Chapter 9
More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered prayers.
St. Teresa of Avila
THE new decade dawned with Hank preparing for two recording sessions, scheduled for Monday, January 9, and Tuesday, January 10. Frank Walker came to Nashville to work with Fred Rose on the ninth, the only time Hank worked with anyone other than Rose behind the glass. Hank was using his road band for the first time since the disastrous “Fly Trouble” session in August 1947, and was recording all his own songs for the first time since April 1947. That alone said much for his growing confidence. Just one thing was required from these sessions: another blockbuster hit. “Mind Your Own Business,” “You’re Gonna Change,” and “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” had all sold well enough, but none of them had come close to eclipsing “Lovesick Blues” or “Wedding Bells.” The midsize hits were fine, they kept the pot boiling, but Hank needed a song that would rule the airwaves for months. Like a successful sports franchise, he needed to deliver the big prize every now and again to keep the attendance up.
Hank and Fred Rose decided to take their best shot with “Long Gone Lonesome Blues,” a song that had — in almost every sense — been sired by “Lovesick Blues.” Rose, of course, couldn’t risk another lawsuit from Mills Music, so the melody wasn’t litigiously close, but Hank had clearly crafted a deliberate follow-up. It had “blues” in the title and windows for the yodels and flashes of falsetto that had proved so effective on “Lovesick Blues.” The tempo was almost identical, and the lyrics were just as inconsequential. The song’s architecture and arrangement were kissing cousins, right down to the unison yodeling figure from the lead guitar and the steel guitar at the intro. Hank liked to tell interviewers that he just closed off his mind and let God write his songs, but “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” was squeezed out line by line from a title that Hank had been nursing for a while. The pieces came together on a fishing trip with songwriter Vic McAlpin. They left early to drive out to the Tennessee River where it broadens into Kentucky Lake, but Hank had been unable to sleep on the trip, and was noodling around with the title all the way. As McAlpin told journalist Roger Williams, he and Hank were already out on the lake when McAlpin became frustrated with Hank’s preoccupation. “You come here to fish or watch the fish swim by?” he said, and suddenly Hank had the key that unlocked the song for him. “Hey!” he said. “That’s the first line!” Then it fell into place. All the old blues clichés he had ever heard about going to the river, jumping in three times and only coming up twice came flooding back. McAlpin contributed a few lines, but Hank later bought him out.
In case “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” didn’t make it, Hank had written himself an insurance policy, “Why Don’t You Love Me (Like You Used to Do).” It showed that he could still afford to be lighthearted about the persistent troubles with Audrey. “I’m the same old trouble you’ve always been through,” he told her, and that would become truer than either of them dared believe. “Why Should We Try Anymore?” was a wintry variation on the same theme. Based loosely on “I’m Not Coming Home Any More,” its four verses limned a bleak picture of a marriage gone sour.
The session was rounded out with another stab at “My Son Calls Another Man Daddy,” in which a jailed man loses his son. There were hundreds of similar songs dating back to the dawn of country music. “I’ll ne’er know his name or his face,” sang Hank, once again resorting to an archaic form as he often would when trying something with a traditional flavor.
After admitting that he was wrong to steer Hank uptown with novelties like “Fly Trouble” and “Rootie Tootie,” Rose had realized that Hank was plugged in to a segment of the market that neither craved nor aspired to sophistication. He had come to share Hank’s “vanilla” philosophy. Bob McNett remembered that during rehearsals he hit some licks and then looked up at the control room. “Is that too country?” he asked. “You can never get too country,” Rose told him. Not on a Hank Williams session.
As they began working together, Rose helped the band define what is still known as the Hank Williams sound. He gave Don Helms the golden rule for accompanying Hank. “Fred said it was useless for me and Hank to be in the same register,” said Helms. “He said, ‘When Hank is singing something low why don’t you play high, and if he’s singing high, you play something low,’ so the steel was always in a different register.” Once, when Helms wasn’t playing high enough for Rose’s liking, he came out of the control and moved the steel guitar several inches, gesturing with his hands up past the nut to show how much higher he wanted it.
Rose also told Jerry Rivers to play in the traditional double-stop fiddle style in which the melody and the harmony are carried on two strings. Hank always called it the “garden seed” fiddle. There would be no more jazzy single-string western swing fiddle on Hank Williams records.
