Chapter 17
Darkling I listen; and for many a time I have been half in love with easeful death Called him soft names in many a muséd rhyme To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever it seems rich to die To cease upon the midnight with no pain.
John Keats, “Song”
THERE’S no way to describe how it feels when they tell you,” says Billie Jean. “There was a person-to-person call to my dad from [West] Virginia. I thought Hank was in some kind of trouble. My daddy said, ‘Oh Lord,’ and asked the driver some questions, then hung up. I was sitting up by that point. He held me and said that Hank was dead, and I was screaming and crying. I said, ‘Don’t let them touch him. He often pretends he’s asleep.’ I thought they were going to bury him alive.”
Billie had flown in from Montgomery on New Year’s Eve, and was asleep by the time her father, Captain John A. Jones, arrived home from his afternoon shift with the Bossier City police department. The call from West Virginia came before daylight. Now there was a race to Hank’s remains.
Charles Carr had already phoned Lilly to give her the news. At 7:01 a.m., Lilly sent a telegram to Irene, “Come at once. Hank is dead,” then called her attorney, Robert Stewart, who made arrangements to charter a plane from Montgomery Aviation to take her and Daniel Carr to West Virginia. They landed at Beckley, and drove on to Oak Hill in a taxi. Lilly’s first stop was the police station, where she was briefed on the situation. Clearly prepared by Robert Stewart, she’d brought along papers identifying herself as the next of kin.
Billie Jean, together with her father and brother, took commercial flights from Shreveport to Birmingham, Alabama, and from Birmingham on to Charlotte. They arrived late on New Year’s Day and met Lilly and Daniel Carr the following morning. Lilly had chosen the suit in which Hank was to be buried and the casket in which he was to be carried back to Montgomery. She had also taken possession of his jewelry and other items from the car.
On hearing of Hank’s death, Toby Marshall caught a Greyhound bus to Charleston, then got a ride to Oak Hill. He should have been worried because his “patient” had died, but he seems to have convinced himself that he really was a doctor, and was preparing his final bill of $736.39.
Charles Carr was taken to the police station for questioning, then released. Joe Tyree put him up in the employees’ quarters of his funeral home, and then in the afternoon of January 1, Carr went to the house of magistrate Virgil Lyons. Television was still a novelty, so he watched some football games on Lyons’ TV. After his father and Lilly arrived, they all took rooms at the Hotel Hill in Oak Hill. Don Surface was questioned and let go, but was asked to stay around Oak Hill for a day or so. He had some friends and relatives nearby, so he stayed with them. Then, on being told he was free to leave, he caught a bus back to Bluefield. The car was impounded in a bay at Burdette’s Pure Oil station, then moved to N&W Motors, the local Ford dealership, where it was cleaned out by one of Burdette’s employees. Beer cans littered the floor, and among them was one verse of a song. It might have been written on an earlier trip, but, in light of the circumstances around its discovery, it seemed a final valentine to Audrey or Billlie Jean. A shoe or boot print stained the bottom left-hand corner, and the handwriting was almost illegible.
We met, we lived
And dear we loved
Then came that fatal day
The love that felt so dear fades fast away
Tonight we both are all alone
And here’s all that I can say
I love you still and always will
But that’s the price we have to pay
One item missing from the car was Hank’s felt hat, apparently stolen by Pete Burdette. An alcoholic, Burdette had contracted jungle rot, a fungal disease that attacks skin tissue, while serving in Asia during the war. His hair fell out after he started wearing Hank’s hat, and it was assumed locally to be a curse. Burdette later killed himself around the back of his filling station, and the hat continued to change hands. A pearl-handled gun was also taken. Lilly, who had fought hard for every one of her possessions, developed an obsession with the car and its contents, and according to Carr, phoned him every few weeks until she died inquiring about various items she was convinced Hank had taken with him.
Lilly, Daniel Carr, Charles Carr, and Toby Marshall drove back to Montgomery in Hank’s car. Daniel drove most of the way, although Charles relieved him occasionally. They probably drove through the night of January 2–3, because Irene remembers them pulling up around breakfast time on January 3. The hearse was just in front of them.
Audrey had spent New Year’s Eve with A. V. Bamford’s wife, Maxine, at the tony Plantation Club in Nashville. Maxine pointedly remembered that Audrey said nothing about Hank coming back to Nashville, or to her. Bamford had sucked up his losses on the Charleston show, then driven to Canton late on New Year’s Eve. He checked into the hotel where he’d arranged to meet Hank, then went to bed. Don Helms and Autry Inman drove to Canton a few hours behind him, checking into the hotel around 5:00 a.m. “Bam got up early,” said Helms, “and Autry and I got up and went down to the auditorium. Bam met me at the dressing room door. He said, ‘Brace yourself: Hank died on the way here.’”
The Canton show was staged by a local company, Harry Lashinsky and Lew Platt’s LCL Presentations. Platt (who later managed rock ’n’ roll deejay Alan Freed) and Lashinsky decided that the show should go on. Hank would have wanted it that way, they were sure. One of Platt’s associates found Eddie Wayne, a singing deejay on WCUE, Akron, to fill out the program, and the remainder of the cast was there. Everyone on the show gathered backstage before the matinee. Akron deejay Cliff Rodgers from WHKK went out and took the microphone to make the announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I’ve been in show business almost twenty years, and I’ve been called upon to do many difficult things in front of an audience, but today I’m about to perform the most difficult task I have ever done.” Rodgers heard some laughter from somewhere in the crowd. “This morning on his way to Canton to do this show, Hank Williams died in his car.” There were a few more laughs from people who thought it was a joke of some kind. “Ladies and gentlemen,” continued Rodgers, “this is no joke. Hank Williams is dead.”
Backstage, the cast could hear some weeping. Some of the cast was crying too. A single spotlight was directed at the empty stage as the band, still behind the curtain, played “I Saw the Light.” A few people in the audience sang along. Then the curtain was opened and the show went on. Hawkshaw Hawkins gave the performance of his life, possibly sensing that there was an opening at the top. Within the year, he would be in Nashville, but ten years later he perished in the plane crash that took the lives of Patsy Cline and Cowboy Copas.
There are a few strange codas to the Canton show. Southwest of Canton, in Dayton, Ohio, there was a Grand Ole Opry show slated for January 1, 1953, and several in and around Dayton swear that Hank Williams was scheduled to appear, although this seems highly unlikely in light of the fact that he was no longer a member of the Opry. Surviving advertisements show a lineup that included Carl Smith and the Carter Sisters, although it’s just possible that Hank was slated to appear before his dismissal. At some point in the 1960s, Jim Denny’s family acquired control of the Hatch Show Print company, found some Hank Williams plates, and faked a poster for the Canton show. According to Denny’s poster, Hank was a Grand Ole Opry artist at the last, and the fake poster is still widely circulated, typifying the culture of misinformation that bedevils Hank Williams. Then, in 1964, when Audrey was managing Hank Jr., she scheduled a promotional tour to coincide with his first record. The first show was on January 1, 1964; the location, of course, was Canton. Eleven years later, the story was to be continued. That same year, the execrable biopic Your Cheatin’ Heart premiered. In it, Audrey placed herself backstage in Canton for the fateful 1953 New Year’s Day show. She stood stoically, fighting back tears. “You have no heart,” Hank had once sung, “you have no shame.”
