Chapter 2
“A Hill-Billie is a free and untrammeled white citizen of Alabama who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him.”
New York Journal, April 23, 1900
LILLY, whose recollections after Hank died were often purposely vague, stated with uncommon authority that she, Hank, Irene, Bernice McNeil, and Marie McNeil arrived in Montgomery on July 10, 1937. Walter McNeil, who had settled in Montgomery a year earlier, moved Lilly and her extended family up from Greenville on a logging truck. He laid planks across the joists, and loaded her stove and all the family possessions onto the makeshift trailer. Lilly was trying to better her lot and that of her children. The rooming house business looked more promising in Montgomery; the schools were better, and there were talent shows, more populous street corners, and a radio station for little Harm.
Montgomery was uptown as far as you could get in Alabama. It was the state capital and had been the first capital of the Confederacy until the heat, humidity, and mosquitoes had driven the secessionists to Virginia. In 1937, some seventy-two thousand people lived there. Lilly moved into 114 South Perry Street, which she converted into a rooming house. Hank, then thirteen, was sent out to shine shoes and sell peanuts on the street; Irene sold packed lunches at the fire hall, the police station, and the Montgomery Curb Market. From 1937 until 1939, Lilly had Hank working weekends as a painter for the Heath Decorating Company. In September 1937, she enrolled him at the Abraham Baldwin Junior High School, although he arrived with the attitude that learning interfered with the important things in life, chief among them music. He took eighth and ninth grade at Baldwin, and then transferred to Sidney Lanier High School in 1938, quitting in October 1939, shortly after his sixteenth birthday.
The situation on South Perry Street was complicated when Lon arrived home in August 1938. Lon later told his second family that when he returned to Georgiana and McWilliams, he found people staring at him as if he were a ghost. He would imitate a black man he’d known, who had backed away from him: “Oh, Mistuh Lon, I never done anything to you while you was alive. Why are you comin’ back to haunt me?” Lilly had, said Lon, told everyone that he was dead. Clearly feeling unwelcome and perhaps ill at ease after being so long out of circulation, he returned to the V.A. hospital that October. He said that he spent Christmas with Lilly and the kids, although he might not have had his boots off very long. By his own account, he returned once more to the V.A. hospital, finally leaving in April 1939. He went back to his old hometown, McWilliams, and when he filled out his application for Social Security on October 16, 1941, he described himself as “separated.” One of the apocryphal stories surrounding his return home is that he arrived to find Lilly in bed with another man, but even if that tale is untrue, Lon would have discovered that Lilly had not been missing him. Although she was acid tongued and built like a logger, she seemed to have no trouble attracting men. “She could be charming when she wanted,” said Walter McNeil Jr., and that seems to be the best explanation anyone can offer. She also had a rotating cast of predominantly male boarders at the rooming house.
The female boarders have been the subject of some dispute through the years. Some say that Lilly was running a call-girl business, and toward the end of his life, Hank told a fellow performer that he had started entertaining as a shill for Lilly’s racket. Others, though, say they saw no evidence that Lilly was running a bordello, and several of the musicians who lodged at the boarding house insist that they would have been regular customers if Lilly had indeed been running a brothel. The only person to state authoritatively that the boarding house doubled as a bawdy house was Marie McNeil’s son, Butch, who said later that Lilly had a sideline running girls.
Immediately after arriving in Montgomery, Hank set about getting noticed, although many of the specifics have been lost to time. In 1946, WSFA program director Caldwell Stewart wrote an introduction to one of Hank’s songbooks in which he stated that Hank had been on the station since 1936 ” the year before Lilly said she moved to Montgomery. When Hank came back to Montgomery for his Homecoming in 1951 he said he had been on WSFA “eleven years, nine days, and six months,” which, if we take him at his word, would place his radio debut in the late months of 1936, six months or more before Lilly says she moved to Montgomery. An article in the Greenville Advocate written to coincide with Hank’s Montgomery Homecoming also seemed to imply that Hank was on the radio in Montgomery while the family was still living in Greenville. Confusing the issue still further, some around Montgomery swear that Hank was on a rival station, WCOV, before he was on WSFA, but WCOV wasn’t launched until 1939.
WSFA was the only game in town when Hank moved to Montgomery. The partnership of two local businessmen, Gordon Persons (later the governor of Alabama) and Howard Pill, the station went on the air in March 1930 and broadcast with one thousand watts from studios in the Jefferson Davis Hotel, within easy walking distance of 114 South Perry Street. In addition to its own programming, the station picked up feeds from NBC and small southern networks. Several former employees of WSFA take credit for bringing Hank to the station, but E. Caldwell Stewart had a better claim than most. Stewart had been hired by WSFA as its staff pianist in 1931 and became the music director several years later. His widow insists that Stewart discovered Hank singing on the street and selling peanuts, and put him on the air. Leaborne Eads, later a performer on WSFA, says that Stewart always told him that he found Hank outside WSFA and ran a remote down so that Hank could broadcast live from his patch on the sidewalk.