When Zeb and Zeke Turner had worked Hank’s sessions, they had taken solos, but from this point the electric guitar was limited to keeping time with a steady tic-toc on the bass strings. Hank played the acoustic rhythm guitar, although Rose tried to persuade him to drop it and concentrate on singing. Hank probably knew that the guitar helped him keep time, so he hung on to it. Rose wouldn’t put a microphone on Hank’s guitar, though; instead, he brought along rhythm guitarist Jack Shook to reinforce the rhythm. Shook could play percussive barre chords, which took the place of brushes on the snare drum.
Rose had very precise ideas about the pace of every song. If it was going too fast or dragging, he would come down from the control room, sit at the piano, and pound it out at the tempo he thought best suited the piece. At first, the band was surprised at the way Hank and Fred Rose seemed to be at each other’s throats, but the bickering was, they found out, just the way they worked. Hank took note of Rose’s suggestions most of the time, and, for his part, Rose gave Hank a lot of latitude. “Hank needed Fred to say, ‘That’s a good un,’” said Don Helms, “but if Fred said, ‘Naw, naw, it needs…such and such,’ Hank would say, ‘I don’t see it,’ and Fred would say, ‘It does. Let me show you why’, and then Hank would usually say, ‘Awright, okay’”
Rose’s true feelings about the second day’s sessions are hard to guess. After lunch on January 10, Hank cut his first set of recitations and talking blues as Luke the Drifter. The recitation was a little homily, usu- ally with a strong moral undertow, narrated to musical accompaniment. It was a tradition embedded deep in country music, and one that was still kicking as it went down. T. Texas Tyler’s narration “Deck of Cards” had been one of the best-selling records of 1948. Hank would have heard Cowboy Slim Rinehart broadcast complete programs of narrations over the powerful unregulated Mexican border stations, and he performed them often on his own radio shows. Bernice Turner, who worked with Hank toward the end of the war, remembered that he’d include a narration on almost every radio show, then he’d walk the short distance from the radio station to Lilly’s boardinghouse and the boarders would be gathered around the radio, some of them still crying. “Some,” added Turner, “would be drinking and crying, but they’d still be crying.” The “talking blues” was part of vaudeville’s legacy to country music. Robert Lunn, “the Talking Blues Boy,” was still a fixture on the Opry when Hank joined. Hank’s talking blues were more sardonic than his narrations, and more personal. Over time, Luke the Drifter became Hank’s alter ego, a wise and thoughtful soul, dispensing advice that the willful Hank Williams ignored.
Don Helms says that Hank pestered Rose long and hard to cut narrations and talking blues, so they were clearly something close to his heart; in fact, Helms believes that Hank was more deeply committed to the recitations than to his regular songs. Rose’s objection was rooted in commercial logic: jukebox operators had huge standing orders for Hank Williams records and, if the recitations were issued under Hank’s name, the operators would complain. Virtually all of the operators serviced bars, and the last thing they needed was for someone to punch up a Hank Williams record and get a sermon. Credibility in the marketplace is hard to win and easy to lose, and Hank didn’t have enough of a track record to take too many risks.
Rose decided to solve the problem by issuing the narrations under a pseudonym, but from the beginning there was no attempt to disguise the identity of Luke the Drifter. An entry in Billboard’s “Folk Talent and Tunes” section made it obvious to the trade. In interviews, Hank never denied that he was Luke the Drifter, and told interviewers that the records were primarily designed for what he called the “take home” trade. Introducing a Luke the Drifter talking blues on one of his radio shows, he would say, “And here’s a little number by one of my closest relatives, Luke the Drifter,” or he’d say, “Here’s one by my half brother.”
Rose’s concerns were validated by the numbers. The jukebox operators were a hugely powerful force in the industry. In 1950, there were four hundred thousand jukeboxes on location serviced by fifty-five hundred jukebox operators. Even though the number of operators was dwarfed by the number of home phonograph owners (then estimated at between sixteen and seventeen million), the operators bought an average of 150 records a week, whereas the average record buyer bought fewer than 10 a year. Wesley Rose estimated that if one of Hank’s records sold 250,000 copies, the jukebox operators accounted for 150,000 of those. The ops, as they were known, were accommodated to the point that Hank, like most other songwriters, kept his song titles to fewer than five words so that they would fit onto the jukebox cards, and made sure his records timed out at under three minutes and twelve seconds, the time at which a record would automatically eject from a jukebox turntable.
