Chapter 10
There’s no darker place than the edge of the spotlight.
Hal Cannon, Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering
HERE’S a little number me an’ the boys been eatin’ off of fer a while,” Hank would often say in his introductions, and he had been depending on his music for so long that he probably saw it at least partly in those terms. If so, he had written and recorded his meal ticket for 1951 before he went out to play his New Year’s show. It was another little cameo of life with Audrey, and if, as some said, the warmest she ever got was thawing, then “Cold, Cold Heart” was one of the most awfully true songs ever written.
Stories of the song’s origin vary. The way that Pappy Neil McCormick remembered it, Audrey was in the hospital, probably recovering from an infection that had set in after she’d had an abortion in September 1950. The abortion had apparently been carried out at home without Hank’s knowledge, and Audrey would have kept him in the dark if she hadn’t developed an infection ("I was in the hospital over some little minor something,” she coyly told journalist Dorothy Horstman). The reasons for the abortion are unclear. Audrey probably didn’t want the physical pain of another pregnancy, much less the encumbrance of another child. According to McCormick, Hank went to the hospital and bent down to kiss Audrey, but she wouldn’t let him. “You sorry son of a bitch,” she is supposed to have said, “it was you that caused me to suffer this.” Hank went home and told the children’s governess, Miss Ragland, that Audrey had a “cold, cold heart,” and then, as so often in the past, realized that the bitterness in his heart held commercial promise.
Years later, Audrey told one of her lovers a different story about the song’s origin: she’d found out about one of Hank’s affairs while she was in the hospital, and that when he brought her some jewelry in atonement, she’d flung it back at him. Other stories surround the song, all of them reflecting the increasingly unhappy times on Franklin Road. Audrey, like most musicians’ wives, probably accepted the fact that Hank had dalliances out on the road. It was generally regarded as one of the few perks of the job. What irked her, though, was that Hank would often come back on Friday night or Saturday morning physically depleted, and would be gone again on Saturday night or Sunday morning. She had more stamina than he did, and could have coped with the rigors of the road, but she was left at home. So she began taking lovers to fill the lonely hours, and quite possibly suspected that the child she had conceived was not Hank’s.
Talking to the Wall Street Journal in October 1951, Hank was economical with the truth. “Cold, Cold Heart,” he told the interviewer, had taken about an hour to write; he just sat and waited, and pretty soon, God had written it for him. If so, the most that God gave him was the words; the melody was adapted from T. Texas Tyler’s 1945 recording of “You’ll Still Be in My Heart.” Lyrically, the songs bore some similarities, but melodically there was very little difference at all. “You’ll Still Be in My Heart” was originally copyrighted by Ted West in May 1943, then rewritten by Buddy Starcher and acquired in July 1943 by one of Starcher’s affiliates, Clark Van Ness. Earlier, Van Ness’ adaptation of an old Spanish-American War song of interracial passion, “Ma Filipino Baby,” had become a big hit as servicemen returned from the Far East. Van Ness traded as Dixie Music, and, as was common, waited until “Cold, Cold Heart” had racked up some sales before filing suit on December 3, 1951.
Hank’s draft of “Cold, Cold Heart” (titled “Your Cold Cold Heart") was dated November 23, 1950. If that was indeed the day he wrote it, it was some two months after Audrey’s abortion, so perhaps his upset festered longer than supposed. It was recorded during an evening session on December 21. Hank sang with palpable hurt, never once sinking to mawkishness. His restraint only heightened the record’s impact, and left the listener in no doubt that he was living every word. It was the first song recorded that night, but from the outset Fred Rose saw it as a B side because it now seemed to be an immutable law that the faster numbers sold best. The A side — the fast side -would be “Dear John,” a song that Acuff-Rose didn’t even publish. It was unthinkable that Rose would have wasted another company’s song on a B side. B sides were known in the business as “free rides” because the record company paid the publisher of the B side as much as they paid the publisher of the A side. From the paperwork submitted to MGM, it seemed clear that Rose intended “Cold, Cold Heart” to get a free ride on the back of “Dear John.”