Hank certainly knew what he was doing when he set up shop outside the radio station. Bill Hunt, then the advertising manager at WSFA, remembered that Hank used to bug anyone he thought might work at the station. He would sing a song, then hawk the peanuts that Lilly had bagged. “Peanuts, Mister, only five cents, and believe me, Mister, I need the dough. One bag? Two bags?” Hunt said that he put Hank on the air in a sustaining (that is, noncommercial) slot, adding that Lilly would arrange for people to phone the station demanding more of “The Singing Kid.”
Chronicling Hank’s career on WSFA is made no easier by the fact that he was continually on and off the station, and the program sched- ules published in the local papers were often sketchy on local programming. Hank might have appeared on other people’s shows, but he wasn’t listed as the star of his own sponsored show until 1941. When he spoke of his eleven years on the station, he seemed to be implying that they were eleven blissfully uninterrupted years, but he was rarely on the air for more than three or four months at a stretch until 1947, his last full year in Montgomery. Between 1937 and 1941 he was off the air more often than he was on.
If Hank’s early career is hazy, his life outside music as he desultorily attended school is even harder to piece together. Two sisters who lived near him remember that he would be out on the streets playing cowboys and Indians, but when the time came for the other children to go in, Hank would stay outside by himself. Later, he would call the early evening the lonesomest time of the day, perhaps echoing back to those years when Lilly was serving and clearing up supper in the boarding-house and no one had time for little Harm.
Lilly’s ambitions for Hank were fairly clear. Christmas 1937 brought a new guitar, a Gibson with a sunburst finish. This was a major investment, quite probably the most expensive item in the Williams household. Lilly bought it from Art Freehling’s Music Store around the time of Hank’s first major public appearance at the Empire Theater’s Friday night talent show. She always spoke of Hank’s appearance at the Empire as if it was just one show, but others remember him appearing and winning so regularly that the management requested that he not appear any more. Talent shows were the entry level of the entertainment business then, and Hank seems to have gone for them all. Members of Lon’s family remember him entering talent shows at the Wilby Theater in Selma, fifty miles away.
At one or more of the Empire shows Hank sang a self-composed song, “WPA Blues.” Other than the ditty he’d sung in school, it is generally reckoned to be Hank’s first song. As Lilly remembered it, one verse went as follows:
I got a home in Montgomery,
A place I like to stay,
But I have to work for the WPA
And I’m dissatisfied ” I’m dissatisfied.
There were a couple of tunes kicking around called “WPA Blues,” one of them by Casey Bill Weldon, who later wrote Louis Jordan’s hit “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town,” but if the words Hank sang were as Lilly remembered them, they had, for the greater part, been cloned from a record called “Dissatisfied” by string band veteran Riley Puckett. The one part of Lilly’s account that is almost certainly true is that Hank partied away the first fifteen-dollar prize he won at the Empire. “When Hank was in the chips, so were his friends ” as long as the money held out ” always,” wrote Lilly in a confused thought that barely disguised her lifelong contempt for the way money ran through Hank’s fingers.
Early on in Montgomery, Hank met fiddle player Freddy Beach. Born in Leakesville, Mississippi, in 1916, Beach was the closest to a seasoned musician Hank had met to that point. Beach had toured as a fiddler with Curly Fox and Texas Ruby and had worked as a traveling evangelist. Freddy and another local musician, Dad Crysel, organized a talent show at a hall on Commerce Street. Hank appeared there in 1937 or ‘38, chaperoned by Lilly. He got up and sang a train song, then started appearing every week. When Hank assembled his first band, Beach was the fiddle player.
It was also around this time, 1937 or ‘38, that Hank met Braxton Schuffert, who remains the most voluble source for Hank’s early career. Born near Montgomery in 1916, Braxton had an early morning radio show on WSFA when Hank was living in Greenville. Lilly later told Braxton that she couldn’t get Hank away from the radio when he was on, so Braxton was a bona fide star in Hank’s eyes when they met. Braxton was a delivery man for Hormel Meats, and made a regular delivery to the boardinghouse on South Perry Street. One day, he saw the guitar and played a few songs, then Hank played a few. Hank was fourteen or fifteen, but his voice, Braxton noted, was as strong and clear as a man’s. The following day, Braxton had to make a delivery to the CCC camps in south Alabama, and Hank went along. Hormel didn’t allow riders, but Braxton told his boss that Hank was his little brother. Hank, said Braxton, wouldn’t lift more than approximately ten pounds. “Some way or another,” concluded Braxton, “I took a likin’ to him.”
