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| I like this one. Captures the fuss. |
“Hank Williams’s legend now overshadows the rather frail and painfully introverted man who spawned it. Born Hiram Williams, the ‘Hillbilly Shakespeare’ came from a rural background.”
- Country Music Hall of Fame Bio
The Basics
The Country Music’s Hall of Fame doesn’t have much to back up that framing, but Hank Williams did squeeze a lot of hits and a lot of trouble into a short life. He was born Hiram Williams in 1923 in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, called Mount Olive. He was also born with spina bifida occulta, a cosmic accident that shaped his life from cradle to grave, but had more consequences on the back end.
His father, Elonzo Huble “Lon” Williams, supported the family with work on lumber company railways, but he disappeared from Hank’s life at a young age. Lon Williams fell off a truck while serving in World War I and those injuries lingered until 1930, when he started developing facial paralysis brought on by an aneurysm. He spent more than eight years in the hospital – the balance of Hank’s childhood – which left his mother, Jessie Lillybelle “Lillie” Williams to raise the family. She proved more than up for the task, working multiple jobs (during the Depression to boot) and ran a succession of boarding houses - even after the first one burned down.
Lillie also encouraged Williams’ love of music. The story of how he got hold of his first guitar varies – one version has him selling peanuts to buy it, another has people from all over whichever town he lived in at the time (they moved around a bit) claiming they bought it for him – but the man who taught him to play it was a busker named Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne. Lillie paid Payne when she could for Hank's music lessons and fed him when she couldn’t, but he taught Williams the basics and on a blues-based foundation. Later, Williams would call Payne “my only real teacher.”
Circumstances – in this case a fight with a phys. ed. teacher – planted the family in Montgomery, Alabama, which is where his musical career starts. In 1937, Williams entered and won a talent contest at the Empire Theater playing a song of his own composition, “WPA Blues.” That earned him $15, but also an angle to sell himself to the local radio station, WFSA, when they saw him busking in front of their building on weekends and after school. The station’s producers handed him the equivalent of a part-time job ($15/week), but it started him on his way.
High school didn’t figure into that future, so Williams dropped out in 1939 (with his mother’s blessing) and formed the first version of his backing band, the Drifting Cowboys. His mother served as his manager, doing everything from handling the booking and negotiating pay-outs for the shows to driving the band to gigs all over Alabama, into western Georgia and the Florida panhandle. They managed to build a regional following, despite the amateur management...and then World War II came. Williams’ back issues, which he aggravated when he fell off a bull at a Texas rodeo, spared him from the draft, but the rest of the Drifting Cowboys shipped out in short order. Williams formed several replacement line-ups, but he had trouble keeping them on due to something that haunted his life like a refrain, “habitual drunkenness.” He lost his radio job with WFSA for the same reason. When he got a chance to meet one of his idols, Roy Acuff, his hero tried to steer him away from drinking with the sage words, “You've got a million-dollar talent, son, but a ten-cent brain.” There's little evidence Williams took those words to heart.
For the rest of the war, Williams helped keep the family whole by working the shipyards in Mobile, He met Audrey Mae Sheppard, his future wife, working in Mobile in 1943. After cohabitating for a time, they made it official at a Texaco station in Andalusia, Alabama, with a justice of the peace presiding. Williams bounced between working in Mobile and performing in Montgomery often as he could. With Audrey by his side, he cleaned up enough for WFSA to hire him back on. He repaid their faith by writing original songs for his radio slot and at a clip of about one per week – which is to say, he had plenty of material on hand when the opportunity came. Or when he went looking for it.
He and Audrey made a trip to Nashville to try out for the Grand Ole Opry, but they rejected him. While still there, they dropped in on to the pioneering country label, Acuff-Rose Music. Despite barging in a ping-pong game, Fred Rose let Williams audition on the spot and liked what he heard. Rose started him on writing for other artists on the label (e.g., Molly O’Day), but gave him a shot at recording a couple sides for the Sterling Records label. The two songs – “Never Again (Will I Knock on Your Door)” b/w “Honky Tonkin,’” both recorded in a December 1946 session – did well enough that Rose took over management from Audrey and placed him on MGM. What had been a regional career took off in 1947 with the release of “Move It on Over,” Williams’ first major hit (despite the fiddle, one of the early forerunners of rock ‘n’ roll).