Joe Tyree and his assistant Alex Childers had set out for Montgomery with Hank’s remains at 4:00 p.m. on Friday, January 2. They’d taken turns at the wheel, driving nonstop. “It was raining all the way down,” said Tyree, “and when we got into Alabama and we’d pull into a filling station and they’d see the West Virginia plates, they’d want to know if we was carrying Hank back. They’d start peeping in the windows.”
Hank’s body arrived back in Montgomery at 7:00 a.m. on Saturday, January 3. The funeral was scheduled for the following afternoon. A. V. Bamford had flown from Canton to Nashville, then driven down to Montgomery with Audrey to organize the funeral. Before leaving Montgomery, Lilly had called Leaborne Eads, who’d helped her promote some of Hank’s shows back in the late 1930s and early ’40s. Eads worked for the Henley Monument company, and sang with the Henley Harmony Boys on one of Hank’s old WSFA spots. Lilly was very calm, Eads remembered, and gave the impression that she’d half expected Hank’s death. While she was away, Eads made arrangements for Dr. Henry Lyon to preach the funeral service and for Reverend Talmadge Smith to assist. He also secured a burial plot in Oakwood Cemetery Annex, next to the grave of Irene’s first child. On Lilly’s instructions, Eads ordered a top-of-the-line Wilbert Continental copper-lined hermetically sealable casket from Atlanta. The original plan had been for a church service, but it soon became apparent that no church could accommodate all those who wanted to attend. Robert Stewart’s idea was to rent Crempton Bowl, but the weather looked unpromising, so either Stewart or Bamford persuaded the city of Montgomery to make the Municipal Auditorium available. The police and fire department would then escort the cortege on its way to Oakwood Annex. Bamford chartered a plane to bring the Grand Ole Opry cast down for the funeral program. No one seemed to question why Opry rather than Louisiana Hayride artists were invited.
Billie Jean and her father and brother flew from West Virginia back to Shreveport, then returned to Montgomery late on Friday, January 2. They were staying at the boardinghouse when Lilly arrived early the following morning. Lilly immediately hid the car.
Irene had flown in. She wrote to her attorney, Robert Stewart:
The morning Mother returned, Billie refused to speak to her. Mother went into her bedroom and sat down on the bed. Billie came out of the bedroom where she had spent the night, picked up the telephone which was on the wall in the hall and placed a long-distance call to her attorney in Shreveport. Her words to him were, “Get up here. This old gray-haired bitch is trying to steal all of Hank’s stuff from me.” She hung up the telephone and returned to her room. Mother told me that if I did not get her out of the house, she would kill her.
Lilly and Audrey, discovering a commonality of interest they’d never had while Hank was alive, began looking for a sheaf of lyrics as if they were maps to buried treasure. They found them in the bedroom that Hank and Billie Jean had shared. Lilly grabbed them while Billie was in the bathroom, and handed them to Bamford, who put them in the trunk of his car. Bamford then handed them to Fred Rose when he appeared the following day. Nobody realized that without Hank singing them, the scribblings were fool’s gold.
Lilly then sat with Irene, blaming Billie for the concussion marks on Hank’s head. Irene later wrote:
Mother told me that Billie did not like the suit that had been put on Hank at the funeral home in West Virginia. She [Lilly] wanted me to take [Billie] to a men’s shop on Dexter Avenue where Hank traded and pick out a new suit and tie. I went into the bathroom where Billie, her father and brother were talking as she finished putting on her makeup. I told her what my mother had said and told her I would be ready in a few minutes to go with her. Her words were, “This is your mother’s show. Let her run it.” My words, “This is no show, this is my brother’s funeral.” By this time I was so mad, guess I could have killed her myself. I just said, “Billie, I have tried to love you and treat you good because I figured Hank loved you or he would not have married you, but let me say something to you here and now.…I will go through this funeral by your side. I will go with you to pick out the suit and tie. I realize that you think you are the meanest woman alive, but honey you have now met on [sic] much meaner than you. Now come on, we have a job to do. When it is over, don’t ever cross my path again.” At this time, my mother comes into the bathroom and starts for Billie. I made her go back to her room, took Billie by the arm, very calmly walked out the front door with she and her father and brother, went to the clothing shop where she again changed her mind. Hank was buried in the suit that was picked out in the first place.
Billie’s mother arrived from Shreveport and it was decided that they would be more comfortable in a hotel. The night before the funeral, Doctor Toby Marshall showed up. Billie comes strolling in, in of all things, red slacks, going from one group of people to another telling them what the ole gray-haired bitch has done to her or was trying to do to her cars and possessions. Billie and Doctor Marshall got into a pretty good discussion, and he told her very frankly what he thought about her attire and her conduct.
On Saturday evening, Lon Williams hitched a ride to Montgomery. He had five dollars in his pocket when he arrived at the boardinghouse. Hank was lying in state by then, and Braxton Schuffert was on the door screening entrants. Lon told Braxton that he wanted some flowers, so Braxton took him to Rosemont Gardens, where everyone was working late preparing floral arrangements. “I got Hank Williams’ daddy out here with me, and he wants y’all to make him a bouquet of flowers for his son,” said Braxton. “They let us in. The old man said, ‘I’m a poor man. I just want a five-dollar bouquet of flowers for my son.’ They made him a big bouquet. His voice right then was just like Hank’s.”
By this point it was clear that Hank hadn’t left a will, so, in the normal course of events, Lon would have been the administrator of his estate. Hank’s lawyer, Robert Stewart, notified him of this and Lon apparently agreed to be the administrator or executor, but Lilly confronted him and told him that she would fight a lawsuit in hell before she would see him have it. He said he’d fought her on earth all these years and when he died he hoped to be rid of her, and she could take it. He hired a lawyer but eventually relinquished all claims. There are many crowd photos from the funeral, but Lon is not among the official mourners.
On Sunday morning, lines formed once more outside the boarding-house to view the body. “In comes a couple of Hank’s friends bringing Myrna Fay [Myrna Faye Kelley], the Indian girl that fainted at the funeral,” wrote Irene to attorney Robert Stewart in 1972:
She goes over to the coffin and starts screaming. Billie comes up and says “Francis.” She thinks she is Francis Williams from WSM [Irene means Frances Williams Preston, later president of BMI]. Billie says, “Thank you for forwarding our mail to us in Shreveport.” Turns one upshook Indian. “I am not Francis. I’m not anybody you ever heard of, I am just a person that loved Hank with all my heart, not a tramp like you that married him for his money.” By this time I have come out of shock and I am breaking up a fistfight between the two of them over Hank’s coffin. By some miracle I was able to get Myrna Fay out the front door, Billie calmed down, and return to my mother who was trying to keep Audrey [and] Audrey’s family and various other people from hearing what was going on.
In a 1969 letter connected with Billie Jean’s subsequent lawsuit, Robert Stewart also remembered her getting into a fistfight with “some Indian girl” at the casket.
On Sunday afternoon, January 4, 1953, Hank was buried. Crowds estimated at between 15,000 and 20,000 were outside the city auditorium; 2,750 were inside. The balcony was set aside for black mourners, of whom there were around two hundred. The casket was brought in at 1:00 p.m. and opened at 1:15. Hundreds filed past. The Drifting Cowboys, now reunited, stood by in a guard of honor. The casket was framed by two guitar-shaped floral arrangements, one with silver strings. Two purple lamps glowed in the background. A tiny white Bible was placed in Hank’s frozen hand. Backstage, Roy Acuff was attempting to organize the musical program. In addition to the Opry artists, there was a Montgomeryarea black gospel quartet, the Southwind Singers, and a white quartet, the Statesmen, who would later sing at Elvis’ funeral. “Roy Acuff was in charge,” said the Statesmen’s lead tenor, Jake Hess, “and he asked us to sing ‘I Saw the Light.’ That was before gospel singers knew that song, and he was upset when we said no. He cussed us out, but couldn’t do much because Hank’s mother had invited us.”