Braxton worked in tandem with a harmonica player, Smith Adair, who called himself “Hezzy.” There was a cornball group, the Hoosier Hotshots, on the National Barn Dance in Chicago, who’d introduce most songs with “Are you ready, Hezzy?” They were so popular that “Are you ready, Hezzy?” became a national catchphrase, and perhaps that’s how Smith Adair became Hezzy. Originally from Birmingham, he moved to Montgomery from Sylacauga when he was sixteen. Braxton met him one morning when he was coming back from the station. Hezzy was walking down Bell Street playing his harmonica. “I said, ‘Boy, can you play with a guitar?’” remembered Braxton, “and he said, ‘Hell yes, I can play with a guitar,’ so I said he should come up to the house and we’d play some. His mother was dead and his dad was a roving sign painter, rode a bicycle. Smith was on his own. We’d go down and play all the cafés. I’d sing, Smith would play the harp, pass the hat around.” Braxton and Hezzy figured out when the firefighters got paid, then they’d set up and busk outside the fire halls. They played small theaters, restaurants — anywhere they could draw a crowd and pick up a few nickels and dimes.
By the time Hank arrived in Montgomery, he had decided to drop his given name, Hiram, in favor of Hank. He developed a little set piece to explain how this came about. According to one of his first steel guitarists, Boots Harris, he’d say that “there was a fence outside his house and he’d sleep with the window open, and there was an old cat walking up and down that fence yowling ‘H-a-r-r-m-m, h-a-r-r-m-m.’ He said he thought the cat was calling him so he changed his name to Hank.” The truth, of course, was that “Hank” sounded more like the name of a hillbilly and western music star than “Hiram.” That’s why Clarence Eugene Snow became Hank Snow, Hubert Penny became Hank Penny, and Lawrence Locklin became Hank Locklin.
In 1938, when Hank was starting out with Braxton Schuffert, Freddy Beach, and Hezzy Adair, he heard the performer who, more than any other, would shape his music. Roy Acuff was twenty years older than Hank, and outlived him by almost forty years. Born on a tenant farm near Knoxville, Tennessee, Acuff grew up in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. A baseball career seemed likely until he was sidelined by a debilitating bout of sunstroke. During the layoff, he honed his skill on the fiddle and formed a band called the Crazy Tennesseans. Later in life, Acuff tried to gloss over this period, but the Crazy Tennesseans put on a vaudeville show that included several smutty songs. Two of them, “When Lulu’s Gone” (better known as “Bang, Bang Lulu") and “Doin’ It the Old-Fashioned Way,” even got onto disc. Acuff then paid fifty cents to someone he remembered only as “Charlie” for a song called “Great Speckle [sic] Bird.” In the Book of Jeremiah, the speckled bird was a metaphor for the church assailed by evil ("Mine heritage is unto me as a speckled bird, the birds round about are against her"). The song was strange and elliptical, unusually rich in metaphor for a country song, and Acuff performed it on the Grand Ole Opry on February 5, 1938. The overwhelming response led to an invitation to join the cast.
Once on the Opry, Acuff dropped the smutty songs, and the Crazy Tennesseans became the not-so-crazy Smoky Mountain Boys. Acuff sang in a full-throated, emotional style that sounded good crackling through the ether on Saturday night. He hired a Dobro player, and the instrument’s tremulous sound perfectly echoed his style. He appeared in movies, toured the country, and twice ran for governor of Tennessee. During the war years, enlisted men would request more songs by Acuff than by anyone else, even Sinatra, and he reportedly earned an astonishing $200,000 in 1942. In Acuff’s hands, country music was just that: music for the country people of the South and Southeast. He bridged the gulf between ancient string band music and the modern era, and came to epitomize country music’s innate conservatism.
Roy Acuff’s Appalachian music resonated with Hank Williams in a way that no western song or parlor ballad ever did. There were no electrified instruments, and no songs of liquor or sin that didn’t end in death or perdition. It was highly charged, emotional music, and Hank Williams was riveted. Talking to Ralph Gleason in 1952, after his star had eclipsed Acuff’s, Hank was still in the thrall of the older singer. “Roy Acuff is the best example [of sincerity in singing],” he said. “He’s the biggest singer this music ever knew. You booked him and you didn’t worry about crowds. For drawing power in the South, it was Roy Acuff, then God. He’d stand up there singing, tears running down his cheeks.” Acuff became Hank’s benchmark, both of success and of heart-on-the-sleeve sincerity.