The prime of Williams’ career exploded from there, starting with his first regular, high-paying job on radio's Louisiana Hayride. He continued to write prolifically, churning out a steady string of hits over a four year period, including “Hey, Good Lookin’,” “Moanin’ the Blues,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” and “My Son Calls Another Man Daddy.” Another notable single was “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” one of the first songs Rufus Payne taught him to play, but Williams’ game-changing hit was “Lovesick Blues,” recorded in 1949. That one wasn’t an original – a pair of Tin Pan Alley scribblers wrote the original in 1922 and a couple other artists (e.g., Rex Griffin and/or Emmett Miller) popularized it first – but Williams made it a monster hit. It climbed to No. 1 on the country charts and stayed there for four months; when it crossed over to the pop charts (peaking at No. 25), that (along with “Honky Tonkin’”) kicked off a rush of pop musicians reworking any Williams song they could get their hands on (e.g., Tony Bennett scored a big hit with his re-working of “Cold, Cold Heart”). He continued touring too, though he typically stayed close enough to get back for Louisiana Hayride broadcasts. This period also saw the most famous Cowboy Drifters line-up, featuring guitarist Bob McNett, bassist Hillous Butrum, fiddler Jerry Rivers, and steel guitarist Don Helms. By this time, not even the Grand Ole Opry could ignore him. They hired him on, though they did it “despite misgivings about his reliability.”
Williams drinking problem never went all the way away. Whether showing up too drunk to play or not showing up at all, the tension between his undeniable talent and serial unreliability defined Hank Williams career. What had been bouts of drunkenness turned permanent following a hunting accident when he fell down and re-injured his back in 1951. When an attempted back fusion by doctors at Vanderbilt University failed to soothe the pain, Williams started drinking and would never stop again; worse, he fell in with a quack doctor named Horace “Toby” Marshall, who prescribed him whatever he asked for under the name “Dr. C. W. Lemon." The carnage spread to his marriage next. After a string of separations and a 1951 stay at a sanitarium for alcoholism, Audrey left him for good in 1952 and won full-time custody of their* only son, Randall Hank Williams (later known as Hank Williams, Jr.). (* Williams had another child with a dancer named Bobbie Jett, only Jett Williams wouldn’t discover he was her father until the 1980s.) By the time June 1952 rolled around, Williams career went off the rails and never really got back on. The Opry let him go for (again) “habitual drunkenness” and, as Allmusic.com put it:
“Hank turned completely reckless in 1952, spending nearly all of his waking hours drunk and taking drugs. He also frequently destroyed property and played with guns.”
The end wasn’t too long coming. Williams landed a New Year’s Eve gig at Charleston, West Virginia’s Municipal Auditorium, only to have a snowstorm ground all available flights. He hired a limo and a chauffeur, a teenager named Charles Carr, to drive him up instead. They made a pit-stop at a hospital in Knoxville, where doctors attempted to keep him whole with shots of Vitamin B12 and a grain of morphine, and then continued on to Canton, Ohio, where they’d been redirected for another show. Around midnight, January 1, 1953, Carr and Hank Williams arrived in Oak Hill, West Virginia. The details diverge between sources – Allmusic says they got pulled over for speeding, while Wikipedia says Carr pulled up to an all-night diner and asked Williams if he wanted something to eat - but, they all agree Williams had died long before Carr noticed (Wikipedia says rigor mortis had already set in).
He was a star for six years on the outside and didn't even make it to 30, but the roots of a couple genres and subgenres reach back to him. To borrow a quote from the Country Music Hall of Fame bio that just feels right:
“In those four short years, he established the rules for all the country performers who followed him and, in the process, much of popular music. Hank wrote a body of songs that became popular classics, and his direct, emotional lyrics and vocals became the standard for most popular performers. He lived a life as troubled and reckless as that depicted in his songs.”