At 2:30, the doors were closed. “My friends,” said Dr. Lyon, “as we begin this service this afternoon, Ernest Tubb will bring us closer to the Lord as he sings ‘Beyond the Sunset.’” The Southwind Singers (possibly the only black quartet to perform at a prominent white funeral in Alabama prior to the civil rights era) sang “My Record Will Be There” before Dr. Lyon read from the Bible. Lyon had told Bamford that he needed half an hour, but Bamford had told him that he had only ten minutes. Roy Acuff made a confused announcement before leading the singing on “I Saw the Light.” Other Opry performers there that day included Jimmy Dickens, Carl Smith, Lew Childre, Webb Pierce, Bill Monroe, Ray Price, June Carter, and Johnnie and Jack, as well as Eddie Hill from WSM’s on-air staff. Tears were on their faces, but the task was harder yet for Don Helms, who led the Drifting Cowboys. “It was the eeriest thing I ever had to do in my life,” he says. “I had to stand up there and play with Hank’s coffin right below me. I can never explain how I felt playing his songs for somebody else the way I played for him with him laying in his coffin.”
Billie Jean was seated in the front row, uncomfortably close to Audrey, before deciding to move her family one row back. “Everybody ignored me,” she said. “Money begets money. They thought they were gonna have all the money. When Hank was alive it was a different story. None of them crossed him. Ernest Tubb, who was pretty close to Hank when he was alive, wouldn’t speak to me. He looked at me kinda stupid. I stopped to speak to him, and he looked at me like he didn’t even know me.”
After Talmadge Smith led the congregation in prayer, Dr. Lyon introduced Red Foley, who came forward to sing “Peace in the Valley.” Foley said later that Hank had made him promise he would sing it at his funeral should he go first and Red remain. Foley’s normally rich and measured baritone was cracking by the time he finished. Then Lyon gave a final, lengthy eulogy, saying that Hank’s true eulogy was in his music. At Lilly’s request, the Statesmen Quartet sang “Precious Memories” before the final benediction. The cortege then moved slowly toward Oakwood Cemetery.
Horace Logan had flown to Montgomery with Felton Pruett, Hayride guitarist Dobber Johnson, and a few others. “Acuff was talking about ‘Hank’s friends from the Grand Ole Opry…,’” said Logan. “Jim Denny sat in front of me. He turned around and said to me, ‘Logan, if Hank could raise up in his coffin, he’d look up toward the stage and say, “I told you dumb sons of bitches I could draw more dead than you could alive."’
At the grave site, Lyon gave a rosebud to the survivors as they threw handfuls of earth on Hank’s coffin. Fred Rose was one of the honorary pallbearers. Talking to reporters after the funeral, he was refreshingly down to earth. “Whatever people say about Hank, he never hurt anybody but himself,” he said. “He was his own worst enemy…but one thing he had — and all his friends recognized it — was loyalty. I don’t give a hang whether he drank or not, I appreciate the fact he was loyal.…[If someone tried to bribe him away], he’d say, ‘I started with Rose and I’ll stay with Rose.’” Rose also threatened to sue anyone who duplicated recordings of the funeral. With so much litigation to follow, it was altogether fitting that the first threat of legal action was made as the earth was covering the coffin.
Everyone then went their separate ways. Audrey, Randall Hank, and Lycrecia returned to Nashville with A. V. Bamford; Lilly went back to the boardinghouse, and Irene joined her for a few days before returning home. Toby Marshall went back to his “practice” in Oklahoma City. Billie Jean and her family caught the Greyhound back to Shreveport, although attorney Robert Stewart later remembered her coming up to him after the funeral, “telling me that if I didn’t have them seven Cadillacs ready for her to take back to Shreveport, her brothers would personally stomp my God-damn teeth down my throat.” Irene remembered the parting in slightly warmer tones. “Billie and her father came back to the house, said goodbye,” she wrote later. “I promised to send her things on to her the following week. Her father thanked me for being able to keep a fairly cool head. His words were, ‘But for you, child, there would have been a killing here.’”
It typified the ambiguity of Hank’s life that his last journey wasn’t quite his last. On January 17, 1953, his casket was dug up and moved. The Oakwood Annex housed Free French and British airmen who had been killed during training, and their remains were now disinterred and returned to their relatives. It was a gruesome job because they hadn’t been buried in caskets, nor always in one piece. The remains of those who had no relatives were consolidated, leaving a large plot that the cemetery owner, John Hart, sold to Lilly.
On the afternoon of January 16, 1953, Leaborne Eads and a crew dug a new grave for Hank in what would become the family plot, and then, in the middle of the night, they moved Hank to the new site. Some passersby after midnight saw the lamps flickering and the coffin being moved, and the rumor quickly started that Hank had been taken from his casket, his boots stolen, and his body pickled. Eads, though, insists that the casket wasn’t opened.
A monument in Vermont granite now sits atop several tons of poured concrete. Beneath that impregnable tomb lies the ol’ Drifting Cowboy, almost certainly looking, according to Eads, exactly as he did on January 4, 1953, when the lid was closed on him. Perhaps the skin would have pinched a little around his nose, says Eads, adding with the undertaker’s ghoulish detachment that the eyes might have popped open as well. One or both of the black, riveting Indian eyes that burned so intensely for twenty-nine years may now stare lifelessly into eternity. For the reverse of the monument, Audrey wrote a mawkish poem that scans about as well as she sang.
Within a week of Hank’s burial, Audrey began rewriting history. That task, together with her adventures in the music business, would consume the remainder of her days. “I knew he would never hurt me or anyone else,” she said, all evidence, especially her own, to the contrary. “The dream was good, it was true…. The heights of joy could not be told or even imagined of the happiness I [knew] as his wife…. Everything I ever wanted or could desire I found in Hank Williams.” Hank might have wished for those flowers while he was living, but he might have stomped on them too. Audrey was the first of many who found Hank more lovable dead. In a letter to Irene dated February 24, 1953, she sounded a slightly more realistic note. “I believe Hank’s love for me is what destroyed him,” she said, “and there wasn’t too much I could do about it. That’s what makes it so bad. I was helpless. If I was weak like he was, the same thing would happen to me.”
In Nashville, Hank Williams was welcomed back in death to preside beatifically over country music. The Opry was as anxious to reclaim him in death as it had been to cast him out in life, but as Jerry Byrd, who had played steel guitar on “Lovesick Blues,” remembers, his canonization didn’t go unchallenged in private:
There was a bunch of us in the hallway at WSM on January 1. George Morgan, Ken Marvin, Jim Denny, and me. Jim Denny said, “We’ll never see his like again.” I said, “I hope not.” Everybody looked at me like I’d blasphemed, and I said, “You’re trying to put a halo on him that won’t fit.” He had a great chance and he blew it. He did as much to hurt country music as he did to help it — doing shows drunk as hell and insulting the audience. Everyone forgets that. They have short memories.
George Morgan, who had been the butt of some of Hank’s arrogance, broke the awkward silence. “I’m with Byrd,” he said.