Acuff met Hank in the late 1930s or early 1940s and would eventually become Hank’s music publisher. When Acuff recorded a complete LP of Hank’s songs in 1966, he stated on the liner notes that Hank was working with Pappy Neil McCormick, a country bandleader based in the Florida panhandle, when they first met, which would place the meeting in 1940 or 1941. Acuff later told Hank’s first biographer, Roger Williams, that Hank would come by his dressing room whenever he played Mont- gomery. “[Hank] would sit around, sing songs and play the guitar,” Acuff said. “He was just a little fellow [Hank at age nine was already taller than Acuff, so quite what Acuff meant by this is unclear], and he just hunkered around in the corner waiting for a chance to sing.” Later, Acuff claimed to have gone out to see Hank in the honky-tonks, even going so far as to get up and sing with him. “I wasn’t as big then as I am now,” he explained. “We both had a type of cry in our voice, and we sang with a lot of energy and feeling.”
One of Hank’s band members, Paul Dennis, remembered an altogether different encounter. Hank was half tanked, and Acuff admonished him: “You got a million-dollar voice,” he told him, “and a ten-cent brain.” For all the crocodile tears he shed over Hank’s casket, Acuff’s opinion never changed much. He later disinherited one of his grandsons who had been busted for drug possession, and his attitude toward Hank’s transgressions was never marked by much compassion. Hank, though, never lost his respect for Acuff, and from the late 1930s until his death, he would introduce Acuff’s songs in his shows. One of his first recordings, an acetate that ended up in his father’s hands, featured an Acuff song, “(Beneath That) Lonely Mound of Clay.”
By the time Hank started listening to Roy Acuff in 1938, he was already determined to carve out a career in music, but Acuff became a beacon. On a commercial level, Acuff’s success proved that hillbilly music could sell nationwide; on an artistic level, Hank gravitated toward Acuff’s full-throated, emotional style. Hank would have played music without Acuff, but whether it would have sounded the way it did or whether the market would have been as ready for him is doubtful.
Hank’s first taste of touring was probably in support of Juan Lobo, aka Jack Wolf, a cowboy performer who claimed to have been in Westerns with Ken Maynard. No one named “Lobo” or “Wolf” is listed as one of Maynard’s costars, but a ropin’, wranglin’ extra who could spin a few tales of Hollywood would have impressed Hank Williams in 1938. Hank and Juan Lobo went out on a brief tour supported by Hezzy Adair, Braxton Schuffert, and Freddy Beach. Lobo sold handmade bat-wing chaps and belts, and performed standard cowboy shtick, like whipping a cigarette out of someone’s mouth with a sixteen-foot bullwhip, or dancing through twirling lariats. Hank was in his element. School couldn’t hold a candle to this, and Hank’s teachers knew it. “Aw, don’t wake him,” they’d say when he fell asleep in class. “He isn’t going to learn anything anyway.” After Juan Lobo left, Hank recruited Irene for the act and took a steady date at a theater in Roanoke, Alabama, ten miles from the Georgia state line. Braxton remembers that they drove up in Lilly’s Ford station wagon, and played three shows a night at 3:00 p.m., 6:00 p.m., and 9:00 p.m. for around one hundred dollars. Everyone came away with fifteen dollars, excellent money for that time.
Braxton fell out of the picture around 1938, but Hank continued with Hezzy Adair, and Braxton remembers hearing them on WSFA’s Saturday night barn dance. Accordionist Pee Wee Moultrie joined in 1939. He said:
I went in Montgomery with another band We went up to WCOV, played a radio program, and while we were playing I saw a couple of guys watching us from outside the studio. So when we got through, they came out. We went outside and they introduced themselves as Hank Williams and Hezzy Adair. They said that they were putting a band together to be called Hank and Hezzy and the Drifting Cowboys, and they wanted to know if the fiddle player, Charlie Mays, would like to have a job with them. So we had been on the road awhile and we were all broke and hungry and so we accepted. We moved our stuff into his mother’s boardinghouse and started a radio program five days a week on WCOV. For some reason, Hezzy’s name was dropped, but he continued playing bass.
I moved into the boardinghouse on South Perry Street. It was just an old white frame, two-story house, one or two blocks off the main drag. Mizz Williams gave us a room on the second floor. Hezzy lived someplace else. I doubt if Mizz Williams had over three or four people, regular boarders. She had some young girls going to college. Hank took an interest in one of ’em.
Late that year, 1939, Hank and the Drifting Cowboys signed up for a tour of theaters in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. It was common at the time to bracket a live performance with a movie, and many of Hank’s performances were in support of Paul Muni and Bette Davis in Juarez. The promoter wanted a girl singer, so Hank and Pee Wee hired a young, fresh-faced cowgirl named Sue Taylor. As Pee Wee remembered:
Hank was on his best behavior the first two weeks. The third week, we pulled into Georgiana and went to the theater. The owner pulled out a bottle of peach brandy. We offloaded the car and Hank and Hezzy went off in search of some more booze. They both got loaded. Hank started the show and told the people that he wished he’d been born in their town and if it happened again, he’d make sure it happened there. He lost his pick and was strumming his guitar with his knuckles. Hezzy walked off to the west wing and vomited. People sitting on the left side could see him, and started walking out. I figured they would run us out of town, but the manager was laughing his head off. He said it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen.