“Dear John” was written by a hard-luck Texas honky-tonk singer, Aubrey Gass. It was the only hit he ever wrote. The first version was by Jim Boyd, younger brother of Dallas-based western swing artist Bill Boyd. Gass apparently knew Jim Boyd and offered him “Dear John,” and Boyd recorded it on March 11, 1949. Soon after, Tex Ritter got his finger in the pie. Ritter probably promised to get the song cut by a big name (himself perhaps), or get Gass a contract with his label, Capitol, if he got a piece of the song. The fact that Gass recorded “Dear John” for Capitol some six months after Boyd suggests that Ritter lived up to his half of the bargain. When MGM filed for a license for Hank’s version in January 1951, the application went to Tex Ritter Music in New York.
For all his tales of life in the bunkhouse, Tex (or Maurice Woodward Ritter, to give him his full name) had spent longer at law school than on the trail, and knew the angles when it came to the business end of the music business. If Tex hadn’t beaten him to it, Hank could have bought the song from Aubrey Gass and no one would have known that “Dear John” wasn’t a Hank Williams song. Clent Holmes, who’d worked with Hank in Shreveport, remembers him singing it there, so Hank had probably acquired Jim Boyd’s record and carried the song around in the back of his mind for a year and a half. Needing a fast song for the jukeboxes, he remembered “Dear John.” When Hank and the band hollered the tag line, “Dear John, I’ve sent your saddle home,” it invited everyone in the bar, the auditorium, or even the car to holler right along. Once again, the upfront rhythm guitar carried the recording. Hank cruised at the brisk tempo, never once straining.
The last two sides recorded at the “Cold, Cold Heart” session were for another Luke the Drifter single, the fourth that year. “Just Waitin’” was a lusterless talking blues that Hank had adapted from an idea by a Texas songwriter, Bob Gazzaway, but it did little credit to either of them. Gazzaway wrote a few more songs that got recorded, including several by Little Jimmy Dickens, but never wrote a hit. “Just Waitin’” promised more than it delivered. Everyone is “just waitin’” for something. It was a good premise, but a bad song. The other side of the record, “Men with Broken Hearts,” was Hank at his absolute bleakest. Later, Montgomery journalist Allen Rankin recalled Hank playing him the song. “Ain’t that the awfulest, morbidest song you ever heard in your life?” Rankin remembered Hank saying. The lines about “eyes staring in defeat,” “hearts pray[ing] for death,” and “know[ing] pain with every breath” were from the darker side of life that drew the poetry out of Hank. “Don’t know why I happen to of wrote that thing,” he told Rankin, “except somebody that fell, he’s the same man as before he fell, ain’t he? Got the same blood in his veins. How can he be such a nice guy when he’s got it and such a bad guy when he ain’t got nothin’? Can you tell me?” It was a theme that Hank harped upon often in his conversation, as he sensed that those claiming to be his new best friends would one day disown him. If those were indeed his thoughts, they were a chillingly accurate premonition.
The year 1951 began with no hint of the changes in store. Hank closed out a hugely successful New Year’s weekend bash in Indianapolis when more than sixteen thousand people had paid to see him, and as he looked into the new year, he probably saw the road stretching forever. There was a swing out west, followed by a short tour through the Southeast, both for A. V. Bamford.
During rare days off in Nashville, Hank prerecorded seventy fifteen-minute radio shows for Mother’s Best flour, hosting the show with WSM announcer Louie Buck. The format was almost invariably the same. Hank would kick off with “Lovesick Blues” (he was still “that ‘Lovesick Blues’ boy"), and Cousin Louie would come in over the instrumental backing with a pitch for Mother’s Best. There was a secular song, a “Come to Jesus” number, an instrumental, and finally a long closing pitch for Mother’s Best. Sometimes a guest would drop in and do a number in place of the instrumental. Most if not all of the Mother’s Best shows survived, and they include more than forty songs that Hank never otherwise recorded. He’s very unguarded, believing that no one aside from early morning listeners in and around Nashville and mid-Alabama would ever hear him. He laughs a lot, sometimes almost giggles, reminding us that he was only twenty-seven. The jokes are usually self-deprecating and the hymns are riveting.
Some of the hymns were extraordinarily long, but Hank sings them entirely from memory. Most had a dark undercurrent. “The Great Judgment Morning” was possibly the best. It talks of the day when everyone will be equal. Money won’t matter; neither will debt. The widow and the orphan will be on an equal footing with the famous as they gather before the “great throne.” Roy Acuff had recorded it, but he hadn’t included one verse that Hank found especially compelling:
The gambler was there and the drunkard
And they who had sold him the drink
The people who gave them the license
Together in Hell they did sink
And oh the weeping, the wailing
As the lost were told of their fate
They cried for the rocks and the mountains
They prayed, but their prayers were too late
There were a few surprises, too. The Weavers were in the pop charts with an old folk song, “On Top of Old Smoky,” and Hank was clearly amazed that a song his grandmother used to sing was in the charts, so he decided on the spur of the moment to sing it as his grandmother had sung it. The Weavers’ record is insufferably jolly, but Hank’s rendition is very melancholy. The Drifting Cowboys join him on the chorus to haunting effect. It could have been a hit.