Out on Long Island, Frank Walker composed a letter to Hank addressed “c/o Songwriter’s Paradise.” Walker started by saying that he always enjoyed writing to Hank on New Year’s Day, although the only letter anyone ever found was a curt reply to Audrey, who had called inquiring where the year-end royalty statements were. “An hour or so ago,” Walker wrote, “I received a phone call from Nashville. It was a rather sad call too for it told me that you had died early this morning…. I think HE wanted to have you just a bit closer to HIM. Nashville’s pretty far away, so HE just sent word this morning, Hank, that HE wanted you with HIM…. You’ll be writing for the greatest singers too, the Angels, they’re so wonderful — I know they’ll want you to join them.”
Then a voice borne on a sepulchral breeze spoke to Walker: “When the plant reopens tomorrow,” it said, “take records by all other artists off the presses, lay on an extra shift, and press only Hank Williams records; this is the opportunity of your lifetime.” Walker didn’t go to Nashville; instead, he heeded the voice and reaped the rewards. “Honestly,” he’d said in his letter, “I’m not too unhappy for I must rejoice with you at the tremendous opportunity you will have to do good for others.” How true those words would become. Walker’s folly was that to the end of his stewardship at MGM in 1958, he would sign average, occasionally above-average, country singers, believing them to be the next Hank Williams.
Two months after Toby Marshall arrived back in Oklahoma City, he was unmasked. His wife, Fay, died in mysterious circumstances on March 4, 1953, and Hank Williams’ name was found among a list of “patients.” An investigation was launched, and lots of damaging innuendo was heard, but in the end Marshall could be indicted for nothing more serious than parole violation. Before he was arrested, he contacted Billie Jean once again for payment, intimating that he knew things that could prove very valuable to her in the legal battles ahead. Then, while serving out his time, he wrote a 222-page book detailing much that Hank Williams told him during their sessions. Marshall’s manuscript surfaced recently but has never been released. Its thesis is that Hank Williams committed suicide. “It occurs to me,” Marshall said during testimony in March 1953,
that perhaps Hank got to mulling things over in his mind, and having a very persuasive personality he might have just talked the doctor in Knoxville out of enough stuff [barbiturates] to kick himself off…. He had been on a rapid decline. Most of his bookings were of the honky-tonk beer-joint variety which he simply hated. If he came to this conclusion [suicide], he still had enough prestige as a star to make a first-class production out of it. Six months from now, he might have been playing for nickels and dimes on skid row.
Marshall is the only person to have raised the specter of suicide, but his opinion cannot be discounted because he was as close to Hank as anyone during those last weeks, perhaps even closer than Billie Jean. Many around Hank would have ruled out the notion of suicide, insisting that he had everything to live for — which, in a sense, he did. Even so, the world must have looked very different to Hank Williams when he was coming off a drunk, reeling from ceaseless back pain, soaked in his own urine, the taste of vomit still in his mouth, facing the prospect of a three-hundred-mile haul to the next beer joint, always knowing that midnight was approaching.
“He wanted to destroy the Hank Williams that was making the money that fair-weather friends and relatives were getting,” said Marshall. “Although he had a multiplicity of personal problems, basically he was a very lonely person, and couldn’t stand being alone…. He had a host of fair-weather friends, most of whom were parasites, who fawned on him, played up to him, and kept him supplied with liquor.” Several of those who worked with Hank during his last year lend credence to Marshall’s theory. Don Helms says that he sometimes dreaded coming into Hank’s hotel room for fear that the window would be open and Hank would be gone. Whether he jumped on that final trip will forever be conjecture, though. Setting out, he seemed determined to show his Nashville costars that he could arrive on time and put on a hell of a show, but we’ll never know the thoughts that beset him on that long, final ride.
Hank had lost the focus that had driven him in 1949. One moment he felt suicidal; the next he wanted to reclaim his position at the top in Nashville. One moment he wanted to jettison Billie Jean and return to Audrey; the next he wanted to stay with Billie. He left so many contradictory messages behind him. He had lost the centeredness that had helped him achieve his success, and this too is hard to believe, because so few years separated the intently focused Hank Williams of late 1949 from the bruised, buffeted, and directionless Hank Williams of late 1952. There are enough questions around that last journey and the events that followed to suggest that a secret was buried with him, but the problem with conspiracy theories is that Hank Williams would almost certainly have been dead within weeks or months anyway. He was in such poor shape.
Bobbie Jett was a name on nobody’s lips during the lying-in-state, the funeral, or its immediate aftermath. Two days after Hank was buried, she gave birth to a daughter named Antha (Bobbie’s mother’s name) Belle (her grandmother’s name) Jett. A lonely confinement was followed by a lonely delivery. She was the only mother giving birth that day in St. Margaret’s Hospital. Under the influence of painkillers, she began singing Hank’s songs. A week or so later, she checked herself out, picked up Jo, and left Antha Belle with Lilly and Marie Glenn.
On January 28, Lilly attended a hearing at the Montgomery County Department of Public Welfare. She stated that the child had been left at her house when she had gone back to Butler County, and she told the public welfare officers that the child was Hank’s and she would be willing to adopt her because “this was what her son would want her to do, and he once commented that he did feel that Miss Jett was not a suitable person to take care of the child.” According to the report, Lilly seemed quite devoted to the baby, and wanted to keep her because she would help her feel closer to Hank. Lilly, though, had been diagnosed with heart disease, and her fitness to adopt was questioned. Meanwhile, Bobbie Jett was back in Nashville, caring for her grandmother, and cooking and cleaning for several other family members. At no time did she consider taking Antha Belle.
Three days later, Irene wrote to Robert Stewart, “Please talk my mother into never bringing Bobbie into this mess no matter what. Yea Gods, if all of the scandall [sic] that could be dug up ever was, I would feel like changing my name.” Robert Stewart was equally opposed to Lilly’s adopting the child. “I am making as few suggestions as possible,” he wrote to Irene on March 16, 1953, “other than to say that I feel it [the child] should be turned over to the Welfare Department or to the Sisters in the event that Bobbie will not take care of it.” Four days later, Irene replied to Stewart, mentioning that she’d had a letter from Bobbie Jett that morning in which Bobbie told her that she was going to Montgomery the following week to sign the papers allowing Lilly to adopt the child.
All the while, Irene was making it clear that she would never assume responsibility for the baby (referred to by both Irene and Robert Stewart as “it"), despite the fact that she’d told social workers that she would. In another letter to Robert Stewart dated April 6, 1953, she made her position clear: “Tee [Irene’s husband, John T. Smith] says that if she [Lilly] adopts it and then can’t take care of it, he is not going to let me take it. Keep this under your hat, mabey [sic] it will never be necessary for me to have the child at all. I feel that the poor child would have a better chance in life if it were adopted by someone that would never know its origin at all.”
Lilly went ahead with the adoption, and the child became Cathy (a name Lilly picked from her favorite book, Wuthering Heights) Yvone (from “Jambalaya") Stone. Lilly was still married to Bill Stone, but would divorce him in April 1954 — one legal action of many that year. Lilly took another lover, named Slim Stern, while Stone moved in with Marie and Butch in the boardinghouse next door.
In the absence of a will, Hank’s estate was the subject of contention. Audrey’s share was clear, but the thought that Billie Jean would share the other half with Hank Jr. prompted Audrey and Lilly to become strange bedfellows. Some might say that they had a case; they had gone up and down with Hank Williams for nine and twenty-nine years, respectively, whereas Billie Jean had been in the picture for only three months. Very quickly, Audrey and Lilly played their trump. Lilly remembered the overheard conversation in which Billie Jean had told Hank that they weren’t legally married (presumably, Audrey forgot that her 1944 marriage to Hank hadn’t been legal either, for exactly the same reason).