Hank’s early career is largely available to us only as an accretion of fragments, and the picture doesn’t begin to sharpen for several years. Those who knew him and worked with him say that he never expressed interest in any career other than music, but music was barely getting him by. The money would be gone before it was made, and he’d borrow more. He drank whenever he could, and started to write songs by setting his own words to established melodies. Lilly was seldom out of the picture; she drove the station wagon to dates, collected the money, paid the band members, often housed and fed them too. She put up handbills, encouraged Hank, chided him, and cussed him out when he screwed up. Not even family members got into the shows for free with Lilly on the door.
One of the few surviving artifacts from Hank’s early years is a brief audition acetate from the late 1930s. Acetates date back to the pretape era. They were recordings made directly onto ten-inch aluminum discs coated with acetate. Hank and Pee Wee’s acetate was clearly intended to land a steady radio job because it was formatted like a radio show. Hank made up call letters for an imaginary station in Fort Deposit, Alabama, and he and Pee Wee kicked off with an instrumental version of Irving Berlin’s “Marie” (although written in 1928, “Marie” was a big hit for Tommy Dorsey in 1937). Then there was some chatter before Hank turned to the Sons of the Pioneers’ 1935 tune, “Happy Roving Cowboy,” which seems to have been his theme song from earliest times. Like most of the Pioneers’ best songs, it was written by Bob Nolan. Born in eastern Canada, Nolan captured the outsider’s wide-eyed wonder at the untamed vastness of the West, a wonder that filled Hank with ambivalence. The cowboy was never more popular than during the late years of the Depression, and life in the bunkhouse must have looked more appealing than life in the boardinghouse, but Hank got no further than naming his band the Drifting Cowboys and singing a couple of Nolan’s songs. The western makeover didn’t go very deep.
Pee Wee Moultrie doesn’t have altogether charitable memories of his two years as a Drifting Cowboy.
Mr. J. L. Frank [country star Pee Wee King’s father-in-law and manager] would frequently come to town representing the Opry Artist Service Bureau. He’d rent the city auditorium for a Sunday show, and use us to do his legwork. Then he’d bring in Opry stars, like Roy Acuff, and let us do the show with them. We usually got a better response than his Opry folks. Drunk or sober, Hank had the uncanny ability to hold an audience’s attention, [but] by 1940, Hank’s drinking problem was getting worse. All we were getting was three meals a day and most of the money was going to Hank’s mother.
It was Lilly, not Hank, who was the driving force, he said. “She owned the car, and by the time she took a cut for the car and the gas and oil, we usually came up on the short end of the stick. She rode herd on Hank and dished him out just enough to keep him from buying booze.” For a very short period Hank, Pee Wee Moultrie, and their fiddler, Charlie Mays, relocated to WBHP in Huntsville, but they soon returned to WSFA and a regular Saturday night job at the Fort Dixie Graves Armory.
The original Drifting Cowboys broke up in 1940. “A small group of people stayed at the boardinghouse on the way to a rodeo or carnival [in Texas and Mexico],” Moultrie said later. “Hank took off with them, and left his band sitting there cooling their heels, so we started working with another local band led by Dad Crysel.”
Writing to his mother from what is now the Fort Worth suburb of Handley, Texas, on November 18, 1940, Hank apologized for not sending any money. Someone he identifies only as “Jack” had just bought six hundred dollars’ worth of western suits for the band, and Jack had also bought a ranch where the band lived, so there would be no money heading east. The identity of “Jack” is unclear. It could have been Juan Lobo (Jack Wolf), but after Hank’s death, someone named Jack Hughes came forward with information about him, and Irene told her attorney that Hughes had bounced checks at the local five-and-dime in 1939 or 1940, then skipped town.
Hank’s letter was full of instructions. He asked Irene to go see Pee Wee and give him his address. “Tell Pee Wee I said to be ready to come at any time,” he wrote. “This is the greates [sic] country in the world, Texas.” He said that he hoped to be home in seven months with a “real band and pleanty [sic] of money to run one on.” When he applied for shipyard work two years later, Hank stated that he’d toured Mexico as a musician in 1940, presumably with “Jack.” The months in Texas are otherwise blank, except that Hank probably met Ernest Tubb, who’d just moved to Fort Worth to broadcast over KGKO, and was little better known than Hank at the time. Tubb, though, broke through in 1941 with “Walking the Floor over You,” and became the preeminent country star of the war years.