Hank featured both “Cold, Cold Heart” and “Dear John” on his Mother’s Best shows, promoting what was then his latest release. The single was shipped on February 2, 1951, and “Dear John” showed up in the charts one month later. Within two weeks, though, “Cold, Cold Heart” overtook it. This left Rose gnashing his teeth because “Dear John” was now getting a free ride on the back of “Cold, Cold Heart.” Still, it was good to know that a slow song would sell. “Cold, Cold Heart” eventually peaked at number one for a week in May, then hung around on the charts for the rest of the year. “Dear John” was off the charts in four weeks.
“Cold, Cold Heart” lingered because it acquired a new, and unexpected, lease on life. It’s part of Acuff-Rose mythology that, against all odds and against the deeply ingrained resistance of the pop music establishment, Wesley Rose went to New York and persuaded Mitch Miller to record “Cold, Cold Heart” with Tony Bennett. Wesley loved to tell of how he beat on every record company door in New York with the song. “That’s a hillbilly song,” he was told everywhere, “and there’s no use kidding yourself otherwise.” Finally, he persuaded Miller, the goateed head of pop music A&R at Columbia Records, to take a listen. The rest, Wesley was fond of saying, is history.
In truth, Wesley took “Cold, Cold Heart” to New York at a time when the market for country songs had never been better. Every pop A&R man in town should have been beating a path to his hotel room. The idea of covering country records for the pop charts gathered steam after Jimmie Davis’ “You Are My Sunshine” and Al Dexter’s “Pistol Packin’ Mama” became huge wartime hits for Bing Crosby. Acuff-Rose’s first taste of pop action came several years later with “Jealous Heart.” Written by Red Foley’s sister-in-law, Jenny Lou Carson, it was a hit for Tex Ritter in 1945, then languished for four years before a Chicago pianist and singer, Al “Mr. Flying Fingers” Morgan, recorded it for a small local label. Morgan’s record was picked up by London Records, and it became a top five pop record in 1949. Acuff-Rose had nothing to do with Morgan’s picking up the song, but if the Roses ever needed a reminder that pop sales comfortably exceeded country sales, Al “Mr. Flying Fingers” Morgan was it. Later in 1949, Acuff-Rose had another pop hit when Frank Sinatra and others covered Red Foley’s “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy.”
Pee Wee King’s “Tennessee Waltz” provided another vast, unanticipated windfall for Acuff-Rose. Again, no one there had any role in its success, which probably increased Wesley’s need to cement himself to the success of “Cold, Cold Heart.” His training as an accountant led him to downplay dumb luck, which has always counted for so much in the music business. King had written and recorded “Tennessee Waltz” in 1947 and released it in January 1948 back-to-back with his version of Fred Rose’s “Rootie Tootie.” It became a fair-sized country hit. King and Cowboy Copas sold roughly 380,000 copies combined, but the song was dead in the water by the time jazz band leader Erskine Hawkins recorded it in September 1950. Jerry Wexler, then a Billboard columnist, heard Hawkins’ record and suggested to Patti Page’s manager that she put it on the flip side of her 1950 Christmas single. By early 1951, it had become one of those inexplicable, uncontainable smashes. By May, Page’s record had sold 4.8 million copies and cover versions had probably sold half as many again. Sheet music sales had topped 1.1 million, and it was the highest-grossing song that BMI had ever represented. So, when Wesley Rose went to New York in early 1951 with “Cold, Cold Heart” in his briefcase, he shouldn’t have had to twist anybody’s arm into recording it.
Mitch Miller downplays Wesley’s role in getting “Cold, Cold Heart” to him. He says it was Jerry Wexler who alerted him to “Cold, Cold Heart,” but confirms that Tony Bennett had to be coerced into recording it. “When I heard the song, I thought it was made to order for Tony,” says Miller. “I thought the last four lines were particularly poetic, and so I played Hank Williams’ record for Tony, with the scratchy fiddle and everything, and Tony said, ‘Don’t make me do cowboy songs!’ I said, ‘Tony, listen to the words. It’s only a record. If it doesn’t work out, I won’t put it out. I’m not here to hurt you.’”