“If it was left to Audrey and me, we could work this thing [the estate] out on friendly terms,” said Billie Jean, striking an unusually conciliatory note a week after Hank died. “I don’t want to fight over Hank’s estate. He wouldn’t have wanted it that way.” But big money was at stake, and very soon Hank’s presumed wishes were irrelevant.
Lilly and Audrey developed a plan: first they would prove that Hank and Billie Jean were not legally married, then they’d try to blacken Billie’s reputation. On February 24, Audrey wrote to Irene: “I’m leaving early Thursday morning to check on this Billie.…I may also go to Ft. Jackson, S.C. to check to see Farron [sic] Young.” The following month, Lilly went to Nashville because three of Billie Jean’s former coworkers at the telephone company apparently had information that they wanted to share, but wouldn’t give to Audrey. Meanwhile, Irene, Lilly, and Audrey were still following up leads on Billie’s first husband, Harrison Eshliman. Their anger rose as Faron Young’s “Goin’ Steady” (a song that Hank almost certainly wrote) began climbing the charts. Irene wrote bitterly to Robert Stewart, “This Johnny Horton that [Billie] goes out with will probably be the next one to come out with one of Hank’s songs.” Irene clearly thought that Billie had made off with a stash of songs and was feeding them to her friends.
“I had youth, but no knowledge,” Billie concluded. Two weeks after Hank’s death, Paul Howard had called her. Howard was the bandleader who had arranged Hank and Billie’s first marriage. “He asked me if I could sing, and I said I’d been singing all my life in churches, and at the officers’ club. Paul said, ‘G-o-o-o-d, because I’m fixing to make us a lot of money.’ We rented a costume and took a picture of me with a hat on. We were making two thousand dollars or more a night not counting pictures. We could have sold as many pictures as we had. I was sending money home every day.” At the same time, Audrey put together an all-girl band, the Drifting Cowgirls, and Bamford began booking her out on show dates.
For several months there were two “Mrs. Hank Williams” on the road, invoking Hank’s memory and singing his songs. Sometimes they played at competing parks. “One time up in Missouri,” said Billie Jean, “Audrey was playing thirteen miles down the road. I said over the loudspeaker, ‘If you guys hurry up, you go on down the road you can catch my husband’s ex-wife down there.’ I used to pull crap like that all the time.” It was a situation that couldn’t last.
On August 19, 1953, Billie Jean signed an agreement with Audrey and the estate in which she relinquished all rights to Hank’s estate and to any future income from it, and agreed not to perform as “Mrs. Hank Williams.” She and her attorney had been persuaded that the chance of income beyond 1953 was “slight and speculative,” and that she would be better off taking a one-time settlement instead of fighting a protracted legal battle. The agreement was very specific, right down to requiring Billie Jean to divulge the location of Hank’s Tennessee walking horse, Highlight Merry Boy. She was also required to deliver the saddle along with three pieces of luggage left in Shreveport. In exchange, she received thirty thousand dollars. Her lawyers, she says, took ten thousand, and the remainder barely paid off the debt load of her next husband, Johnny Horton, whom she married one month later, on September 26, 1953. Horton made Hank look like a model of fiscal probity.
Audrey’s divorce settlement had given her half of Hank’s royalty income, leaving him the other half and all performance income. In death, of course, royalties made up almost all of the posthumous income. Half went to Audrey, and with Billie Jean out of the picture, the other half went to the estate, administered by Lilly on behalf of Hank Jr. No one foresaw what would happen to the value of Hank’s estate. Billie Jean didn’t foresee it when she signed the agreement, but neither did those who would profit from it.
“Kaw-Liga” became the best-selling country record of 1953, and the flip side, “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” also became a top-seller. Joni James’ cover version of “Your Cheatin’ Heart” reached number two on the pop charts, and Frankie Laine’s version wasn’t far behind it. The next single, “Take These Chains from My Heart,” also reached number one. Hank’s entire catalog began moving in unprecedented quantities. Two albums were on the shelves by March, Memorial Album and Hank Williams as Luke the Drifter (the secret not a secret anymore). Within ten weeks of his death, Hank had as many albums on the market as he did all the years he lived; hundreds more would follow. The oil well that Hank Williams became in death was starting to gush. In 1952, his MGM royalties had been $13,869 and his Acuff-Rose royalties had been $55,044; in 1953, they had been $60,636 and $72,762, respectively.
Lilly opened a shrine to Hank in his old bedroom and wrote a booklet, Life Story of Our Hank Williams, that she sold over the radio. She attended events in honor of her son and corresponded ceaselessly with her lawyer, Robert Stewart. Marie Glenn took on the raising of Cathy Yvone, but fell out with Lilly in 1954. For most of that year, they didn’t talk. The years of ceaseless work eventually took their toll on Lilly, and she died in her sleep on February 26, 1955. Her maid called Marie and told her that she couldn’t get Lilly up. Marie went next door and found Lilly slumped across the bed.
Irene became the executor of the estate and thus the Alabama guardian of Hank Jr., but wouldn’t adopt Cathy, who was put up for readoption later in 1955. Marie made one last-ditch attempt to save Cathy from adoption. She tracked down Bobbie Jett, then living in California, and told her that Cathy would be put up for adoption if Bobbie didn’t reclaim her. Bobbie told Marie that she’d remarried and that her new husband didn’t know about Cathy, and she could therefore do nothing. Bobbie had married a man named John Tippins, and had six more children with him. Apparently, Pappy Neal McCormick visited Marie and offered to adopt the child, but Marie told him that they didn’t want anyone to have the child who “knowed anything about Hank.”
In a meeting with the Department of Public Welfare, Robert Stewart gave an indication of Irene’s thinking on the matter. Irene would be in Montgomery for Hank Williams Day parades and the like, said Stewart, and “she could just hear the tongues wagging now when Cathy would ride down the street.” Lilly had divorced Bill Stone in April 1954, but he was still the adoptive father and was called upon to sign the papers necessary to put Cathy up for readoption. Social services reported that he cried that day. He was still living at Marie’s boardinghouse, as was Cathy, so if they cared for Cathy as much as they said, it seems strange that they apparently made no effort to prevent her being put up for adoption.
In March 1955, Cathy went to Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Cook in Pine Level, Alabama, and then, in February 1956, to a middle-aged couple, Wayne and Mary Louise Deupree in Mobile. She became Cathy Louise Deupree. Irene wrote to Robert Stewart in January 1956 from her new home in Dallas and asked, “Has the baby been adopted?” The following month, a payment of $2,281.14 was made to a lawyer from Lilly’s estate with the instruction that it be paid to Cathy Stone / Deupree when she reached the age of twenty-one.
After the boardinghouses had been sold and all of Lilly’s debts paid, just $6,504.38 remained in her estate. It wasn’t much to show for a terribly hard life. Lilly left nothing to Marie Glenn, but Irene gave her sufficient furnishings to start her own boardinghouse on North Decatur Street. Several more moves followed. In 1958, Marie married Ed Harvell, who had lived for years in Lilly’s boardinghouse, sharing the room next to Hank’s on the ground floor (Marie’s son, Butch, says that Marie and Ed were never married, although Marie took his name, and was buried as Marie Harvell).
Immediately upon Lilly’s death, Audrey sought to have Irene removed as administrator of the estate. Irene not only refused to give up the job, for which she received 2.5 percent of Hank’s income, but also hung on to a large number of his artifacts. She justified her actions by saying that Audrey had squandered her half of Hank’s income, and would squander the other half if she were administering it. The Alabama estate had borne the total cost of all the judgments against Hank as well as the total cost of the settlement with Billie Jean. Audrey doggedly refused to share anything but the income.
