Chapter 3
Long Ike and sweet Betsy attended a dance
Where Ike wore a pair of his Pike County pants,
Sweet Betsy was covered in ribbons and rings,
Said Ike, “You’re an angel, but where are your wings?”
(Trad.)
AUDREY Mae Sheppard Williams spoke often of her late husband. In her revisionist view of their life together, they were young star-crossed lovers. Disturbingly quickly — within days of Hank’s death, in fact — Audrey began finding it hard to distinguish between the Hank Williams she’d married and the Hank Williams she wished she’d married.
“I met Hank in Banks, Alabama,” Audrey told journalist Dorothy Horstman.
He was working a medicine show. My dad’s only sister was with me and it was her idea to stop and see what was going on. I said, “I never heard of Hank Williams before,” but I learned later that a lot of people in the area had heard of him. I said, “This guy will be number one on the Grand Ole Opry one of these days.” I had that feeling very strongly. Anyway, after the show was over, Hank and these other people were going around selling herbs. Little vials. He came up to the car. I’ll never forget how country he talked. He said, “Ma’am, don’t you think you need some of these herbs?” then he quickly looked back, and he said, “No, I don’t believe you do.” My aunt asked him what he was gonna do after the show, and he said, “Well, I have no plans.” She said, “Well, would you like to go with us?” So he went with us after the show that night, and we went to a little club. I just seemed to be with him from then on. I just wanted to help him. Though I had no experience in the business, I felt this guy had a tremendous talent.
I’m kinda psychic. I had a brother who was ten years old and I was twelve. He was disgustingly healthy, but I knew for months he was gonna die. Then he went hunting with my dad one afternoon and came in and took double pneumonia. They were bringing in doctors and nurses, and I was thinking to myself, “You can bring Jesus Christ himself, and he will not live.” That’s how strong I believed it. That’s how strong I believed in Hank. He was lucky with a God-given talent, and I was lucky with a few brains, so I used to go out and book shows. I was on the door. I took up money on the door, then I’d go up onstage with him. He used to do a blackface act that was just outasight. He’d sing a little bit, then do a few funnies.
Audrey Mae Sheppard was born near Banks, Alabama, on February 28, 1923, some seven months before Hank. She was a prize; surely the loveliest woman in Pike County. Fine clothes sat well upon her. She once said that her family owned half of Pike County, and true or not, she thought she belonged with the old-money crowd. She characterized herself as independent, although her family probably had another word for it. As early as age eleven or twelve she had learned how to drive and was taking herself off on trips. “I knew what I wanted and I went after it,” she said. Her independent streak led her to run off one day with a neighbor’s son, James Erskine Guy. She was seventeen years old. They lived in Gadsden for a while, but a year or so later Guy went to work one day and didn’t return. Audrey returned to Banks, heavy with Guy’s child. Lycrecia Ann Guy was born on August 13, 1941. When Audrey met Hank in the late summer of 1943, she was working in Brundidge as a drugstore clerk, and looking for a way out.
After their date, Hank asked Audrey to meet him the next day. It would be the first of his Bloody Mary mornings in store for her. He was unshaven, and he greeted her in the doorway of his trailer with no shirt on his back and the stench of last night’s whiskey on his breath. They went for a drive that afternoon. Hank told Audrey a little about himself, confessed that his drinking had got him kicked off WSFA, and then, after the show that night, he asked her to marry him. “I told my aunt, ‘This boy’s crazy,’” said Audrey.
What did Audrey see in Hank? The only rung on the show business ladder lower than south Alabama hillbilly music was itinerant blues singing, but Hank and his music still had a vestige of glamour that the Brundidge Drug Store didn’t. Audrey also had her gift. She couldn’t see her own lack of talent, believing herself to be a singer until the day she died, but she could see talent in others. Early on, she saw something in Hank Williams, something that Hank probably had trouble seeing in himself. What did Hank see in Audrey? She was lovely, and that was enough to secure his interest. But it was more than that. His two wives were feisty, sharp-tongued, and ambitious. Lilly, of course, was precisely that, so the pop-Freudian conclusion is obvious.