Every year, the operators’ organization, the Music Operators of America, held a convention that was celebrated with special issues of Billboard and Cashbox. Everyone in the industry took out advertisements to greet the ops, thanking them for buying their product. The record labels laid on entertainment; in fact, Hank was sent to the March 1950 convention in Chicago. Rose didn’t want to alienate the ops, but if he refused to let Hank cut narrations, he would alienate his prize asset. “Luke the Drifter” was the best compromise he could hope for.
Hank was particularly keen to cut two narrations, “The Funeral” and “Beyond the Sunset.” Just a few weeks before the Luke the Drifter session, Elton Britt had cut “Beyond the Sunset,” and T. Texas Tyler had just cut both “Beyond the Sunset” and “The Funeral” (which he titled “Colored Child’s Funeral"). Then, a few days after the Luke the Drifter session, East Coast deejay Buddy Starcher cut both. From this distance, it’s hard to account for this little flurry of activity. As poems, both songs had been kicking around in one form or another for decades.
By today’s standards, “The Funeral” was an uncomfortably patronizing account of a black child’s funeral service. Originally a poem by Will Carleton, it was first published in 1909 and designed for recitation in caricatured black patois. Unlike Starcher and Tyler, though, Hank delivered “The Funeral” in his regular voice, and was clearly extending every ounce of compassion within him. His sincerity, though, was undermined by the words: “I pictured him while livin’, curly hair, protrudin’ lips,” he said, “I’d seen perhaps a thousand in my hurried southern trips.” Then the preacher arises “with a manner sorta awkward and countenance grotest [sic]. The simplicity and shrewdness in his Ethiopian face, showed the ignorance and wisdom of a crushed, undying race.”
In the background, an organ (manned by Fred Rose or Owen Bradley) played the reedy chords of Rose’s “A House Built on a Rock” with accenting from Don Helms’ steel guitar. When Rose submitted artist and publisher information to MGM, he noted that there was to be no songwriter or publisher credit on the record label, but that he was to receive half the composer royalty for “A House Built on a Rock.” Later, the Williams estate claimed “The Funeral” as one of Hank’s compositions, and in a 1993 edition of his lyrics it appeared in a new, politically correct version (the “protruding lips,” for instance, were now “smiling lips").
Bob McNett didn’t play on “The Funeral” but he was there. He remembers that when Hank and Helms finished, they both had tears running down their cheeks. “I’ve formed an opinion of Hank over late years that I had never thought of when I was working with him,” he said. “Hank had a deep personal feeling for his fellow man. This didn’t show on the outside. You had to get to know him, and then he’d give himself away every now and again about his deep concern for people who were less fortunate. ‘The Funeral’ touched him. When he did it, he lost himself in it.” On his narrations, Hank rarely gave in to mawkishness. He was simply, almost painfully, direct, letting tenderness edge out the knuckleheadedness with which he often greeted the world.
“Beyond the Sunset” was pure Victoriana caught out of time. The words came from “Should You Go First,” a poem by Albert “Rosey” Rowswell, the voice of the Pittsburgh Pirates for more than twenty years. The poem first appeared in a book called Rosey Reflections, but Hank probably found it in a popular anthology called Poems That Touch the Heart. Tillman Franks claimed to have given Hank his copy of the book, but it was on almost as many shelves as the Bible in the late 1940s, and often tucked next to it. Even Elvis Presley, en route to Germany, said at a news conference that he had been reading Poems That Touch the Heart on the train and had been especially moved by “Should You Go First.” The 1936 hymn “Beyond the Sunset” was first married to “Should You Go First” by Chickie Williams, a performer on WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia. Elton Britt’s version briefly cracked the charts in February 1950, three weeks before Hank’s was released, but it didn’t linger.
Two other narrations were cut that day. The first was “Too Many Parties and Too Many Pals,” a morality play in one mercifully short act by Tin Pan Alley veteran Billy Rose (no relation to Fred) and two other New Yorkers. It was first published in 1925 when Rose, the writer of songs like “I Found a Million Dollar Baby (in a Five and Ten Cent Store),” “Clap Hands, Here Comes Charley,” and “I Got a Code id By Dose,” was new to the business. One of the first singing cowboys, Carl T. Sprague, recorded it as “The Wayward Daughter,” and by the time Hank turned to it, it was a minor hillbilly standard. One of the versions immediately preceding Hank’s was by Bill Haley, then leading a group called the Saddlemen. Hank’s version was released in June 1950 with his own gently mocking “Everything’s Okay,” a “What, Me Worry?” talking blues that he’d first sent to Fred Rose back in August 1947.