Fred Rose died three months before Lilly, on December 1, 1954. He had been much more than Hank’s music publisher and record producer; he had been his mentor and his quality-control department. In the last photos of him, some of them taken with Lilly and Audrey, he looked gaunt and sick, but still fearsomely intense. He’d developed heart disease, and had once suffered a heart attack in the recording studio, but his Christian Science beliefs prevented him from seeing a doctor. After his death, Wesley Rose assumed control. The accountant began to fancy himself a music man, but he could never have sat with Hank, as his father had done, helping him polish those diamonds in the rough. Even less could Wesley have helped Hank weather the upset triggered by rock ’n’ roll. Seven months after Fred Rose died, an Elvis Presley record nudged its way onto the country charts, heralding the revolution. The hard and fast borders between pop, country, and R&B began to dissolve, and rock ’n’ roll emerged. In perhaps the most ludicrous statement he ever made, Wesley Rose said that if Hank had lived “I don’t think we would have had a rock era.” His contention was that rock ’n’ roll filled the void left by Hank’s death.
Every one of Hank’s contemporaries had to come to terms with rock ’n’ roll. Webb Pierce, Hank Snow, Carl Smith, Faron Young, Red Foley, and Eddy Arnold saw their careers take a precipitous nosedive in the mid- to late 1950s. Only Ray Price went from strength to strength as he finally escaped Hank’s long shadow to forge his own style. As rock ’n’ roll erupted and everyone was wondering what would happen next, Price took country music back to the barrooms, cutting classic beer hall shuffles, like “Crazy Arms” and “My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You.” Price was the only one from that generation to see his career surge during the birth of rock ’n’ roll by making music true to country music’s roots.
Hank Williams was elected to the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, but scarcely belonged there. His music was for adults, whereas rock ’n’ roll was for, by, and about teenagers. The exaggeration and overstatement of rock ’n’ roll had no place in his music, and its sledgehammer beat was the opposite of the Drifting Cowboys’ sweet, mellow swing. Had he lived, there would have been no place for Hank Williams in rock ’n’ roll or in Nashville. His thinning hair, his incorrigibly rural ways, and his “Pitchers from Life’s Other Side” were the antithesis of nearly everything recorded in Nashville from 1955 onward.
With the exception of Ray Price, the new era’s most successful artists, like Jim Reeves, Johnny Cash, and Marty Robbins, blurred the line between pop and country, whereas Hank’s music always needed to be reinterpreted for the mass audience. Some of his records, like “Hey, Good Lookin’” or “Settin’ the Woods on Fire,” almost prefigured rock ’n’ roll’s giddiness, but Hank himself was inalienably country.
Rhythm ’n’ blues singer Wynonie Harris had much of what became rock ’n’ roll swagger on his late 1940s and early ‘50s hits like “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” but that didn’t help him score one hit after rock ’n’ roll erupted. He was too old and too black. Hank was probably too old and too hillbilly, but by dying prematurely, he avoided the indignity of having to answer the question of what he would have done. For its part, MGM tried to imagine the sound by grafting drums, electric guitar, and piano solos onto his records and bathing the results in echo, beginning a long, sorry history of reinventing Hank’s music according to the season.
As early as 1955, the ongoing success of Hank’s catalog was surprising everyone. The emerging LP market was a godsend. MGM could endlessly repackage Hank’s recordings, and Acuff-Rose could pitch his songs to other artists as LP filler. When Hank had signed his contract renewal with MGM in 1951, the LP royalty rate was artificially low, and the estate renegotiated the rate to the standard 5 percent, but not without squawking from Frank Walker. On October 20, 1955, Walker wrote to the estate: “We in the record business know that interest pretty much ceases in a record artist the day after his funeral,” he said. “The flowers dry very quickly, so do eyes, and so do royalties.” Walker reminded the estate that, in his view, the ongoing success was because of his ceaseless work. With Acuff-Rose’s assistance, he had at least overcome the problem that Hank left so few recordings. Aside from “Kaw-Liga” / “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” just five studio recordings remained unissued, and two of those were hymns that Audrey rendered unlistenable. Acuff-Rose retrieved vocal-guitar demos for overdub. The Drifting Cowboys were still around Nashville, most of them working with Ray Price, and the results of their overdub sessions were surprisingly convincing. A few of the overdubs, notably “Weary Blues from Waitin’,” became hits.
Then, in 1955, MGM acquired the Johnnie Fair Syrup shows. Between January and May 1949, Hank had prerecorded early morning radio shows for Johnnie Fair, and many of the shows survived on acetate. An engineer at KWKH reportedly found them and sold them to Leonard Chess, boss of Chess Records. Chess realized that he couldn’t issue them and sold them on to MGM. With few hits of his own at the time, Hank had generally performed other artists’ songs, and did so without a band. The results were artlessly affecting. At the dawn of the rock ’n’ roll era, MGM began issuing these very spare vocal-guitar recordings as singles, and they sold respectably well. The faux folk ballad “At the First Fall of Snow” was released in September 1955 and had sold thirty thousand copies by the end of February 1956.
Hank’s royalty income, which had peaked in 1953 at $132,000, was still at a very healthy $74,000 in 1958, despite the fact that his singles were no longer hitting the charts. In 1959 and 1960, MGM overdubbed the Johnnie Fair shows for LP release, and by 1960 the royalties once again topped $130,000. In 1961, the Health and Happiness shows were acquired, providing the basis for a couple of spurious live albums. Then, in 1962, Ray Charles included two of Hank’s songs on his chart-topping Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, and Hank’s Acuff-Rose royalties jumped from $45,626 in 1961 to $71,049 the following year.
Acuff-Rose had become hugely successful by 1960, managing and publishing the Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison, but Hank Williams was still the jewel of the catalog, and Wesley Rose wanted to preserve it at all costs. As early as 1960, Rose began to talk to the Alabama estate about copyright renewal. Copyright law back then stated that copyrights must be renewed every twenty-eight years. At the time of renewal, the copyright can be reassigned to another music publisher, and that prospect had Wesley Rose running scared. Hank Jr. would reach the age of majority in 1970, and might well reassign his father’s copyrights when they began coming up for renewal in 1974.
With that in mind, Wesley Rose offered a deal to Irene, who was still Hank Jr.’s guardian in Alabama and executor of the estate. The estate would receive a one-time, nonrecoupable payment of twenty-five thousand dollars and Irene would receive a one-time, nonrecoupable payment of five thousand dollars. In return, the estate preagreed to renew the copyrights with Acuff-Rose. The ostensible reason for this was that the long-debated movie was on the point of being made, and Acuff-Rose needed to know that they had the copyrights for another term in order to offer synchronization rights.
The estate had a reason for wanting to get the matter resolved, too. In a handwritten memo to himself, Irene’s attorney, Robert Stewart, said, “Renewal rights vest in the twenty-eighth year in both legitimate and illegitimate children.” In other words, the problem of Cathy that they thought they’d solved in 1956 might come back to haunt them. In fact, Acuff-Rose almost ensured that it would. Acuff-Rose’s attorney, Maury Smith, didn’t have an especially good case when Audrey sued to gain control of the entire estate and have the renewal deal reversed. Trying to explain why Acuff-Rose had paid so little for the renewal rights, Smith mentioned Hank’s October 1952 contract with Bobbie Jett and stated that the child covered by that agreement might come forth with a claim that would diminish the value of the rights under discussion. In a December 1966 decision, an Alabama judge left the administration of the estate with Irene, and refused permission for the renewal deal to be undone. At some point, an attorney contacted Cathy’s adoptive parents, probably asking if they wanted to pursue a claim on her behalf. They said that they didn’t, not realizing the amount of money at stake.