Audrey’s daughter, Lycrecia, was around two years old when Hank entered their lives, but throughout the years there have been persistent rumors that Hank and Audrey were both parents when they met. Hank’s cousin, Marie, was some two years older than Hank, born in Garland on May 8, 1921. She’d lived with Lilly’s family since she was twelve. Her father had never let her go to school because she had a withered arm and a prominent strawberry birthmark. The other kids, he thought, would make fun of her. Marie helped Lilly at the boardinghouses, cooking and cleaning, and, by some accounts, running the girls. The two women argued often, and Marie would sometimes pack her bags and move in with Hank’s cousins, the McNeils. In 1942, she became pregnant, and at some point the following year, she married a serviceman named Conrad Fitzgerald but, by all accounts, never lived with him. Dr. Stokes at St. Margaret’s Hospital delivered the boy child on June 24, 1943. Hank nicknamed him Butch. “[From what I’m told],” said Butch, “when I come home from the hospital, he come in and he said, ‘There’s my Butch.’” And the nickname stuck. What has never been resolved is whether Hank imparted more than a nickname. From the time Butch, or Lewis, as he was christened, could first remember, he insists that people put the word in his ear that Hank was in fact his father. “When you get a little older in life, you kind of see the light,” said Butch. “A lot of people walk up, and start telling you this, that, and the other. Momma had told a lot of people, [and] she hinted to me a lot of times, but she never would just come out and say it. She’d say little things like, ‘You such like your daddy, and you walk like him…and you got a dropped shoulder like him.’” Butch asserts that Lilly caught Hank and Marie in bed together on more than one occasion, although no one else saw them together in that way.
The musicians who lived with Lilly heard the rumors, but Hank neither confirmed nor denied them. He acted in a caring, paternal way toward Butch, which could of course mean no more than the fact that he was looking out for a fatherless child. There were toys and trips to the movies. Hank, thought Butch, seemed overprotective. Some say that Hank had all the women he wanted and would not have fooled around with Marie, but that was less true in 1942 than later.
Hank almost certainly met Audrey within weeks of Butch’s birth. He probably worked in music throughout most of 1943. In all likelihood, the medicine show fell victim to gasoline rationing, but by Labor Day 1943, Hank was back in Montgomery, appearing as a supporting act on a show hosted by Birmingham-based hillbilly singer Hardrock Gunter. The show’s headliners were to be Pete Cassell, the Sunshine Boys, and Gunter himself. Gunter remembers Hank hanging around backstage drinking. Someone figured it would be a good idea if Hank introduced Gunter, so Hank grabbed Gunter’s guitar, went out, and started singing. The crowd apparently recognized him and he went over well. When he got off, Gunter bawled him out, but Hank took no notice and sauntered off out the door, still with Gunter’s guitar slung around his neck. “The guitar’s neck and body hit the doorway,” remembered Gunter. “He tried twice more to get through the door before I pulled him round. He was belligerent and said, ‘You just don’t want me to play your guitar.’”
Later that year, Hank played some dates as a local added attraction on a tour led by Grand Ole Opry star Pee Wee King. Born Frank Kuczynski in Wisconsin, Pee Wee was leading a polka band in Green Bay when Gene Autry came to town in 1934, trying to replace a couple of his band members who had been injured in a car wreck. Kuczynski signed on, quickly changing his name to Pee Wee King ("Pee Wee” because he was short, and “King” in emulation of another Polish band leader, Wayne King). A few years later, Pee Wee lit out on his own, taking his western-and-polka band to the Opry in 1937. He brought drums to the Opry stage for the first time, and joined Roy Acuff and Bill Monroe among the show’s new headliners.