“Long Gone Lonesome Blues” did exactly what Hank calculated it would, and Rose hoped it would. On March 25, 1950, it shot straight into the charts at number two, staying there until April 29, when it dislodged “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” from the number one spot. It was the knockout punch Hank needed, and it ended up spending twenty-one weeks on the charts, eight of them at the top. None of the Luke the Drifter releases sold sufficiently well to chart. By August 1950, “Too Many Parties” had sold 20,000 copies and “The Funeral” had sold just 6,600 copies, while “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” had sold 150,000. Hank’s credibility was born anew, and “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” set the table for the unprecedented success he would enjoy until his death, success that would create its own ceaseless pressure to keep delivering. For the present, Hank was desperately eager to rise to the challenge.
Nothing else was recorded until June 14, when, at a half-session, Hank cut another Leon Payne song, “They’ll Never Take Her Love from Me,” and a third version of “Honky Tonk Blues” that, like the other two, was abandoned. After “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” had spent eight weeks at number one, only to be replaced by “Why Don’t You Love Me?” Hank was probably disappointed to see “They’ll Never Take Her Love from Me” top out at number five. The message was fairly clear: the public wanted brisk, up-tempo juke joint songs. History might decide that Hank Williams was the finest writer and singer of “heart” songs in all country music, but that wasn’t what the radio and jukebox audiences wanted in 1950.
Since joining the Opry, Hank had worked shows with Bill Monroe, the irascible father of bluegrass music. Hank’s feelings toward Monroe’s music are unknown, but he probably loved it because it contained much that he held dear. Monroe refused to have electric instruments in his lineup, and voiced some criticism of Hank’s singing style ("He drug it to death,” he once said, referring not to drugs but to Hank’s tendency to hold on to notes), but he was a good judge of songs, and knew that Hank was writing some great ones. Somewhere on tour in Texas, Hank played Monroe a new song, “I’m Blue, I’m Lonesome,” and Monroe somehow acquired it. There were rumors that the song’s notional writer, “James B. Smith,” was a pseudonym for Hank and Bill Monroe, but it appears as though the royalties went solely to Monroe until Acuff-Rose challenged for a share in the 1990s. Monroe later asserted that he wrote some of the song, but his sideman, Jimmy Martin, who was with Hank and Monroe at the time, insists that Hank wrote it all.
Monroe recorded “I’m Blue, I’m Lonesome” on February 3, 1950, during his first sessions for Decca, and it became a bluegrass classic. At the same time, Monroe cut “Alabama Waltz,” a song that Hank had written to stoke the ongoing craze for “state” waltzes that had started with Monroe’s “Kentucky Waltz” and Pee Wee King’s “Tennessee Waltz.” Monroe couldn’t recall if Hank was at the session, but if he was in town he usually liked to sit on the sidelines when his songs were being cut.
Braxton Schuffert says that Hank was at his recording session five days later, on February 8, although existing itineraries place Hank in Kansas City with Cowboy Copas and Jamup and Honey for that entire week (February 5 through 9). It’s hard to know if Hank felt as though he owed a debt to Braxton, or if he truly thought Braxton stood a chance of making it. Since the war, Braxton had been working six days a week for Hormel Meats in Montgomery, all the while performing as a Hormel-sponsored solo act on WCOV and WSFA. Whenever Hank went back to Montgomery, he tried to persuade Braxton to take another stab at the music business, and in January 1950 he took matters into his own hands. He called Brack’s wife and told her that he had train tickets ready, a backstage pass to the Opry, and reservations at the Hermitage Hotel. Braxton begged off work and took the Saturday morning train to Nashville. He joined the melee backstage at the Opry, and the next morning Hank picked him up at the hotel and drove him out to his house. Hank opened and closed his garage door a few times with the remote control. Braxton had never seen anything like it. Hank then phoned Fred Rose, asked him to come over, and ordered Braxton to sing Rose some songs. Rose had more or less been given carte blanche by Frank Walker to sign country acts to MGM, and he either heard something he liked in Braxton’s slightly antiquated style or realized that this was a concession, like the Luke the Drifter session, that he needed to make to keep Hank sweet.