According to Pee Wee, Hank returned long before the seven months were up, claiming that he had back trouble. Lilly said later that he fell from a horse in a rodeo, worsening his already serious back problems. Hank was anxious to reassemble his old band; in fact, more anxious than they were to work with him again. He had no problem finding work, though, and quickly assembled a new group of Drifting Cowboys. The Texas dream would resurface when he drank. He’d pack his suitcase — britches and shirtsleeves sticking out — and tell everyone he was off to Texas. Then he’d sober up somewhere around the Alabama state line and hitch his way back home or wire for money. Soon after Hank returned, Lilly pressured him into taking a bookkeeping course at Draughon’s College, and, according to Hank, he attended for seven months (others, though, say this is unlikely, as a high school diploma was a prerequisite and Hank hadn’t graduated). Lilly, meanwhile, had leased a bigger boardinghouse at 236 Catoma Street, and this would be Hank’s permanent address for the next six years.
After Lon’s brief reappearance in 1938, he went back to the hospital. Upon his release in 1939, he returned to McWilliams. He divorced Lilly on July 1, 1942, and married Ola Till on September 12 that same year. They had a daughter, Hank’s half-sister, Leila, on June 19, 1943. Lon never again took regular employment. He had a full disability check from the Veterans Administration, and he made his way doing odd jobs, occasionally running a country store with Ola. From the time Lon returned to McWilliams, Hank saw him on a fairly regular basis. Whenever Hank was appearing in the neighborhood, he and his band would descend on Lon’s house in the middle of the afternoon and then stay for dinner. Hank and Lon’s relationship wasn’t close: Lon had been gone for too long for that, and Hank wasn’t much given to intimacy anyway.
One week after her divorce from Lon, Lilly married Hank’s guitarist, Homer H. Haatchett, who played in the band as “Indian” Joe Hatcher. Apparently, Indian Joe died of appendicitis shortly after their marriage. Lilly kept feeding him oil to flush out his system, instead of taking him to the hospital. Two months later, on September 10, 1942, she married a Cajun serviceman, James C. Bozard, and they remained together until May 1, 1946. The one surviving photo of Bozard is of a smiling, gregarious, overweight man in uniform. Those who remember him say that he wasn’t around very much.
One of Hank’s surrogate fathers was Pappy Neal McCormick, a Creek Indian who led a band variously called the Barn Dance Troubadours or the Hawaiian Troubadours. McCormick was based 150 miles south of Montgomery, in and around Pensacola in the Florida panhandle. He played steel guitar; in fact, he had invented a four-head steel guitar. Four guitars in different tunings were mounted on a railroad tie that turned on a barbecue spit. McCormick’s band played for dancing, and although none of his music has survived, Hank almost certainly acquired some ideas about showmanship from McCormick. He might also have dated McCormick’s daughter, Juanealya; there’s a photo of them together dated April 24, 1941. Hank worked a few weeks at a time with McCormick for several years. Whenever his relationship with Lilly reached boiling point, he would take off for Pensacola, sometimes to work, sometimes to hole up in the San Carlos Hotel and drink. WCOA, where McCormick worked, was also in the San Carlos, so work and play were no more than an elevator ride apart.
A few surviving fragments give us some idea of what Hank was up to as war loomed. Three guys fresh out of high school in Hayneville, Alabama (about twenty miles from Montgomery), heard Hank on WSFA and decided to present him at the local courthouse. They wrote to him in care of the station at the end of March, and several days later Hank wrote back in pencil on lined paper saying he’d work for 60 percent of the gate. The promoters made up thirty signs and posted them around Hayneville. Hank and three pickers led by guitarist Zeke Crittenden arrived during the afternoon of Friday, April 4. Hank seemed shy and very unlike the outgoing performer the promoters had expected from his WSFA shows. He was shown the courthouse where he’d be playing, and he saw the jail cell. “Awright boys,” he said, “they’re ready for us. Ever’body on their best behavior tonight.” Hank went over well that night, and the following morning the three promoters went over to the courthouse to move back the benches and divide what was left of the thirty dollars they’d taken in.
Two weeks later, Hank worked his bread-and-butter gig at Thigpen’s Log Cabin. Perhaps he was working his way south, because he was photographed with Juanealya McCormick shortly after. Thigpen’s had opened in 1931 just off old Highway 31 in Georgiana. Fred Thigpen, at six feet four inches and 230 pounds, made a formidable combination with Lilly for anyone who threatened trouble. Hank played for dancing in a walled-in skating pavilion behind the main dining room. The pavilion was roofed, but open to the air with canvas curtains that had to be lowered when it rained. Admission was a quarter, and Hank and his new Drifting Cowboys would play from 8:00 p.m. until midnight or 1:00 a.m. Butler County was still dry, so Thigpen sold ice and setups, and the dancers would retire discreetly to fill their glasses with hooch. Playing every second week, Hank quickly became Thigpen’s major draw between 1940 and 1942. Hank alternated with a full dance band led by Cecil Mackey, and even outgrossed name dance bands like Wayne King. He mixed up his set, and did a square dance interlude when he would play fiddle tunes. He couldn’t call a square dance, but knew enough hoe-downs to get the crowd on the floor. If Hank served any kind of apprenticeship, it was at Thigpen’s and at Pappy Neil McCormick’s show dates.