In other words, the man looms large in American popular culture. And now...
- Country Music Hall of Fame Bio
The Basics
The Country Music’s Hall of Fame doesn’t have much to back up that framing, but Hank Williams did squeeze a lot of hits and a lot of trouble into a short life. He was born Hiram Williams in 1923 in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, called Mount Olive. He was also born with spina bifida occulta, a cosmic accident that shaped his life from cradle to grave, but had more consequences on the back end.
His father, Elonzo Huble “Lon” Williams, supported the family with work on lumber company railways, but he disappeared from Hank’s life at a young age. Lon Williams fell off a truck while serving in World War I and those injuries lingered until 1930, when he started developing facial paralysis brought on by an aneurysm. He spent more than eight years in the hospital – the balance of Hank’s childhood – which left his mother, Jessie Lillybelle “Lillie” Williams to raise the family. She proved more than up for the task, working multiple jobs (during the Depression to boot) and ran a succession of boarding houses - even after the first one burned down.
Lillie also encouraged Williams’ love of music. The story of how he got hold of his first guitar varies – one version has him selling peanuts to buy it, another has people from all over whichever town he lived in at the time (they moved around a bit) claiming they bought it for him – but the man who taught him to play it was a busker named Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne. Lillie paid Payne when she could for Hank's music lessons and fed him when she couldn’t, but he taught Williams the basics and on a blues-based foundation. Later, Williams would call Payne “my only real teacher.”
Circumstances – in this case a fight with a phys. ed. teacher – planted the family in Montgomery, Alabama, which is where his musical career starts. In 1937, Williams entered and won a talent contest at the Empire Theater playing a song of his own composition, “WPA Blues.” That earned him $15, but also an angle to sell himself to the local radio station, WFSA, when they saw him busking in front of their building on weekends and after school. The station’s producers handed him the equivalent of a part-time job ($15/week), but it started him on his way.
High school didn’t figure into that future, so Williams dropped out in 1939 (with his mother’s blessing) and formed the first version of his backing band, the Drifting Cowboys. His mother served as his manager, doing everything from handling the booking and negotiating pay-outs for the shows to driving the band to gigs all over Alabama, into western Georgia and the Florida panhandle. They managed to build a regional following, despite the amateur management...and then World War II came. Williams’ back issues, which he aggravated when he fell off a bull at a Texas rodeo, spared him from the draft, but the rest of the Drifting Cowboys shipped out in short order. Williams formed several replacement line-ups, but he had trouble keeping them on due to something that haunted his life like a refrain, “habitual drunkenness.” He lost his radio job with WFSA for the same reason. When he got a chance to meet one of his idols, Roy Acuff, his hero tried to steer him away from drinking with the sage words, “You've got a million-dollar talent, son, but a ten-cent brain.” There's little evidence Williams took those words to heart.
For the rest of the war, Williams helped keep the family whole by working the shipyards in Mobile, He met Audrey Mae Sheppard, his future wife, working in Mobile in 1943. After cohabitating for a time, they made it official at a Texaco station in Andalusia, Alabama, with a justice of the peace presiding. Williams bounced between working in Mobile and performing in Montgomery often as he could. With Audrey by his side, he cleaned up enough for WFSA to hire him back on. He repaid their faith by writing original songs for his radio slot and at a clip of about one per week – which is to say, he had plenty of material on hand when the opportunity came. Or when he went looking for it.
He and Audrey made a trip to Nashville to try out for the Grand Ole Opry, but they rejected him. While still there, they dropped in on to the pioneering country label, Acuff-Rose Music. Despite barging in a ping-pong game, Fred Rose let Williams audition on the spot and liked what he heard. Rose started him on writing for other artists on the label (e.g., Molly O’Day), but gave him a shot at recording a couple sides for the Sterling Records label. The two songs – “Never Again (Will I Knock on Your Door)” b/w “Honky Tonkin,’” both recorded in a December 1946 session – did well enough that Rose took over management from Audrey and placed him on MGM. What had been a regional career took off in 1947 with the release of “Move It on Over,” Williams’ first major hit (despite the fiddle, one of the early forerunners of rock ‘n’ roll).