“Fred said, ‘What have you got for him to sing?’” said Braxton, “and Hank said he had a couple of songs, and Fred said he had a song by one of the Anglins called ‘If Tears Would Bring You Back.’” Among the songs Hank pitched to Braxton was “Teardrop on a Rose,” a sentimental parlor piece that Hank had toyed with for years. He asked Braxton what he thought of it. Braxton said:
I told him it was one of the most beautiful songs I ever heard, and Hank said I could have it if I wanted. Then we needed one more. I was wanting to sing “I’ll Still Write Your Name in the Sand,” but Fred said, “No-o-o, we don’t give other folks royalties. I’m going over to the house for a few minutes. You and Hank write something.” So Hank and me wrote “Rockin’ Chair Daddy” sittin’ on the settee at his house. He’d write a line and I’d write a line. When Fred come back, I sang him “Rockin’ Chair Daddy,” and he signed me up that evening.
“Rockin’ Chair Daddy” was the closest to a Jimmie Rodgers–style song Hank would ever have a hand in writing.
The session was logged at the Castle studio on February 8, 1950, but that was a Wednesday, when Braxton should have been at work, and Hank, as noted, should have been in Kansas City. Braxton says he played Hank’s guitar, but insists that Hank didn’t participate except, as Braxton says, to “pop that heel — he wouldn’t pat, he’d pop that thing.” All four songs were released under the name “Braxton Shooford.” Like every record that Rose produced for MGM that wasn’t by Hank Williams, Braxton’s failed to do much business. MGM’s initial sell-in on “Rockin’ Chair Daddy” accounted for just under thirty-five hundred copies.
At the end of March, Hank was back in the studio. This time he was sitting in on Audrey’s first session for Decca. Having just missed the opportunity of signing Hank, Decca’s country A&R chief, Paul Cohen, now had the worst-case consolation prize: Hank and the Drifting Cowboys were at a Decca session, but Audrey was singing.
Audrey cut seven songs, and six of them were released. First out of the tape box was a cover version of “Honky Tonkin’.” Rose Maddox had revived the song in July 1949, and it had been picked up by Polly Bergen and Teresa Brewer for the pop market — the first pop cover version of a Hank Williams song, and the unlikeliest. Brewer was coming off her first big hit, “Music! Music! Music!” but “Honky Tonkin’” simply wasn’t a pop song. Even so, Brewer’s version was attracting a little airplay, and Audrey decided to corner some of the action. Her version was released back-to-back with a Hadacol song, “What Put the Pep in Grandma?” (the band yelled “Haddy-cole, Haddy-cole, Haddy-cole"). It was the kind of free advertising only Hadacol’s competitors would have wished on it.
When Billboard reviewed Audrey’s second Decca single in October 1950, its review staff concluded that “Orking [is] much superior to thrush’s singing,” and gave it one of the lowest ratings of the week. Audrey now had an official recommendation, almost a request, that she stop singing, but she continued to insinuate herself onto Hank’s radio shows and occasionally onto his live shows. If they were getting along, Hank would call her onstage at the Opry for a duet; if they were on the outs, she would stand backstage and pout while Hank did his portion alone.
Audrey felt excluded from a career she thought, with justification, she had done much to get off the ground. Having Hank’s money to spend was not enough of a consolation prize, so peace never broke out for long at the Williams household. Two weeks after the Decca session, the troubles resurfaced. Hank returned from a tour, and Audrey had heard that he was drinking and locked him out. Hank checked into the Tulane Hotel and was later arrested after he fell asleep drunk with a lit cigarette in his hand and set fire to his room.
Audrey always maintained that she had been signed to MGM with Hank, but Rose evidently refused to produce her as a solo act, leading to the Decca deal. Rose did, however, schedule the two unissued Hank and Audrey duets, “Jesus Remembered Me” and “I Heard My Mother Praying for Me,” for September 1950. The fall time slot was dubbed the “After Harvest” release, when the market for religious songs was supposed to be especially good. Even then, with Hank’s credibility near its zenith, the record fell stillborn from the presses.
Hank’s 1949 royalties were reported by Variety magazine at $65,000, but the actual figures were substantially lower. The MGM royalties for 1949 were $15,400 and the Acuff-Rose royalties were $8,219, totaling $23,619. Still good money. In 1950 the MGM royalties jumped to $22,574, in part because some “Lovesick Blues” sales from 1949 were accounted for in 1950. Hank’s Acuff-Rose royalties for 1950 increased substantially to $18,040 because he was now writing his own songs.