The 1941 Drifting Cowboys included Shorty Seals, who had worked in the McCormick band. Shorty played the bass and did the comedy routines that were expected of bass players back then. Pee Wee Moultrie’s buddy, “Mexican” Charlie Mays, played the fiddle (the “swing fiddler,” he was called in the band’s announcements). Lilly’s future husband, “Indian” Joe Hatcher, played guitar and fiddle (he was dubbed the “wrong shoulder fiddler"). Clyde “Boots” Harris played the “singing steel guitar.” They gave themselves nicknames to sound like outlaws. Many others dropped in and out of the lineup. Paul Dennis played bass and rhythm guitar; Paul Compton played guitar; and Millard “M.C.” Jarrett and Jimmy Porter played steel guitar. No one stayed long, and playing with Hank wasn’t considered a plum job. On most schoolhouse dates, Hank sang without amplification, accounting in part for the forcefulness of his singing style: he was literally struggling to be heard. When Dennis played, the band had a portable public address system that comprised two twelve-inch speakers mounted in a box that could accommodate eight input jacks. The entire band used it until it was smashed in a traffic accident on the outskirts of Montgomery in late November 1941. The same accident permanently crippled Compton when a sun visor bracket penetrated his skull.
Steel guitarist Clyde “Boots” Harris was from Opp, Alabama. As a kid, he coveted a pair of boots in a Sears catalog, but when they arrived, he was disappointed to discover that they were both the same color, not one black and one white as they had appeared in the catalog. Boots led a band with his brothers, but decided to try for a job where he could play three or four nights a week, so he caught the bus to Montgomery in September 1941. First he went to WCOV, then WSFA, where the program director told him that their only hillbilly act, Hank Williams, played solo. Boots went to Lilly’s boardinghouse and found Hank lying on the couch. They played a few songs together, and Hank became friendlier.
He said, “Let’s go get a cup of coffee,” so we went out the front door, and there was a little café right there and I started in it and he said, “Naw, their coffee ain’t no good,” so we went on down a ways to a little restaurant and they had whiskey lined up on the wall. I had just quit the mill in Opp and I had maybe a week’s salary in my pocket. Hank said, “Have you got any money on you?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Have you got enough for a half-pint?” I said, “I guess so.” I didn’t drink at all then, so I hadn’t been knowing him but thirty minutes and I bought him a half-pint of whiskey.
Lilly put up Harris and other band members at the boardinghouse, docking their pay accordingly. When they were out on a job, Hank used to tell the audience that he paid his band $21.50 a week: “Twenty-one hamburgers and fifty cents.” It got a lot of laughs, but it was too close to the truth for the band to find it really funny. They joined him on WSFA from time to time, but the sponsorship fees didn’t stretch to cover a band. Joints like Thigpen’s together with schoolhouse or courthouse dates were their bread and butter. They played for dancing at the joints, but worked a little comedy into the schoolhouse dates. The latter worked on a split of the gate. Lilly would book a schoolhouse for an evening, and then she, sometimes in conjunction with Leaborne Eads, would put up flyposters all around the neighborhood. On the posters, Hank billed his act as “one-and-a-half hours of good clean comedy, songs and music,” and he would announce the show on the radio every morning. After the show date, Lilly would share the door money with the school on a seventy-thirty or sixty-forty split.
Those who paid the twenty-five or thirty cents Lilly charged for admission heard a show comprising, for the most part, other people’s songs and traditional favorites. Hank didn’t make any commercial recordings during the early 1940s, but he cut several acetates. The problem with acetates is that they can be played only a few times before the acetate coating begins to break up, and that’s what happened to a record Hank left with his father. It coupled Roy Acuff’s “(Beneath That) Lonely Mound of Clay” with the very appropriate “Mother, Guide Me” (possibly derived from the same root as the Stanley Brothers’ “Mother’s Footsteps Guide Me On"). The acetate was recorded at Sears, but after Lon hauled it out and played it too many times, the grooves simply wore away.
