except now he was being heard by ten million people hunkered around radios throughout North America and into Canada. Hiram Williams, Lillie and Lon’s boy, had reached the pinnacle of country music at the age of twenty-five. Nobody had ever made it faster to the top.

  To be added to the official roster of the Opry was the ultimate endorsement for a country music performer. Although some stars over the years would turn down the opportunity, on the grounds that they could do better by playing big-ticket concerts in major cities rather than hustling back to work the cramped Ryman for peanuts on the biggest night of the week, most would kill to be an Opry regular. There were about four dozen of them when Hank was accepted to the club, which was exactly what it was, and the benefits far outweighed the losses. A star would be showcased twice over the course of a Saturday night at the Opry, performing as many as a half dozen songs for a radio audience representing the most faithful of country listeners all over the nation, and the biggest names like Hank and Acuff might make a third appearance on a live show broadcast from Ernest Tubb’s Record Shop around the corner from the Ryman. The radio exposure, not the minimal pay, made it worthwhile to interrupt a tour, dash back to Nashville, do the Opry, and then leave immediately to resume the tour. Regulars were obliged to make at least twenty-six appearances on the Opry each year, and in exchange for that they could advertise themselves as a “star of the Grand Ole Opry” wherever they went. They were also offered the clout of WSM’s Artist Service Bureau, ruled by a bearish company man named Jim Denny, who, for a percentage of the take, put together concerts and tours.

  From all appearances, Hank had finally found a home and was ready to settle down for the long haul. He was a father now, and a stepfather, and he and Audrey were shopping around for a house in Nashville. He had just signed a fresh contract with MGM Records, which suddenly had a cash cow on its hands and was making the most of it by releasing records as fast as Hank could cut them. His relationship with Fred Rose was turning into a dream collaboration between a raw storyteller and a slick tunesmith, neatly summarized in a simple sentence by Mitch Miller, the Columbia record producer who would later place many of Hank’s songs on the pop charts: “Every good writer needs a good editor.” For a personal manager he had the indefatigable Oscar Davis, the man who had brazenly introduced live country music to New York. He had even found a Nashville banker he could trust, a fellow named Sam Hunt, who delighted in allowing Hank to play the laid-back cowboy; coming in from a week of playing one-nighters on the road, Hank would amble into the bank when it opened on a Monday and begin emptying pockets crammed with crumpled bills and personal checks onto the counter, telling a bemused cashier, “I make it, you count it.” In that summer of ’49, suddenly thrust upon the world, Hank had it made. He was sober, his records were selling, his voice could be heard all across the land, and he was about to unleash the greatest single portfolio of songs ever written by any one person in the history of country music.

  Now Hank could stop taking no for an answer from the men he had wanted for years to have as a part of the Drifting Cowboys. At the very top of his list was Don Helms, the steel guitarist from rural south Alabama, whose history with Hank dated back to playing at Thigpen’s Log Cabin. The steel was the most important element in Hank’s accompaniment, a delicate echo of his mournful cry when played properly, and Helms had the perfect touch. When he said yes to Hank, the others followed: Jerry Rivers, a sprightly young fiddler, son of a Miami dentist, who had served an apprenticeship with an offshoot of Tubb’s Texas Troubadours; bass player Hillous Butrum; and guitarist Bob McNett. All of them were slightly younger than Hank, healthy and hungry and eager to see
more of America, veterans already of the hard life out there on the road. Putting together the right band was an imperative for Hank this time around, after too many years of having to tell virtual strangers to come in on the chorus “when you see me stomp,” and he had learned the hard way the necessity of teamwork and simple compatibility for a group of men faced with hours cramped together in an automobile for days on end. They understood the basic simplicity of Hank’s music and their role in it (“Keep it vanilla,” was all he asked.). He paid them salaries slightly above the average, and sometimes they could double that from the cut they got from hawking photos, songbooks, and records to audiences. The group began to coalesce after only a couple of loose jam sessions—Hank became “Harm” and “Bones,” Helms with his long hair was nicknamed “Shag,” and Rivers’s crew cut cried out for “Burrhead”—and they were quickly okayed by the Opry’s Jim Denny, who could have insisted on a house band if he had found them lacking. They would become the most famous Drifting Cowboys ever. Something big was about to happen, and Jerry Rivers could feel it from the start: “As we rolled out of Nashville in Hank’s long, blue Packard after my first Opry appearance with Hank, I sat quietly in the back knowing I had changed. In those few moments on stage, watching Hank perform and watching the audience respond, I regained a humility I’d lost somewhere along the way.”

  Rolling away from the Ryman at midnight on a Saturday, pulling a little aluminum trailer with Hank Williams & the Drifting Cowboys hand-painted on its side, they went in search of their fortunes. The road was their mistress. Like the long-haul truckers they would pass in the night, they were constantly searching for country music or baseball games on the radio, not to mention keeping eyes peeled for gas stations and truck stops; dodging drunk drivers and highway patrolmen; trying to sleep; and wondering when they might take a decent shower again. Often they covered four hundred miles between shows. Once, a buzzard came flying through the windshield. More than once, they ran out of gas. Another time, a jerry-built gizmo somebody had devised as a precursor of air-conditioning, a bullet-shaped intake lodged in the partly opened window and filled with excelsior and alcohol, suddenly went haywire, giving them an acrid bath they hadn’t anticipated. They were playing better venues now, bigger places in bigger towns like Dallas and St. Louis, but they weren’t averse to working from the roofs of concessions stands at drive-in theaters. “What rhymes with ‘street’?” Hank would holler, riding shotgun, pencil poised over his schoolboy’s composition notebook, and from the back would come a yelp from Don Helms: “Your smelly feet!” Hank was so bad about cadging cigarettes that he would mindlessly reach into another’s shirt pocket to bum one, a practice that ended when one of the Cowboys found some exploding cigarettes at a novelty shop. They were on such a natural high, living a dream, that nobody was drinking so much as a beer, including Hank.