Another Grand Ole Opry headliner, Minnie Pearl, was on that tour. She later said:
I met Hank in Dothan, Alabama. Always, when we went into a town, we’d go to the radio station to plug the show. Well, in the lobby of the radio station, we saw this man and woman sitting there. The man had on a disheleved suit, a cowboy suit but no sequins. And a very dirty cowboy hat, which showed a lot of wear and a lot of use. He was sort of crumpled up, like a stick man, on the sofa. The girl was very, very pretty. We were introduced to them as Hank Williams and his wife, Audrey. They were obviously in very straitened circumstances.
While Hank toured south Alabama with Pee Wee King and his Golden West Cowboys, he sold him one of his original songs, “(I’m Praying for the Day That) Peace Will Come.” King said that Hank first pitched the song to him in Montgomery when the band’s girl singer, Becky Barfield, said she needed a patriotic number. Hank was hanging around the dressing room between shows and made his pitch. “Hey, King,” he said, “listen to this.” Hank ran it down, but Pee Wee was dubious, so Hank suggested that he try the song onstage. “He got a pretty good hand with a brand-new song, which is hard to do,” said Pee Wee. “He said, ‘Now, what do you think?’ I said, ‘Let’s wait.’” On December 13, 1943, the transaction was completed. Hank received twenty-five dollars, and although his name was to appear on the composer credit, he signed away all rights. The agreement was witnessed by Honey Wilds, half of the Opry’s blackface comedy act, Jamup and Honey. When King got back to Nashville, he placed the song with Acuff-Rose Publications, which registered it with the Library of Congress on December 20, 1943. As it turned out, the few dollars Hank got for the song was the most anyone made off it. By the time King landed his first recording contract with the Nashville-based Bullet label in 1945, peace had come, and the song languished until the Korean War, when Esco Hankins (recording as Roscoe Hankins) cut it without much success for Mercury.
Hank seems to have returned to the Mobile shipyards immediately after the tour, but, as before, didn’t make a significant contribution to the war effort. The McNeils had moved to Mobile in 1943, and Hank’s aunt Alice and his cousins Opal and J.C. helped build Liberty Ships. Hank was a welder by day and hung out with musicians at night. “He would hit the joints,” said J. C. McNeil. “He tried to get a band together when he was in the shipyards. It was in his blood. I would venture to say that he didn’t work more than two or three months all told. He probably slept on the job more than anything else. It was encouraged by the foreman so that he could stretch the hours he could bill.”
Audrey always insisted that she joined Hank in Mobile:
We worked side by side in these pit things [with a blowtorch]. I had never seen [them] before. We’d go back to the little old hotel room, which was terrible, in the evening. I’d wash out our clothes. We didn’t do this too long — but we did do it. I knew he had something, and me or someone had to get it out of him. One day I said, “This is just not it, Hank. I want to go back to Montgomery, get a band together for you, and get you back on the radio station and start working shows.” And that’s exactly what I did.
If true, Audrey had come to Hank’s rescue, just as Lilly had done a year earlier.
We know very little of what Hank was up to in 1944. He probably spent part of the year in Mobile before settling back in Montgomery around August. He assembled another group of Drifting Cowboys, this one including Don Helms and Sammy Pruett, who would later work with him in Nashville. Helms was eighteen years old when he joined Hank. He was from a farming family in New Brockton, Alabama. In 1943, he went to Panama City, Florida, to work in the shipyards. He had an aunt in Montgomery who had studied music and had a Hawaiian guitar, and his father played fiddle, but even after his aunt had given him the steel guitar he still had no thought of a career in music. Pappy Neal McCormick was the one who finally sold Helms on the idea of becoming a steel guitar player. “I saw him in a vocational building,” said Helms. “He was playing that thing, and I thought, ‘Man what a way to have fun. What a way to make a living.’” The only steel guitarist to teach Helms some licks was Boots Harris. When Harris would come back to Opp from Nashville, where he still worked with Curley Williams, Helms would go see him and learn Curley’s steel guitar parts.