Bennett had yet to see a chart entry when he recorded “Cold, Cold Heart” on May 31, 1951, so he wasn’t the prize catch that Wesley might have been hoping for, but three weeks after the session, his version of “Because of You” shot straight to number one. This gave “Cold, Cold Heart” a head start, and proved again how important dumb luck could be. If “Because of You” had flopped, would “Cold, Cold Heart” have done as well? Would it even have shown up at all? As it was, “Cold, Cold Heart” jumped to the top of the pop charts, and every record label had to have at least one cover version. The Fontane Sisters and Perry Como did it for RCA, Louis Armstrong and Eileen Wilson for Decca, Tony Fontane and Dinah Washington for Mercury, and so on. It wasn’t half the phenomenon that “Tennessee Waltz” had been, but “Cold, Cold Heart” served notice that Hank Williams’ songs now had a potential that was unthinkable when he sent up his acetate of God, Mother, and Death songs for Molly O’Day just five years earlier. Mitch Miller, always the unabashed populist, came to appreciate Hank’s artistry. “He had a way of reaching your guts and your head at the same time,” he said later. “The language hit home. Nobody I know could use basic English so effectively.” Tony Bennett never really understood what Hank was doing, but in January 1956, he sang “Cold, Cold Heart” on an ABC-TV Opry broadcast, while Ernest Tubb stared at him with stunned, icy disbelief.
Hank was tickled. He had always made a policy of spinning his own records on the jukebox in any restaurant he ate in; now he spun Tony Bennett’s record as well. The first couple of times, he would slap the table, grin his shiteating grin and say “Hot damn!” Now when he looked in Billboardevery week he had a reason to check out the pop listings instead of heading straight for the “Folk Talent and Tunes” section. Miller’s success with “Cold, Cold Heart” earned him a promise from Acuff-Rose that he would get prerelease demos of any songs that Wesley or Fred considered to have pop potential. “That way,” says Miller, “I wouldn’t have to scramble, but I agreed with Fred and Wesley that I wouldn’t release my record until the original had got going on the country chart.” It was an arrangement that would be mutually profitable for Acuff-Rose and Columbia over the next few years. When Rose spoke to the Wall Street Journal in late 1951, he stated that Acuff-Rose’s gross for that year would be 40 or 50 percent up on 1950, which had in turn been 150 percent better than 1949. Mitch Miller made a substantial contribution to that.
Looked at in a broader context, the success of hillbilly songs refashioned for the pop market and the success of R&B reconfigured as pop a couple of years later meant that the music of the black and white underclasses was entering the pop mainstream through the back door. That in turn meant that the pop market was being prepped for rock ’n’ roll. The “folk tunes boom,” as it was termed at the time, caught the attention not only of the Wall Street Journal but of virtually every other periodical. The Collier’s approach was typical in its mixture of surprise and condescension; “There’s Gold in Them Thar Hillbilly Tunes” was the headline. Hank was often singled out in the press’ musings. Much of the comment focused upon his ability to write hits in half an hour, and Hank played the role of the intuitive folk artist to the hilt, never once mentioning the rigid application of commercial logic that took place in Rose’s home studio before every session.
Not only were cover versions of hillbilly tunes selling well, but the original versions were doing unprecedentedly good business as well. Decca Records had tried without success to sign Hank Williams, but had Red Foley, Ernest Tubb, and Kitty Wells under contract. Decca estimated that 50 percent of its sales derived from country music. Even Columbia Records estimated that 40 percent of its gross came from country. The bottom line looked even rosier. A typical pop session of the day used as many as thirty or forty instrumentalists at $41.25 for three hours. Before the session, an army of copyists was required to write out the arrange- ments, and a contractor had to be engaged to call everyone in. Then, typically, only one or two songs would be recorded during a session. In Nashville, most sessions used no more than six or seven instrumentalists, arrangements were cooked up on the spot, no contractor was needed, and three or four songs were cut in three hours.