The prime of Williams’ career exploded from there, starting with his first regular, high-paying job on radio's Louisiana Hayride. He continued to write prolifically, churning out a steady string of hits over a four year period, including “Hey, Good Lookin’,” “Moanin’ the Blues,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” and “My Son Calls Another Man Daddy.” Another notable single was “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” one of the first songs Rufus Payne taught him to play, but Williams’ game-changing hit was “Lovesick Blues,” recorded in 1949. That one wasn’t an original – a pair of Tin Pan Alley scribblers wrote the original in 1922 and a couple other artists (e.g., Rex Griffin and/or Emmett Miller) popularized it first – but Williams made it a monster hit. It climbed to No. 1 on the country charts and stayed there for four months; when it crossed over to the pop charts (peaking at No. 25), that (along with “Honky Tonkin’”) kicked off a rush of pop musicians reworking any Williams song they could get their hands on (e.g., Tony Bennett scored a big hit with his re-working of “Cold, Cold Heart”). He continued touring too, though he typically stayed close enough to get back for Louisiana Hayride broadcasts. This period also saw the most famous Cowboy Drifters line-up, featuring guitarist Bob McNett, bassist Hillous Butrum, fiddler Jerry Rivers, and steel guitarist Don Helms. By this time, not even the Grand Ole Opry could ignore him. They hired him on, though they did it “despite misgivings about his reliability.”
Williams drinking problem never went all the way away. Whether showing up too drunk to play or not showing up at all, the tension between his undeniable talent and serial unreliability defined Hank Williams career. What had been bouts of drunkenness turned permanent following a hunting accident when he fell down and re-injured his back in 1951. When an attempted back fusion by doctors at Vanderbilt University failed to soothe the pain, Williams started drinking and would never stop again; worse, he fell in with a quack doctor named Horace “Toby” Marshall, who prescribed him whatever he asked for under the name “Dr. C. W. Lemon." The carnage spread to his marriage next. After a string of separations and a 1951 stay at a sanitarium for alcoholism, Audrey left him for good in 1952 and won full-time custody of their* only son, Randall Hank Williams (later known as Hank Williams, Jr.). (* Williams had another child with a dancer named Bobbie Jett, only Jett Williams wouldn’t discover he was her father until the 1980s.) By the time June 1952 rolled around, Williams career went off the rails and never really got back on. The Opry let him go for (again) “habitual drunkenness” and, as Allmusic.com put it:
“Hank turned completely reckless in 1952, spending nearly all of his waking hours drunk and taking drugs. He also frequently destroyed property and played with guns.”
The end wasn’t too long coming. Williams landed a New Year’s Eve gig at Charleston, West Virginia’s Municipal Auditorium, only to have a snowstorm ground all available flights. He hired a limo and a chauffeur, a teenager named Charles Carr, to drive him up instead. They made a pit-stop at a hospital in Knoxville, where doctors attempted to keep him whole with shots of Vitamin B12 and a grain of morphine, and then continued on to Canton, Ohio, where they’d been redirected for another show. Around midnight, January 1, 1953, Carr and Hank Williams arrived in Oak Hill, West Virginia. The details diverge between sources – Allmusic says they got pulled over for speeding, while Wikipedia says Carr pulled up to an all-night diner and asked Williams if he wanted something to eat - but, they all agree Williams had died long before Carr noticed (Wikipedia says rigor mortis had already set in).
He was a star for six years on the outside and didn't even make it to 30, but the roots of a couple genres and subgenres reach back to him. To borrow a quote from the Country Music Hall of Fame bio that just feels right:
“In those four short years, he established the rules for all the country performers who followed him and, in the process, much of popular music. Hank wrote a body of songs that became popular classics, and his direct, emotional lyrics and vocals became the standard for most popular performers. He lived a life as troubled and reckless as that depicted in his songs.”