The lawsuit proved that Audrey had spent everything that she’d taken in from Hank’s estate, and that there was nothing left for Hank Jr. There wasn’t much more left in Alabama. In 1968, Irene settled sixty thousand dollars in bills that Junior and Audrey had run up. By then, the estate’s total earnings since Hank’s death were in excess of $1.6 million. Half of that amount had gone to Audrey, and she had spent it all, and of the remaining $830,000, just $203,592 was left. Irene, meanwhile, was turning to other sources of income, and in July 1969 was arrested at the U.S.-Mexican border with seven million dollars’ worth of cocaine concealed under the rear seat of her Cadillac. Her next few years were spent in a federal penitentiary in West Virginia, quite close to where Hank was pronounced dead. After her incarceration, the Alabama guardianship was taken over by Robert Stewart. In 1979, Irene wrote one of the last of many letters to Stewart on the occasion of Jay Caress’ biography of Hank Williams. Stewart replied, “When it comes to airing the real facts about the Williams family, just think what you and I together could tell.” Neither, though, ever told. Stewart died in January 1985, and Irene died impoverished and alone in Dallas on March 24, 1995. In an act of great magnanimity, Hank Jr. sang “I Saw the Light” at her funeral. Shortly before she died, she sold a storage locker full of Hank’s stage outfits, photos, contracts, and ephemera to country star Marty Stuart for thirty thousand dollars.
While Irene was in jail, her father, Lon, died. The only person to remain above the squabbles with a modicum of dignity, he had continued to live in McWilliams, Alabama. He ran a store for a while, fixed fences and spliced cable, and told stories that sometimes stretched credibility. He died at age seventy-eight, on October 22, 1970, and wasn’t buried in the same Williams family plot as Hank and Lilly, but in another family plot that bore his name.
In 1974, Hank Williams’ copyrights, which no one thought would be worth anything past the end of 1954, started coming up for renewal. By then Billie Jean was a widow once more. Johnny Horton had died in a car wreck on November 5, 1960. His last paying gig had been at the Skyline Club in Austin, the site of Hank’s last paying gig.
By the early 1960s, Billie Jean realized the enormity of the mistake she’d made in settling for thirty thousand dollars. She sued first over the manner of her portrayal in MGM’s biopic, Your Cheatin’ Heart, but a United States district court in Atlanta determined that although she and Hank hadbeen legally married, the movie hadn’t maliciously defamed her, and so damages were not payable. Billie Jean then took the decision that she and Hank had been legally married and sued for half of the copyright renewals. Someone, quite possibly a music business entrepreneur named Ernest D. Brookings, put the word in her ear that she hadn’t signed away the renewals because she couldn’t have signed away what she didn’t have. On October 9, 1968, she gave Brookings permission to shop her as-yet-unproven claim on the renewals. On May 28, 1969, Brookings assigned them to Acuff-Rose’s archrival, Hill & Range, which in turn funded her lawsuit on the understanding that they would handle her share of the music publishing should she win. The case came to trial in March 1975, and judgment in Billie Jean’s favor was rendered on October 22 of that year.
On November 4, 1975, Audrey died, ostensibly of heart failure. She had lived her last years in a pharmaceutical and alcoholic daze as if in fulfillment of the prophecy Hank had made: “You’ll walk the floor the way I do.…” A year before her death, she’d held a garage sale. Local news media reported it as if she were selling off Hank’s possessions, but in fact she was selling off the detritus of her own life at hugely inflated prices, charging two dollars admission. She sat out front, a sadly diminished figure, looking much older than her fifty-one years. Seated in front of a huge cardboard cutout of Hank, she hid behind oversized dark glasses, and had extreme difficulty getting up.
On January 6, 1974, Cathy Yvone Stone turned twenty-one. The twenty-two hundred dollars left to her in the settlement of Lilly’s estate hadn’t been placed in an interest-bearing account, but the return on it would be greater than anyone could have imagined. Days before she turned twenty-one, Cathy’s adoptive mother told her about a Dickensian inheritance awaiting her, and hinted that her birth father might have been none other than Hank Williams, but Cathy’s visit to the Montgomery County Courthouse to pick up the check yielded no further clues. Three months later, on April 17, 1974, Bobbie Jett died in California, leaving only the vaguest intimations that she had once been involved with Hank Williams.
Just two days before Bobbie’s death, attorney Richard Frank had written to fellow attorney Robert Stewart in connection with Billie Jean’s lawsuit. “I am much afraid,” Frank wrote, “that if Baby Jett has personally come up with a lawyer to get the money from Mrs. Stone, her ancestry may well be reasonably obvious to her, and further trouble may ensue.”
Further trouble did ensue. Until 1980, Cathy made only desultory efforts to uncover the truth about her parentage. She found Marie Glenn (by then Marie Harvell), who was overjoyed to see her again but remained guarded on several big issues, and she found Bobbie’s surviving children in California. Then, in September 1984, Cathy went to see an investigative attorney, Keith Adkinson, who was sufficiently intrigued by her case to take it on. Adkinson discovered the October 1952 agreement between Hank and Bobbie, and, in July 1985, Cathy went public with her allegation that fraud had been committed. Over Hank Jr.’s strenuous objections, the Alabama Supreme Court eventually recognized her claim, reopened Hank’s estate, and awarded her a proportionate share together with some of his effects. By then, she’d married Keith Adkinson and become Jett Williams.
Marie’s son, Butch, saw all that his former playmate went through in order to establish her share of the estate, and wondered if it was a price he was willing to pay. Marie died on January 17, 1991, without ever quite telling him who his father was, but there had been enough gossip for him to see a lawyer. Depositions were taken, although Butch is guarded about the advice he was given as a result. At some point, though, he decided that he would take it no further. His wide, thin-lipped mouth is much as Hank’s was, and he has the same dark, deep-set Indian eyes. He also began losing hair in his twenties, just as Hank had. He lives in a poor area of Montgomery, and his protestations that he needs no more than he has do not ring entirely true, but he understands the financial and emotional cost of challenging for a share of the estate. “I don’t see the sense of fighting a battle, to lose it all even if I was to win,” he says.
Hank Williams Jr., meanwhile, became a star in his own right. For all the hits, now numbering around one hundred, perhaps his greatest achievement is that he at least partly escaped his father’s long shadow. While the offspring of other country stars such as Marty Robbins, Conway Twitty, and Buck Owens were unable to sustain music careers, “Junior” went from strength to strength.
Audrey planned Junior’s career as a tribute to his father, thereby stoking the legend upon which her livelihood depended. Signed to his father’s record label, MGM, in December 1963, Junior’s first public appearance as a recording artist was, as noted, in Canton. Before he was out of his teens, Junior was touring with his father’s band members, singing his father’s songs for his father’s label, adding music to some of the lyrics Bamford and Lilly had grabbed from Hank’s bedroom, and recording some faked-up father-son duets. He even recorded narrations as Luke the Drifter Jr. As an act of fealty, it worked, but as music for the late ’60s, it did not. Turnout at the shows was good; record sales were generally poor. There were just two top five country hits during Junior’s first four years as a recording artist; the first was his father’s “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” and the other was a self-deprecatory tribute, “Standing in the Shadows” ("I know that I’m not great / Some folks say I imitate").