The same Variety report stated that MGM’s top seller, black crooner Billy Eckstine, grossed more than $100,000 in royalties in 1949. Even if true, there was no disguising the fact that MGM was in trouble almost from the first day. Eckstine, Hank Williams, and MGM’s other quasi-major names like orchestra leaders Blue Barron and Art Mooney weren’t generating enough sales to cover the giant overhead. When the parent corporation, Loews, was ordered to divide its business into independently operating studio and theater divisions, MGM Records devolved to the theater division. There were rumors in the trade that the theater division would shut down MGM Records when Frank Walker’s initial five-year term was up in August 1950, but it was decided to keep MGM Records afloat, and Walker was re-signed.
One expense that MGM hadn’t counted upon when it broke ground at its plant in New Jersey was the need to retool the presses to accommodate 45 rpm records and LPs. RCA had introduced the 45 rpm in March
1949 in response to Columbia’s introduction of the LP in June the previous year. Trying to sidestep the cost, MGM began pressing its 78s on a supposedly unbreakable compound in October 1949, but Walker soon had to face up to the inevitable and began pressing 45s in May 1950. For all companies, the LP and 45 “micro-platters” as they were called, represented additional overhead for a minimal return. The only benefits were their lighter shipping weight and unbreakability (all record labels made a “breakage allowance” on shipments of 78s). It wasn’t until October
1950 that Seeburg introduced the first 45 rpm jukebox, and even though 45s gained acceptance in the pop market, 78s would outsell 45s for years in the country and gospel markets. Jerry Rivers remembers seeing 45s for the first time in Cincinnati when Hank and the band went to Nelson King’s house on one of their earliest tours. Hank’s first record to be released simultaneously as a 45 and a 78 was “They’ll Never Take Her Love from Me” / “Why Should We Try Anymore?” in August 1950.*
For Hank, records and music publishing were icing on the cake. His personal appearance fees made up the greater part of his income, which was estimated at ninety-two thousand dollars for 1950. A record that sold 150,000 copies, as both “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” and “Why Don’t You Love Me?” had done, netted Hank just three thousand dollars from MGM. If he wrote both sides of the record, he would receive an additional forty-five hundred dollars from Acuff-Rose. Airplay royalties would filter back from the performing rights society, BMI. But the true value of a big hit lay in the fact that Hank could hike his personal appearance fee or anticipate a higher turnout, which would increase his share of the gate.
Hank’s personal appearance fee fluctuated wildly. The rule of thumb was that you worked for what you could get, and you got it in cash. If Hank was playing a date as a headliner in a major center, he often settled for 50 or 60 percent of the gross after tax; if he filled a four-thousand-seat auditorium at ticket prices that ranged from a dollar for adults to fifty cents for children, he might expect to stuff two thousand dollars into his valise for the night’s work. He never took checks after being burned a few times. But then, if he had a free night and was expecting to pass through a small town where he knew a deejay or someone who promoted hillbilly shows, he might play a club for a few hundred dollars.
Grand Ole Opry appearances were a loss leader. Like the Hayride, the Opry paid American Federation of Musicians scale. For backing men, this was seven dollars a spot on the non-networked portion and twenty dollars on the Prince Albert portion. Hank’s rate was roughly fifty dollars a show. Soon after arriving at the Opry, he was given some fifteen-minute early morning shows on WSM. His sponsors included Duckhead Overalls, Pops-Rite Popcorn, and Mother’s Best flour. The net result was that after Jim Denny’s Artist Service Bureau deducted the money that Hank owed WSM for using the Opry name on shows, he was usually in the hole to the station.
Hank supplemented his income in various ways. Sheet music and song folio sales were a big deal in 1950. At the top end of the scale, Pee Wee King’s “Tennessee Waltz” sold 1.1 million pieces of sheet music in 1951. Hank’s sheet music sales were substantially less (between January and June 1950, for instance, “Honky Tonkin’” sold 4,769 copies), but still combined to provide a healthy adjunct to his income. Songbooks were an even better business. Acuff-Rose reported sales of 7,300 copies of The Hank Williams Country Folio during the first six months of 1950, and Hank doubled his money by selling many of those himself. The band typically went out into the crowd and sold song folios and photographs on commission during the intermission. The usual asking price for photos was fifty cents, and Hank would sign them for that price. When he returned to Shreveport for a concert on May 31, 1950, he was open for business. “Some guy near Hank’s dressing room was selling pictures of Hank,” said Tillman Franks, who’d booked Hank in leaner times. “I bought one, and Hank saw me buy it and didn’t offer to give it to me. Then I asked him to autograph it, and he spelled my name wrong.”