In other words, the man looms large in American popular culture. And now...
 |
| Better, in a truly inexplicable way. |
Five Points of Interest
1) His Birthname
Hank Williams parents were Freemasons, so his name was no accident. The name “Hiram” amounts to a deep cut for that crowd, but not a big enough one in Alonzo’s and Lillie’s case for them to get his name right. They spelled it “Hiriam” on his birth certificate – which, for the record, was only drafted and signed when Hank Williams was 10 years old. Also, Williams’ nickname around family was “Harm,” but his friends knew his as either “Herky” or “Skeets,” hence the name of the sampler.
2) His First Stab at Marketing
As noted above, Williams was a remarkably prolific songwriter. Before he broke in the national market, Williams published a songbook of his original material titled, Original Songs of Hank Williams. The book included only the lyrics – i.e., it didn’t include the musical notations – but he turned it out in the hopes of boosting his name recognition. Some of the featured songs: “Mother Is Gone,” “Granddad’s Musket,” and “My Darling Baby Girl” (couldn't find that one, so here's "If You See My Baby"). The latter was a duet with Audrey, who, in fairness, aspired to have a career of her own for as long as she knew Williams. And she's...not so good.
3) Luke the Drifter
This is the best bit, without question:
“Although the real identity of Luke the Drifter was supposed to be anonymous, Williams often performed part of the material of the recordings on stage. Most of the material was written by Williams himself, in some cases with the help of Fred Rose and his son Wesley. The songs depicted Luke the Drifter traveling around from place to place, narrating stories of different characters and philosophizing about life.”
Yep, Hank Williams created an alter-ego named “Luke the Drifter.” It was a vanity project in a lot of ways, so Williams marketed that material separately, so jukebox operators wouldn’t load it onto their machines and damage Williams’ brand. To give people a taste, enjoy "Be Careful of the Stones You Throw" and "Help Me Understand."
4) I'm Seeing...George Hamilton
I’m still recovering from the fact that they cast (the famously tan) George Hamilton to play Hank Williams in 1964’s Your Cheatin’ Heart. Suffice to say it looks as wrong as anyone who has seen both men would imagine.
5) The Lost Notebook of Hank Williams
Hank Williams had a diary with him on the night he died in the back of that limousine. That same diary somehow found its way to a dumpster at the Sony/ATV Music Studios in 2006, where a janitor found it, recognized it for what it was and sold it to “a representative of the Honky-Tonk Hall of Fame and Rock-N-Roll Roadshow.” She was subsequently both accused and exonerated on charges of theft, but Sony/ATV handed the diary to Bob Dylan and charge him with finishing the unfinished thoughts Williams left on his way to the other side. In collaboration with a bunch of other artists – e.g., Alan Jackson, Norah Jones, Jack White, Lucinda Williams, Vince Gill, Rodney Crowell, Patty Loveless, Levon Helm, Jakob Dylan, Sheryl Crow, and Merle Haggard – they released the resulting album in 2008 with the name at the top of this section.
Sources
Wikipedia –Hank Williams
Country Music Hall of Fame Bio
AllMusic.com Bio
About the Sampler
As always, I’ve already linked to a number of songs on the sampler above. And most of the stuff I haven’t linked to doesn’t sound so different from those songs, perhaps owing to the fact that Hank Williams’ prime lasted just five or six years – not that that changes the fact he inspired the next generation of artists, and across a couple genres.
At any rate, and in no particular order, here’s the rest of the sampler:
“Jambalaya (on the Bayou),” “Mind Your Own Business,” “Kaw-Liga” (an odd, cute song I’ve known for decades), “Let’s Turn Back the Years,” “Nobody’s Lonesome for Me,” “Dear John,” “Take These Chains from My Heart,” “There’s a Tear in My Beer” (a slow-jam favorite), “I’m a Long Gone Daddy,” “You Win Again” and “I Won’t Be Home No More” (both later songs that he wrote it after Audrey left him).