“At first,” Junior told interviewer John Eskow, “I thought it was the greatest thing in the world — a ghost of this man that everyone loved. They think I’m daddy. Mother’s smilin’, money’s rolling in, seemed ideal.” By 1970, it seemed less so, and Junior’s distress only mounted as MGM edged him away from the tribute act toward country-pop. His first number one hit, “All for the Love of Sunshine,” was every bit as vacuous as its title. “Pain,” wrote Junior in his autobiography, Living Proof, “is walking out on stage two nights out of three, with your insides knotted all into a ball, and singing songs to a crowd who didn’t appreciate if you lived or died.”
As the outlaw movement coalesced around Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, Junior bought into its anti-Nashville stance and rock ’n’ roll attitude. He became the outlaw with the private income. Although bracketed with Waylon ’n’ Willie, he felt a closer spiritual kinship with southern rock bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Marshall Tucker Band, and, in a series of albums culminating with Hank Williams, Jr. & Friends, declared his independence. He wrested himself free of his mother, free of Nashville, and free of MGM and all that it entailed.
But then, on August 8, 1975, just as…and Friends was being readied for release, Junior fell down a mountainside in Montana while on a hunting trip. The injuries were horrific; parts of his face were literally scraped away. There was a long layoff and his appearance was forever transformed. When he reemerged, it was on Warner Bros., then Elektra Records, but by this point he was confident in his new direction. Ironically, though, his first major hit in more than five years came with yet another examination of his legacy, “Family Tradition.” The follow-up, “Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound,” began to establish the Hank Williams Jr. persona. He’d stared down death on the mountainside, and now he was going to live each day as if it were his last. His music was swaggering, unapologetically sexist, hugely self-referential — and very successful. Of his thirty hits during the ’80s, seven of them peaked at number one. “All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight” was adopted as the theme of ABC-TV’s Monday Night Football.
Junior’s musicality came to the fore on a chart-topping revival of Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and on occasional album cuts, but it was the defiant bubba-ness of songs like “Good Friends, Good Whiskey, Good Lovin’” (his last top ten country hit to date) or “Naked Women and Beer” (his duet with rap rocker Kid Rock) that his audience wanted.
“Hey,” he said, “we don’t all live in New York or Los Angeles.”
The copyrights on Hank’s songs, which had come up for their first twenty-eight-year renewal starting in 1974, came up again beginning in 2002. By this point, the business interests representing Hank’s legacy had undergone some changes. Wesley Rose began suffering the onset of Alzheimer’s disease in the early 1980s, and sold Acuff-Rose to Gaylord Broadcasting in 1985. Two years earlier, Gaylord had bought the Grand Ole Opry and WSM, but by August 2002 Gaylord was hemorrhaging money, and it offloaded Acuff-Rose, by then one of the few profitable parts of its business, to the Sony corporation for $157 million. Hank Jr. reclaimed his share of the publishing from Sony/Acuff-Rose, but left the administration of songs with them. Shortly before the sale to Sony, Acuff-Rose also made a deal with Billie Jean to purchase her share outright for an undisclosed amount.
Hank’s records no longer appeared on MGM because MGM Records no longer existed. In April 1972, the German record company Polydor had bought the MGM record catalog without rights to the logo, so Hank’s records began appearing first on Polydor, then on Mercury. In May 1998, Polydor was gobbled up by the Universal Music Group. Universal was the descendant of Decca Records, the label that had tried and failed to acquire Hank in 1947.
Even Hank’s old house has gone. In 1984, part of it was moved to Music Row, although there were rumors to the effect that very little of it was actually moved. In May the following year, the house or a replica of it became a poorly stocked museum hosted by Audrey’s daughter, Lycrecia. The museum closed in 1988, and the house changed hands several times before Reba McEntire’s company, Starstruck Entertainment, bought the property in May 1998 and brought in a backhoe. Hank’s old farm in Williamson County was eventually acquired by Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, who applied to have the antebellum farmhouse torn down.
Hank Williams’ story deserved to end with a ringing, plangent E chord, and perhaps a flash of lonesome blue falsetto, but instead it continues to the drone of lawyers fighting their little fights. The lawsuits will continue as long as Hank’s posthumous income makes it worthwhile for anyone to pay two hundred dollars or more an hour — in other words, into the foreseeable future. His songs now accompany television commercials and have been reinterpreted across the musical spectrum, from the British punk acts to jazz divas like Cassandra Wilson and Norah Jones. Hank’s songs, in fact, are almost everywhere. As the records grow smaller, Hank Williams grows bigger.
Anyone who dies as young as Hank invites endless “what if” speculation. It has been an item of faith in country music circles that Hank would have had a rosy future if only he had lived. The reality might have been a little different. It’s doubtful that he could have saved himself even if he had rested up in Shreveport or Montgomery, concentrated on songwriting, and just made the short tours that he once intended. Too many of his self-destructive behaviors were hardwired. The spinal pain was irremediable, and the physical damage already done to his heart and perhaps his liver and other organs was irreversible. “He didn’t have a chance,” concluded Oscar Davis, who had seen the contrast between the Hank Williams of early 1949 and the Hank Williams of late 1952. “[but] I think he died happy [because] he proved to the world he was somebody.” It is far from certain whether that was as much a consolation to Hank at the last as Davis thought.
The circumstances that combined to make Hank the most powerfully iconic figure in country music will never come again. No one will cut three or four classics in an afternoon session again; no one will redefine the vocabulary of the music in the way that he did. No one will be allowed to mess up in the way that he did, either. The stakes are too high, and professional help would have been foisted upon him. The specialness in Hank Williams would then have ebbed away because the compelling nature of his records stemmed in great measure from the fact that he held too much inside. Just how much was bottled up in Hank Williams is made clear by the vocal-guitar demos, most of which were probably recorded on home disc cutters or primitive tape decks. Hank probably thought that no more than two or three people would ever hear them, yet he sang as if his entire life and career hung upon his performance.
If Hank had started his career a few years earlier, he would have lived and died in almost total obscurity because the social and market conditions that brought about the wider acceptance of hillbilly music weren’t in place, and the country was mired deep in the Depression. If he had lived a few years longer, he would have become an embarassment to the changing face of country music — too hillbilly by half. But, in arriving when he did and dying when and how he did, he became a prophet with honor.
The final paradox is that Hank Williams left no journals, almost no letters, and no extended interviews, and the people who knew him best have to admit that on some level they didn’t know him at all. Yet, for all the ambiguity and unknowableness, Hank Williams appears almost desperately real to us through his music. He escaped the shame of seeing his drunks and dalliances splashed over the tabloids, but left a life diarized in verses sung with such riveting conviction that we feel as though we know him well. At his best, he froze a moment or a feeling in terms simple enough to register instantly yet meaningful enough to listen to forever. No one in any field of popular music can hope to do more.
It’s impossible not to feel that Hank Williams’ “heart” songs, with their sense of unshakable solitariness, define his music and, in all likelihood, the man himself. He had his triumphs — many, many of them. He could grin his shiteating grin, slap the table, shout “Hot damn!” when someone who once hadn’t given him the time of day, or had once called him a damn drunk to his face, was almost coerced into recording one of his songs or booking him, but the moment of victory inevitably passed and he was left with Hiram Williams. Sometimes Hiram was good company, but too often he was not. There’s a romantic notion that the writer or poet calms his troubled soul by reducing it to rhyme, but as Hank Williams pulled off his boots and eased himself gingerly onto his bed, the little verses he had scratched out in his untutored spidery handwriting almost certainly offered him no relief at all.