Hank grabbed wildly at every source of income because he had no inkling that his success would last. He saw the opportunities suddenly opening up, and lunged at them. It was a natural reaction for someone who had been trying for success as long as he had. It’s true that Audrey was spending the money faster than he made it, but the reason he made it was because it was there to be made.
By paying his band slightly more than scale, he was able to keep the steadiest lineup he’d ever had. The only change during the first year in Nashville came when Bob McNett quit in May 1950. He’d messed up on the networked portion of the Opry, kicking off a song with the wrong intro. No amount of faking could cover it up that night; they had to stop and restart the song. Hank didn’t dismiss him, but McNett came to believe that he wasn’t cut out for the big time, and as he says, “I wanted to do something on my own. I had the feeling I was traveling all over the country lookin’ at someone else’s back, and that’s as far as I could see.” He and his brother planned to open a country music park back in his native Pennsylvania, so he quit the Drifting Cowboys. Rather than recruit a guitarist from the growing pool of Nashville sessionmen, Hank replaced McNett with Sammy Pruett, who had played with him in leaner times. Pruett was a fine guitarist, generally reckoned to know more chords and chord inversions than anyone then working in country music, but Hank’s decision to hire him was more indicative of his profound mistrust of Nashville success. He needed to surround himself with familiar faces, and Pruett had stuck with him when they were lucky to walk away from a gig with five bucks apiece and no open wounds. Pruett was working with Happy Wilson’s Golden River Boys on WAPI in Birmingham when he got a call from Hank in Sioux City, Iowa. “I got to Nashville about nine o’clock one Saturday morning,” he remembered. “Hank picked me up in front of the Grand Ole Opry and we left for somewhere out west and we were gone for three weeks.” Like McNett, Pruett was confined to playing the tic-toc rhythm that was now one of the trademarks of the Hank Williams sound. Hank called it the “cheap banjo sound” when interviewed, and Pruett soon grew bored playing it.
In June 1950 Hank and Oscar Davis came to a parting of the ways for reasons that Davis never specified. Hank tried to increase his share of the personal appearance pie by managing himself, but things fell apart. On July 4 he was supposed to headline at the Watermelon Festival at DeLeon, Texas, a hundred miles southwest of Fort Worth. The town was small, but the festival drew some of the biggest names in country music in the late 1940s and early ’50s because it was a magnet for farming families for hundreds of miles around. The promoter, W. B. Nowlin, was also the mayor of DeLeon, and paid Hank a three-thousand-dollar guarantee for the July 4 date. Hank committed to be there by 10:00 a.m. By 2:00 p.m., there was no sign of him, and Nowlin had eleven thousand farmers baking in the Texas sun, getting madder by the hour. Then, just after two o’clock, Hank’s limo came racing into the field where the festival was being staged, and someone calling himself Hank’s road manager got out and told Nowlin that Hank was “too sick” to perform. What had seemed like Nowlin’s biggest coup earlier that day was now a disaster. Nowlin insisted that Hank at least get out of the limo and appear onstage, but the road manager refused, so Nowlin ordered the chief of police to handcuff the road manager to the steering wheel while two men dragged Hank up onstage. Nowlin got on the microphone and said, “Hank Williams’ manager says Hank Williams is too sick to perform, but if you were standing as close to him as I am you would know what he’s sick from.” Then the two men holding Hank let go for a moment and Hank fell almost to his knees before he regained his balance and staggered back to the limo.
Word got back to Nashville that Hank was on a drunk, so Jim Denny flew Hank Snow to Dallas to do the evening show at the Northside Coliseum. Still in bad shape on July 5, Hank signed a curious document naming Jerry Rivers as his general manager while in Texas, then checked into the Adolphus Hotel as Herman P. Willis, the band’s pet name for anyone who couldn’t win for losing. Later that day, Rivers saw Herman P. Willis walking around the hotel wearing dark glasses with a hat pulled low over his eyes. The reason, according to Rivers, was that he was trying to avoid a local booker, Jack Ruby (the Jack Ruby). If rumors of Ruby’s mob connections are true, Hank probably had valid reasons for keeping a low profile. Rivers said that Hank was hiding from Ruby because he didn’t show at a party.