I’ve always kind of liked Williams, if without really understanding why. This helped a bit. Till the next one, and sorry it went on a bit.
1) His Birthname
Hank Williams parents were Freemasons, so his name was no accident. The name “Hiram” amounts to a deep cut for that crowd, but not a big enough one in Alonzo’s and Lillie’s case for them to get his name right. They spelled it “Hiriam” on his birth certificate – which, for the record, was only drafted and signed when Hank Williams was 10 years old. Also, Williams’ nickname around family was “Harm,” but his friends knew his as either “Herky” or “Skeets,” hence the name of the sampler.
2) His First Stab at Marketing
As noted above, Williams was a remarkably prolific songwriter. Before he broke in the national market, Williams published a songbook of his original material titled, Original Songs of Hank Williams. The book included only the lyrics – i.e., it didn’t include the musical notations – but he turned it out in the hopes of boosting his name recognition. Some of the featured songs: “Mother Is Gone,” “Granddad’s Musket,” and “My Darling Baby Girl” (couldn't find that one, so here's "If You See My Baby"). The latter was a duet with Audrey, who, in fairness, aspired to have a career of her own for as long as she knew Williams. And she's...not so good.
3) Luke the Drifter
This is the best bit, without question:
“Although the real identity of Luke the Drifter was supposed to be anonymous, Williams often performed part of the material of the recordings on stage. Most of the material was written by Williams himself, in some cases with the help of Fred Rose and his son Wesley. The songs depicted Luke the Drifter traveling around from place to place, narrating stories of different characters and philosophizing about life.”
Yep, Hank Williams created an alter-ego named “Luke the Drifter.” It was a vanity project in a lot of ways, so Williams marketed that material separately, so jukebox operators wouldn’t load it onto their machines and damage Williams’ brand. To give people a taste, enjoy "Be Careful of the Stones You Throw" and "Help Me Understand."
4) I'm Seeing...George Hamilton
I’m still recovering from the fact that they cast (the famously tan) George Hamilton to play Hank Williams in 1964’s Your Cheatin’ Heart. Suffice to say it looks as wrong as anyone who has seen both men would imagine.
5) The Lost Notebook of Hank Williams
Hank Williams had a diary with him on the night he died in the back of that limousine. That same diary somehow found its way to a dumpster at the Sony/ATV Music Studios in 2006, where a janitor found it, recognized it for what it was and sold it to “a representative of the Honky-Tonk Hall of Fame and Rock-N-Roll Roadshow.” She was subsequently both accused and exonerated on charges of theft, but Sony/ATV handed the diary to Bob Dylan and charge him with finishing the unfinished thoughts Williams left on his way to the other side. In collaboration with a bunch of other artists – e.g., Alan Jackson, Norah Jones, Jack White, Lucinda Williams, Vince Gill, Rodney Crowell, Patty Loveless, Levon Helm, Jakob Dylan, Sheryl Crow, and Merle Haggard – they released the resulting album in 2008 with the name at the top of this section.
Sources
Wikipedia –Hank Williams
Country Music Hall of Fame Bio
AllMusic.com Bio
About the Sampler
As always, I’ve already linked to a number of songs on the sampler above. And most of the stuff I haven’t linked to doesn’t sound so different from those songs, perhaps owing to the fact that Hank Williams’ prime lasted just five or six years – not that that changes the fact he inspired the next generation of artists, and across a couple genres.
At any rate, and in no particular order, here’s the rest of the sampler:
“Jambalaya (on the Bayou),” “Mind Your Own Business,” “Kaw-Liga” (an odd, cute song I’ve known for decades), “Let’s Turn Back the Years,” “Nobody’s Lonesome for Me,” “Dear John,” “Take These Chains from My Heart,” “There’s a Tear in My Beer” (a slow-jam favorite), “I’m a Long Gone Daddy,” “You Win Again” and “I Won’t Be Home No More” (both later songs that he wrote it after Audrey left him).
I’ve always kind of liked Williams, if without really understanding why. This helped a bit. Till the next one, and sorry it went on a bit.
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