Hank was happy to cash the checks as the palm court orchestras played his songs, but on a far deeper level he was suspicious of the trend, seeing it as a dilution of his music. “These pop bands,” he told an interviewer in Charleston, South Carolina, “will play our hillbilly songs when they cain’t eat any other way.” If he saw the trade advertisement for Bennett’s “Cold, Cold Heart,” it must have confirmed his darkest suspicions. The headline was “Popcorn! A Top Corn Tune Gone Pop.” Tony Bennett was caricatured in a policeman’s uniform holding up traffic while a witless hillbilly leads a pig and a mule across a busy city street. In terms of denigrating hillbilly music, this was no better than the Sterling ads four years earlier.
For all its success, “Cold, Cold Heart” did little to change Hank’s routine. After the Opry on Saturday night, he headed out of town on a four- or five-day junket. The crowds were getting bigger as his reputation grew, but otherwise it was all much as before. There was the backstage meet ’n’ greet, and no one was more concerned than Hank to sign every autograph. There were deejays to be stroked — the phrases now tripped like a litany off Hank’s tongue. If there was time and if he had the energy, there might be a quick dive into a motel with a woman. Sometimes, the band would sit out in the car with the motor running while Hank took care of business. Then there was more wriggling inside that damned old car trying to find a position in which his back didn’t hurt so bad, and more grief when he got home. It was a routine that was beginning to pall, but for the present it beat anything Hank had ever known, and he was still happy to be out there.
Hank had been without a manager since he and Oscar Davis parted company, and he tried to bring some order to his business affairs by hiring William R. “Bill” England. Rather than look around Nashville, Hank once again pulled someone from Montgomery. England had been a time salesman on WSFA before coming to Nashville. He moved up in January 1951 and worked from his home at 1950 Richard Jones Road. England’s first priority was to assemble a catalog of promotional items that could be sent out in advance of a show. The promoter could pick and choose from an array of predesigned one- or two-column advertisements for “The Sensational Radio-Recording Star Mr. Lovesick Blues Hank Williams with his Entire Grand Ole Opry Show.” If Hank was paying to use the Grand Ole Opry trademark, he might as well get all the mileage he could out of it. England also wrote some prepackaged stories that could run in newspapers just before the show, and printed up huge stocks of 8 × 10 inch photos for store windows, giveaways, and intermission sales. It wasn’t long, though, before England found that Hank really wanted a gofer, not a manager.
At roughly the same time, a power play was unfolding at the Opry. In August 1950, Harry Stone quit as WSM manager to become a consultant, eventually working for KPHO in Phoenix, Arizona, where he discovered Marty Robbins. He was replaced by Jack DeWitt Jr., who was already president of WSM. DeWitt’s background was in the technical end of radio. He had designed equipment that could bounce radar signals off the moon, and had spent the Second World War working on radar technology, but had little or no feel for hillbilly music. DeWitt had the sense to place Jim Denny in the newly created post of manager of the Grand Ole Opry, despite the fact that he and Denny rarely got along. This left Denny the uneasy victor in a protracted campaign against Stone, a campaign waged on the personal and professional front. Although both men were married, they had competed for the affections of Dollie Dearman, a dancer in the Opry troupe, and that too was a battle that Denny won. The bitter pill for Denny was that he had to surrender the lucrative concession businesses he had built up.
Jim Denny liked Hank, and had a grudging respect for him. Hank, though, had a deep-seated suspicion of everybody. He would never invest enough trust in either Denny or Bill England for them to act on his behalf. Hank’s idea of calculating his net worth was to empty his pockets, and England soon grew frustrated. “We never had a contract because to me a contract represents a lack of trust,” he said, “but managing Hank was like a company asking a management consultant to come in and look at their business, make recommendations and so forth, then ignoring everything the management consultant says and going right back to operating the way they did before. I had the title of manager, but did not manage.” England maintains that he was paid low and slow, and says that Hank, even at the height of his fame, couldn’t cover a ten-dollar check.
Part of the problem was that Audrey was still buying everything that caught her eye, although England asserts that she and Hank were equally bad. “That went back to the early thirties,” he says. “They’d never had anything, then the money came rolling in, and anything they saw, they wanted.” Automobiles, of course. His-and-hers Cadillacs. Audrey bought a four-thousand-dollar convertible against Hank’s wishes — he thought a married woman had no business riding around in one. He bought a Cadillac Coupe for himself, and a six-thousand-dollar seven-passenger Cadillac touring sedan. Audrey shopped at the most expensive couturiers, bought overpriced furniture, and treated herself to jewelry. As Hank sang “Dear John,” the words must have rung truer than any from his own pen:
I went down to the bank this morning, the cashier said with a grin,
I feel so sorry for you, Hank, but your wife has done been in.