Very quickly, the steel guitar became the driving force in Helms’ life. Every Sunday he tuned in a short-wave program called Hawaii Calls, and he listened to all the steel and slide guitar players on the Opry. And there were some great ones. Bashful Brother Oswald worked with Roy Acuff and Little Roy Wiggins with Eddy Arnold. The tremulousness in Oswald’s playing complemented Acuff, and Wiggins’ dulcet tone complemented Arnold. Don Helms’ simple, hard-edged, bluesy playing would soon complement Hank Williams. Helms bought his first electric steel guitar, a Silvertone, from Sears, but, because he had no electricity on the farm, he had to play it on an upended washtub, which resonated just enough for him to practice. Eventually, he took over the steel guitar chair in McCormick’s band when McCormick felt like taking some time off.
Back in New Brockton, Helms assembled a band with two cousins and two friends, one of whom was Sammy Pruett. Helms and Pruett had met in Panama City at a Neal McCormick gig, and they stayed in touch. Their band was called the Alabama Rhythm Boys, and they played the honky-tonks around southern Alabama from Wednesday through Saturday. One of the guys in the band knew Hank and went to Montgomery to meet him. Helms recalled:
He came back and said, “Hank Williams is putting a band together. Y’all wanna go work for him?” We said, “Aw hell, it’s probably better ’n this,” so we gave three or four days’ notice and rode the bus up to Montgomery. We were supposed to meet Hank at Art Freehling’s music store, but he wasn’t there. We went outside and I saw this real long-legged guy coming. He walked up, and he said, “Y’all the group?” We said, “Yeah.” He said, “Well, I’m Hank Williams, follow me.” We walked round the corner and down the block to a hock shop. He said, “Jake, you got any more of them blackjacks in there?” and there was a tray of ’em. He passed ’em out, he said, “Boys, if y’all gonna play with me, by God you’re gonna need these.” He wasn’t kiddin’ either.
Hank lined up Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday nights at the Riverside Club in Andalusia, and Tuesday and Thursday in nearby Opp. The Riverside was one of the biggest dance halls in Alabama, and there would often be six hundred people there on the weekend. Hank rented a trailer and moved to Andalusia. Helms and the band didn’t live far away, so they drove in from New Brockton in Helms’ fiancée’s car, then went home after the show.
Audrey was with Hank much of the time. It was understood that they would get married at the same time as Helms and his fiancée, Hazel, and another group member and his fiancée. Hank and Audrey jumped the gun, though. He pestered her constantly to marry him, but there were several hoops to jump first. Audrey was still married to Erskine Guy who by now was an enlisted man. Divorcing a serviceman who was serving overseas was not easy, and both Hank and Audrey had grown attached to the eighty-dollar-a-month allotment check that Audrey received from the military while Guy was away. It didn’t help that Audrey’s father was bitterly opposed to her relationship with Hank. Audrey also insisted that she never liked the name Williams. “I told my aunt after I started dating Hank, ‘I cannot imagine “Audrey Williams,” ’ she said. As always, though, the biggest problem was Hank’s drinking, but during those late months of 1944, he made a concerted effort to stay sober, and as the year came to a close, sobriety drew its reward.
Audrey always portrayed her decision to marry Hank as a spur-of-the-moment act, but she had to take the first step of divorcing Erskine Guy, a divorce that became final on December 5, 1944, on the grounds of voluntary abandonment. Hank then went to see a Dr. Parker, who declared him free of venereal disease, and then a notary public, who swore out the marriage license. The last stop was a justice of the peace, M. A. Boyett, who operated a filling station near Andalusia and pronounced them man and wife on December 15, 1944. Technically, it was an illegitimate marriage because they hadn’t sat out the sixty-day waiting period necessary after a divorce.
Audrey said she was cooking for the band in the trailer, but Paul Dennis, who came down to play with Hank, remembers only one meal — and that was inedible. The honeymoon didn’t last long. On the weekend that the Andalusia gig ended, Hank got drunk. Audrey pitched a fit, Hank threw her clothes into the mud out in front of the trailer, and she called the police and had him put in jail. Don Helms had to get him out. “I was embarrassed,” says Helms, “but I went back in there. He was sitting on a bench in his cell watching me. I didn’t know what to say, but he was staring at me. He said, ‘What d’ya want me to do? Stand on my darn head?’ I paid the thirty dollars and got him out. As we were leaving, one of the policemen said, ‘Come back ’n’ see us, Hank,’ and he said, ‘All of you can go to hell.’”