As he was bundled on a plane back to Nashville, even Hank must have drawn the conclusion that he was stretching himself too thin trying to handle his own business. Not long after, his bookings were taken over by A. V. Bamford, the self-styled “Cuban Jew.” Right away, Bamford placed him on a package tour with Ernest Tubb and Minnie Pearl. Bamford had arrived in Nashville in 1949 from the West Coast. He had been booking big bands into the Venice Pier when the orchestra business went sour. Then he’d taken a chance on Bob Wills at the pier, saw the huge turnout, and experienced a conversion to country music that eventually brought him to Nashville. Bamford was a packager. He would figure out an itinerary, assemble a troupe of artists, book the halls, print up posters, arrange the advertising, then ride with the artists.
Hank’s first Bamford tour took him out to Phoenix on July 17, then on to Albuquerque, El Paso, Odessa, and Lubbock on consecutive nights before heading back to Nashville. After a couple of weeks at home, he took off on another Bamford tour with Lonzo and Oscar and Rod Brasfield that started in Ohio, and swung across to Richmond, Virginia. Hank then returned to Nashville to rest up and prepare for another recording session slated for August 31.
Hank now believed that “blues” was the password to the top of the charts, and he was finishing up a song called “Moanin’ the Blues” that he hoped would keep his hit streak alive. Once again, he left plenty of windows for yodels and flashes of trailing falsetto. The end result was greater than the sum of its parts. It rocked and rolled. The bridge was particularly compelling; Hank yodeled over the stops, setting up the smooth segue back to the verses. The rhythm, carried by Jack Shook’s prominently mic’d acoustic guitar played up on the neck, was rein- forced by big band drummer Farris Coursey playing brushes on the snare. It was one of only two times that Hank worked with drums.
The second song on the slate, “Nobody’s Lonesome for Me,” was clearly a B side. It had no bridge, and lacked the radio-friendliness of “Moanin’ the Blues.” Then, for the last half of the session, Hank once again became Luke the Drifter. First, he recorded a trite little homily, “Help Me Understand,” a parable for the nag and the philanderer. A little more detail would have elevated it above the mundane. “One word led to another, and the last word led to divorce,” said Hank tearfully, clearly cognizant of the threat of divorce hanging over his own head. Audrey had been the first to record the song back in March, and it was one that she and Hank often performed together as a two-part piece; Hank would narrate it and Audrey would sing the little girl’s part, a rare occasion when her tuneless singing actually worked.
The last song was Fred Rose’s “No, No Joe.” The Cold War was heating up, the Korean War had started in June 1950, and the main enemy was Joseph Stalin. Roy Acuff had already recorded “Advice to Joe” ("When Moscow lies in ashes, God have mercy on your soul"); Jimmy Osborne chimed in with the slightly premature “Thank God for Victory in Korea;” and Elton Britt recorded “The Red We Want Is the Red We’ve Got in the Old Red, White and Blue.” Red-baiting briefly became an issue in the music business, but the only casualties were black folk singer Josh White, who was forced to publicly confess that he had once held communist sympathies, and the Weavers, who saw their bookings dry up and were forced to disband.
In the context of McCarthyism, “No, No Joe” was understated and witty. Billboard noted as much in its review: “Tune and material are carefully wedded, not forced like so many of the recent patriotic tunes.” It wouldn’t have been stretching a point to issue “No, No Joe” under Hank’s name, but Rose held fast to his original intention and issued it under Luke the Drifter. MGM took out full-page advertisements in trade magazines, but it failed to crack the charts. After Hank died and MGM was looking under every rock for Hank Williams recordings, they never once resorted to reissuing “No, No Joe.” Its first domestic LP appearance was on a Time-Life set in 1981.
As the year ended, “Moanin’ the Blues” was atop the charts, but the competition was stronger than ever. Two major new players had arrived: Hank Snow (who stole Hank’s bass player, Hillous Butrum, soon after the debacle in Texas) and Lefty Frizzell. Snow’s first big American hit, “I’m Moving On,” had spent twenty-one weeks at number one (longer than any other country record ever had or ever would), and Hank’s “Moanin’ the Blues” had to share the top spot with Frizzell’s “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time.” In the year-end tallies Hank was rated the third-best-selling artist of the year. Red Foley and Eddy Arnold were still ahead of him, and Hank Snow and Lefty Frizzell were snapping at his heels.