Hank later claimed that Audrey spent fifty thousand dollars during 1951 alone, much of it remodeling and refurbishing the Franklin Road house in what would become the Graceland school of interior decor. Soon after Hank came to the Opry, he boasted to a band member that he was now making money faster than even Audrey could spend it, but she somehow caught up. If Audrey were to defend herself, she would probably say that Hank matched her dollar for dollar. Hank had simple tastes, but indulged them to excess. He had partied away the fifteen dollars he had won at the Empire Theater in 1937, and now he was buying guns, riding tackle, or anything else that caught his eye. He left huge tips on a whim, and would sometimes simply lose money, or send it to people who mailed him a hard-luck story. After he came to Nashville, he started banking with John Clay, the brother of KWKH manager Henry Clay, at the Third National Bank. He would often return from a trip with a suitcase full of money that he would simply dump on a cashier’s desk. When asked how much was there, he would say that it was his business to make it and theirs to count it.
Hank’s fascination with guns was particularly costly. Jerry Rivers remembered that Hank, like Elvis, would befriend members of the police so that they would help him locate guns and even girls. One night, a member of the vice squad in El Paso took Hank and the Drifting Cowboys on a late-night excursion into Juarez in search of exotic firearms. Members of the troupe that accompanied Hank to Oklahoma City in 1951 remember him buying a gross of expensive cufflinks with pistol motifs. He bought a Tennessee walking horse, figuring that its smooth gait would enhance his cowboy image with minimal damage to his back. And then, on September 1, 1951, he bought 507 acres of land with a derelict antebellum farmhouse south of Nashville in Williamson County. The purchase price was sixty thousand dollars, but Hank put up just fifteen thousand, and then proceeded to dig a deeper hole for himself by stocking the farm with whiteface cattle. So if Audrey was the thrusting arriviste, using Hank’s money to buy social credibility, Hank was spending like a lottery winner with a month to live.
Some of Hank’s income went into a forlorn retail venture, Hank and Audrey’s Corral. Back in 1947, Ernest Tubb had opened his famous Record Shop close to the Opry. He mailed records across the nation, and bought up WSM’s airtime after the Opry went off the air on Saturday night to host his Midnight Jamboree from the store. Hank tried to replicate Tubb’s formula by opening Hank and Audrey’s Corral at 724 Commerce Street, next door to Tubb. The Corral opened in June 1951, and Hank took out a five-year lease on the property at $160 a month, then stocked it with seven thousand dollars’ worth of inventory, with furnishings like the western-wear stores he’d seen out west. The walls were covered with barn board, wagon wheels, and hurricane lamps. In addition to the western gear, there were Hank and Audrey dolls, fans, and knicknacks for the Saturday night crowd. The gala opening was broadcast over WSM between 5:00 and 5:30 p.m. on June 16, 1951, and Hank planned to broadcast every week in that time slot, much as Ernest Tubb did after midnight, but the Corral show had to be relocated to the WSM studios after three months because crowds blocked the sidewalk. Hank placed the store in the hands of Mac McGee, but it was too often a refuge for out-of-work musicians waiting for Hank to drop in and buy everyone Krystal burgers. He usually showed up on Saturday morning to sign the paychecks, and Audrey would come by most days to scoop the cash register.
As Hank’s success reached its zenith in 1951, the situation deteriorated at home. “Cold, Cold Heart” turned into what he liked to call “a little prophecy in song.” Audrey, now shut out from everything to do with Hank’s career except the cash flow, closed off her heart. The Hank Williams she got was either dog tired or shipped home early from a tour because he was drinking. The good times hadn’t all passed and gone, but they were fewer now. Two years of almost constant touring had taken their toll on Hank’s health, while the career pressures in the wake of “Cold, Cold Heart” were placing an additional strain on his ever less stable psyche.
Through it all, Hank never messed up in the recording studio. At 1:30 on the afternoon of Friday, March 16, 1951, just as “Cold, Cold Heart” and “Dear John” were breaking, he went back into the studio with four songs, four remarkably strong songs even by the standards he had set for himself. They were “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love with You),” “Howlin’ at the Moon,” “Hey, Good Lookin’,” and “My Heart Would Know.” It took half an hour of studio overtime on top of the three-hour session to get all four down, but Rose’s glee must have been uncontained as he made his myopic way back home that afternoon.