By 1945, Hank was back in Montgomery, reestablishing himself as the most popular hillbilly act in town. He sold a self-produced folio of songs called Original Songs of Hank Williams, printed by Leon Johnson, a local musician who ran a print shop. Johnson had been printing flyposters for Hank since the late 1930s, although it was usually Lilly who came to pick up the order and take care of the account. Johnson didn’t take much notice of Hank until he got a call for a second printing of the songbook. This time, Hank arrived with a half-gallon jar of nickels, quarters, and dimes to pay the bill. He sold the books for thirty-five cents and he’d tell the audience that the money was for handling. “You send in the money,” he’d say, “and I’ll handle it.”
Only the words were published in the songbook — not the music. Hank told Johnson that if people wanted to learn the tune, they’d have to listen to his radio show, but the truth was that Hank didn’t know musical notation and wasn’t about to pay somebody to transcribe it for him. The little folio included “I’m Not Coming Home Any More” as well as several songs that were recorded later and several more that never surfaced again. Among the latter was a saber-rattler called “Grandad’s Musket,” possibly born of Hank’s guilt for having done so little toward the war effort:
The boys up in the mountains have closed down their stills
They’ve moved to the city and are making leaded pills
While me and Grandad’s Musket, when we are off to
War We’ll join up with MacArthur and even up the score.
After the gig in Andalusia ended, the band moved to Lilly’s boardinghouse in Montgomery, and resumed the prewar routine of school-houses during the week and beer joints on weekends. Hank usually paid five dollars a night on top of room and board. Audrey would ride with them, sitting on Hank’s lap all the way down to the show and all the way back because Lilly’s ‘37 Chevrolet was packed full. The bass sat on top. Most nights, Lilly came to watch the door.
The lineup of the Drifting Cowboys was never stable for more than a few weeks. Helms quit the group shortly before he went into the service in 1945, but Pruett stayed on a little longer. Shortly after Helms was drafted, Hank hired Doyle and Bernice Turner, a husband-and-wife team living in Panama City, Florida. Helms had recommended them to Hank, and when they came home one night they found that he had called. “Doyle had made me practice and practice barre chords,” said Bernice, “and when Hank heard me he had a fit. He had a good sock rhythm play- ing open chords, but he couldn’t play barre chords. We auditioned at the boardinghouse, done two or three songs, and he hired us. He knew we were exactly what he wanted.” Bernice remembered them playing throughout Alabama, the Florida panhandle, and parts of Georgia. There was talk of a USO tour, but, according to Turner, Hank would have had to sign papers promising to be sober, and refused to do so. The Turners were furious because Doyle was eligible for the draft, and the USO tour would have earned him a deferment.
Playing with Hank was still no plum job. Even the relatively unsophisticated musicians he hired looked down on his music. “I always thought Hank was too corny,” said Sammy Pruett in conversation with radio interviewer Jim Owen, “because whenever he’d end a tune, instead of playing a chord up on the neck of the guitar, he’d do an [open] A or G or D, just as plain as you could get. We used to set around backstage, and he’d play a few tunes with a little pop taste, and he’d say, Awright boys, get them pop licks outta ya before we get out onstage ’cause we’re gonna keep it vanilla.’” “Vanilla” meant unadorned hillbilly music. Occasionally, he would let his two guitar players cut loose in unison on a western swing tune, but he usually derided western swing as “longhair crap.” The only music other than hillbilly and gospel that seemed to reach him was cottonpatch blues. Band members remember him sitting around backstage and at home playing songs like “Matchbox Blues” and “Bottle Up and Go.” He would even sit in with blues singers on the sidewalk.