One set of recordings from Hank’s earliest days has survived, though it is not in much better shape than Lon’s acetate. The owner of Griffin’s Radio Shop in Montgomery recorded Hank off the air at some point in the spring of 1942. As usual, Hank kicked off with “Happy Roving Cowboy,” then tackled a sentimental pop song, Bob Miller’s “Rockin’ Alone in an Old Rockin’ Chair,” followed by Red Foley’s hymn to his dying dog, “Old Shep.” An unknown female vocalist joined Hank on the black spiritual “Jesus Walked That Lonesome Valley.” Then came Acuff’s “(Beneath That) Lonely Mound of Clay” and Ernest Tubb’s “I Ain’t Gonna Love You Any More.” The latter is intriguing because it was recorded before Tubb’s breakthrough hit, “Walking the Floor over You,” lending credence to the idea that Hank had met Tubb in Fort Worth a few months earlier. Next came Rex Griffin’s “The Last Letter.” Griffin was another Alabamian, and again it’s entirely possible that Hank knew him. Griffin traveled throughout the South and Southwest, but was back in Gadsden, Alabama, in 1941 with a band that included Pee Wee Moultrie. Griffin’s big hit, “The Last Letter,” was the suicide note of an older man besotted with a younger woman. The depth of personal feeling that Griffin invested in his songwriting would inspire Hank to share more of himself in his songs, and Griffin’s version of an old pop song, “Lovesick Blues,” provided Hank with his breakthrough seven years later.
The radio shop acetates also included a 1912 pop song, “Aunt Dinah’s Quilting Party,” that had crept into country music in the 1930s, but the most interesting song was “I’m Not Coming Home Any More” because it was the first known recording of one of Hank’s own songs. Boots Harris insists that Hank had yet to find his own style. Hank would, said Harris, sing Ernest Tubb songs like Tubb, and Acuff songs like Acuff. “We’d get after him all the time,” says Harris. “ ‘Hank, why don’t you sing like Hank?’ Because we drew better crowds when he did. But he’d sing like Acuff and Tubb, and he’d do recitations like a guy on the border stations called the Texas Drifter.” Perhaps Hank sang like Hank on “I’m Not Coming Home Any More” because it was his own song, but, on the skimpy evidence of that one song, his style was intact very early. Backed by a steel guitar and bass, he sings a little higher than he would in later life, but the timbre of his voice and his phrasing are remarkably similar to his first professional recordings five years later. The song, too, is identifiably a Hank Williams song.
Shortly after “I’m Not Coming Home Any More” was recorded, Boots Harris left the Drifting Cowboys to join Curley Williams’ Georgia Peach Pickers. The rift came when Hank was on a short tour backing folk and western singer Tex Ritter. They reached Albany, Georgia, where they played a date with Curley Williams. Curley was hopeful of landing a spot on the Opry, which was still a pipe dream for Hank. Boots recalled:
We’d hear records on the jukebox, and Hank’d say, “Someday, I’m gonna be doing that — they’re gonna be playing my records.” But I didn’t see it coming any time soon the way he was going. He was pretty bad into the drink then. I was having to play guitar, emcee the show, do the jokes, and it was just more than I could put up with. I’d already quit him once because of the drinking. I told him if he’d quit the drinking and we’d get on with it, we’d get somewhere. I said, “If you keep drinkin’ ain’t nobody in the business gonna pay us no attention.”
It was an admonition Hank would hear countless more times in the decade or so he had left.
The middle months of 1942 seem to mark one of Hank’s periodic troughs. War had been declared in December 1941, but Hank was unfit for service because of his back. Even so, the war took its toll on him. The pool of musicians in Montgomery was depleted, and then gas rationing was introduced. Hank was on WSFA consistently for a little more than a year, from July 1941 until August 1942, but then he was kicked off the station for habitual drunkenness. He moved to WCOV, but by September or October he had quit music altogether.
Hank went to Portland, Oregon, to work in the shipyards. It’s unclear why he chose Portland when there were shipyards 170 miles away in Mobile. Perhaps he was trying to get as far as possible from Lilly; perhaps he simply wanted the adventure. The incentive was provided by Kaiser Shipbuilding, which offered free tickets to Portland, free training, free accommodation, and good wages. Paul Dennis says that Hank was drunk on the day he left, so it might have been an impetuous decision made under the influence. He was probably there no more than a few weeks before he wired Lilly for the money to come home, although he later stated that he was there for two months.
In November 1942, Hank moved in with his uncle Bob Skipper in Mobile and applied at the Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company. He was there on and off until mid-1944, never for very long at a stretch. Lilly later recalled the end of the first stint: “I believed in Hank,” she wrote in Life Story of Our Hank Williams. “I knew he had what it took, so I rented a car and went to every schoolhouse and nightclub in the Montgomery area. I booked Hank solid for sixty days. Then, the third week he had been out of the music business, I went to Mobile and got him and put him back in it. When Hank saw the datebook for those shows, he gave me the sweetest smile I’ve ever seen.”
“Thank God, Mother,” Hank is supposed to have said in one of the most uncharacteristic remarks ever attributed to him. “You’ve made me the happiest boy in the world.”