Don Helms’ opening notes on “I Can’t Help It” held fast to Rose’s credo that he must play high if Hank was to sing low. If Helms had played any higher, only dogs would have heard him. Jerry Rivers always said that Hank wrote the song in the touring sedan. He came up with the first line, “Today I passed you on the street,” and then asked for suggestions. “What’s a good line?” he said. Don Helms answered, “And I smelled your rotten feet.” Everyone in the car broke up laughing, but Hank soldiered on. The hand of Fred Rose is clearly at work in some of the lines; the grammatical forms and scansion are unlike pure Hank, but the content and the prevailing mood are identifiably Hank Williams.
In complete contrast, “Howlin’ at the Moon” captures the giddiness of new love. Much of its humor was rooted in Hank’s passion for hunting. The performance tears along, punctuated by Jerry Rivers’ hound dog yodels. It was but a short step from there to rockabilly. Hank had already written another set of words to the same melody, and called it “Countryfied.” He pitched “Countryfied” to his opening act, Big Bill Lister, a month later.
“Hey, Good Lookin’” seemed to demand the same breezy treatment as “Howlin’ at the Moon.” On one level, it seemed to point toward rock ’n’ roll (hot rods, dancing sprees, goin’ steady, and soda pop), but the rhythm plodded along with a steppity-step piano, and Hank sounded almost dour. If Audrey felt a twinge of guilt over her affairs, she must have wondered if she or another had inspired “Hey, Good Lookin’” and “Howlin’ at the Moon.” Hank’s Opry costar, Little Jimmy Dickens, says that Hank wrote both songs on a plane taking them to a date in Wichita Falls, Texas. Dickens also insists that Hank promised him “Hey, Good Lookin’.” “He said he wanted me to record it,” said Dickens, “and I was delighted, I thought it would be a good song for me. Then I met him in the hall of WSM, and he said, ‘Tater [Hank called Dickens “Tater” after his first hit, “Take an Old Cold Tater (and Wait)"], I cut your song today. It’s too good a song for you, anyway’” Dickens says he laughed it off, but it wasn’t the first time Hank had pulled a stunt like that, and it wouldn’t be the last.
Typically, Hank would offer a song around, and if enough artists seemed interested, he would record it himself. “Listen here what I wrote,” he would say, “ain’t that a good un?” Chet Atkins remembers that Hank would “get right up close to you in your face and he’d sing. If you raved over it, he’d love that. He was pitching songs to the hot acts of that time, and they’d say, ‘That’s a great song, Hank. I want to do that on my next session.’ If he got enough people to say that, he’d say, ‘No, it’s too damn good for you, I’m gonna do it myself.’” The humility that all country performers were, and are, supposed to wear like a crown of thorns often drops in private, but Hank’s hubris alienated many of his peers. He placed a surprising number of songs with other artists, but none of them ever amounted to anything. Many, like “There’s Nothing As Sweet As My Baby,” given to young and struggling Carl Smith, were inconsequential songs, and Hank probably knew he was doing no one a favor in bestowing them. All evidence points to the fact that he knew exactly which ones to keep for himself.
The four songs recorded on March 16, 1951, were released in two couplings. “I Can’t Help It” and “Howlin’ at the Moon” were released on April 27, and “Hey, Good Lookin’” and “My Heart Would Know” were released on June 22. Together, those two singles kept “Cold, Cold Heart” company in the charts for the rest of the year. “Hey, Good Lookin’” spent most of August and September at number one. Adhering to their agreement with Mitch Miller, the Roses offered him these new songs, and Miller scored pop hits with Guy Mitchell’s version of “I Can’t Help It” and Frankie Laine’s duet on “Hey, Good Lookin’” with Jo Stafford. Laine and Stafford’s record had much of the zest that Hank’s lacked, thanks to six guitars comping in unison underpinned by a jazz bassist and drum- mer, all punctuated by Speedy West’s steel guitar. The record peaked at number nine on the pop charts at the tail end of 1951.
Hank was back in the studio for another session on March 23, a week after he’d recorded “Hey, Good Lookin.’” Decca Records had jettisoned Miss Audrey, and Hank had persuaded Fred Rose to record her for MGM as a solo act and to cut some more religious duets. The sacred songs they chose were “The Pale Horse and His Rider” and “A Home in Heaven.” Hank had probably learned “The Pale Horse and His Rider” from its cowriter, Johnny Bailes, when he worked with the Bailes Brothers in Shreveport, but the song dated back to 1939, when Bailes was working with Molly O’Day and the song’s other writer, Ervin Staggs, at WCHS in Charleston, West Virginia. Full of images as spectral and haunting as any Hank ever wrote, it is nonetheless undermined by Audrey, who is strident and often woefully off-key.
“A Home in Heaven” was a song that Hank had kicked around in one guise or another for five years. A version was included on a set of demos sent to Columbia’s Art Satherley in 1946, and it would later resurface as “Are You Building a Temple in Heaven?” Once again, Hank and Audrey’s domestic disharmony seemed to find its extension on disc as she tried for supremacy on every note. Rose refused to okay the recordings for release, and it would be almost four years after Hank’s death, when MGM believed it was staring at the bottom of the barrel, before “Home in Heaven” and “The Pale Horse and His Rider” were shipped.
Part of the appeal of Hank’s records was that they gave an inkling of the gulf that existed between the public mask and the inner disquiet. He was now one of the most successful artists in country music. Eddy Arnold might be selling more records, but he couldn’t equal Hank’s overall achievement as a writer and performer. Most of those who punched up a Hank Williams record on the jukebox probably felt that the mood swing on every record between the bouncy up-tempo song and the slower “heart” song was more than a commercial formula; it was an echo of his life, and many other people’s lives. He could josh around with the guys in the limo, bathe in the applause onstage, find a girl and head off to a motel, see his records plastered all over the charts, perform a gratuitous act of charity for someone who was as poor as he had once been…but still he seemed to find no peace or real contentment in it.
Everyone who says they were close to Hank usually has to admit that — on some level — they really didn’t know him at all. “I never knew anybody I liked better than Hank,” Jim Denny said after Hank’s death, “but I don’t think I ever really got close to him. I don’t know if anyone really could. He was so bitter…. He thought everybody had some sort of angle on him.” The mistrust and secretiveness weren’t traits that developed in the wake of success. “This guy was afraid for anyone to get close to him, even to the point of being cold,” said Doyle Turner, who had worked with Hank in 1945. “He was never the type of person to be close. Bernice and I were closer to him than any of the group, and it was as though we were a hundred miles away from him.” Working the street corners with Tee-Tot, Hank had acquired a cheery mask that led people to believe they were his confidantes, and led many to claim that Hank had befriended them and poured his heart out to them. In fact, they’d heard one of his set pieces, every bit as well rehearsed and sincere as his songs. Audrey’s betrayals probably hurt him all the more because she was one of the few to whom he had truly opened up.
Hank craved success until he found it, then wanted less tangible things, like a centered home life. Success alone didn’t widen the gap between Hank and Audrey, but it financed their aspirations, which in turn made it clear how different those aspirations were. Audrey wanted to integrate herself into the old-money Belle Meade country club set, while Hank’s idea of recreation was to go fishing on Kentucky Lake. He is generally reckoned to have been happiest out on the lake with a cane pole. He didn’t even want to go hunting and fishing with the old-money crowd, who took their blinds, their servants, and all manner of expensive tackle and hardware. Several times, Hank apparently embarrassed Audrey at her dinner parties, and even if the stories are exaggerated, they nonetheless show how divergent their paths had become.
Much as Hank blamed Audrey for his poor family life, he knew his own conduct, particularly his drinking bouts, drove a wedge between them. Guilt over his drinking, his inability to spend more time with his wife and son, and his little flings almost certainly gnawed at him. Chiefly, it was the binges, now coming more frequently, that frustrated those who dealt with him. Everyone tried to make him feel guilty about the boozing — and he probably felt the guilt even as he covered it up with truculence. “I tried to shame him,” said Oscar Davis. “I said, ‘Look, you got your son and your wife,’ [but] you can’t shake an alcoholic.” Bob McNett says, “Some of the lonesomeness you found in Hank was guilt because he knew in his heart he wasn’t living up to what he knew was morally right.” The caricature of Hank Williams, with the Bible in one hand and Billboard in the other, has its grain of truth. He knew right from wrong, and knew he had been weighed in the balance and found wanting.
The year 1951 would be the last good one, the last of only three. Hank spent the greater part of it on the road. Once in a while, one of his fellow performers told him his pace was killing him. He would shrug to hide the fact that he probably knew it, and say he had to strike while the iron was hot.