In the summer of 1946, Hank appears to have deviated briefly from his course. He led a band that featured E. B. Fulmer on piano, an instrument he later said had no place in country music, and Lefty Clark on saxophone, an instrument even more at odds with his music. Lum York was on bass, and the group was rounded out with a steel guitarist and a drummer. They played dance music. The sharp double-breasted gabardine suit that Hank wore around this time seems to imply that he was giving some thought to changing direction. As always, he had his ear cocked toward his audience, and he was probably hearing that they wanted the old Hank Williams back.
Hank was off WSFA from February 1945 until January 1946. Starting January 26, 1946, he was on between 6:35 and 7:00 a.m., and that September he was given another sponsored show at 4:00 p.m. By the close of 1946, Hank was so popular that even the radio shows were an event. Fans would turn up to see him at the station, creating a disturbance in the hotel lobby. WSFA still cursed him for his unreliability, but tolerated him as a necessary evil. Hank started using his clout to wrest concessions from the station. One stipulation was that WSFA wouldn’t hire a competing hillbilly band. WSFA acceded, although the agreement warped opinion against Hank among the other bands in town. The station’s ownership couldn’t comprehend his appeal; they simply knew they couldn’t afford to lose him. In radio stores, the question from the country folk was often, “Will it pick up Hank Williams?”
“Hank was a big drawing card,” said WSFA engineer Sebie Smith, “but the band didn’t always dress up too well. They’d come straggling through the Jefferson Davis Hotel. Finally the manager of the hotel asked [WSFA owner] Howard Pill to have Hank’s crew come in the back way.” At the same time, Hank was attracting a lot of jealousy from the other local acts on WSFA, chief among them Camille Brown, the Oprah of Montgomery. She hosted a show called Around the Town with Camille Brown, and griped loud and often to the station’s management about the amount of sponsorship Hank got.
Part of the chronic unreliability that dogged Hank can be attributed to the tensions at the boardinghouse. Lilly and Audrey were both strong willed, belligerent, and grasping. In the name of loving Hank and helping his career, they tried to wrest control from each other. The conflict started early, and never really ended. As Audrey told Dorothy Horstman:
When I first met Hank, he kept saying, “I want to tell you. There’s something I want to tell you.” Each time, he’d back out. Finally, one day we were at my dad’s and we were sitting on the grass, and I said, “Hank, you’ve got to tell me what it is on your mind.” He said, “It’s my mother.” I was so innocent then, I didn’t know if she was dead. He said, “I want to take you home and introduce you to her,” then he said, “You know what she’s gonna say when she meets you? She’s gonna say, ‘Where did you meet this whore?’ I said, “Hank, your mother couldn’t possibly say that. I know she couldn’t.” You know, we walked in, and that’s the first thing she said. I ran back to the car. Hank and [his] mother fought like men would fight. I tell you, she was his trouble.
Lilly even hinted at the squabbles in a small booklet she published in 1953. “I must admit I was a little jealous at times,” she wrote, adding quickly and unconvincingly, “Not really. I’m joking. Hank’s mother was always his first girl, and he never forgot it.” She never let him forget it, either. “She would dictate to him,” said Don Helms. “She’d say, ‘You cain’t do this.…I ain’t puttin’ up with that…. ’ I can’t remember the times I heard Hank say, ‘Goddamn, don’t tell her.’” Lon’s absence not only meant that Hank didn’t have a male role model, but also meant that he never matured from the dependent mother-child state. He simply transferred his dependency to Audrey, a shift that Lilly felt acutely.
It’s doubtful that Hank appreciated the full ramifications of the dangerous curve that Audrey had thrown into his relationship with Lilly. He tended to see it in simpler terms. “No wonder you and Audrey don’t get along,” Hank told Lilly on one occasion. “Because one of you’s afraid the other one’s gonna beat you to my pocket when I get drunk.” Occasionally when Hank went on a bender, Audrey would take off, perhaps back to Banks. Then it was left to Lilly to organize a search of the local joints and hotels for Hank. Sometimes he would go to WCOV and pick a fight with Dad Crysel, and Crysel’s band would take great pleasure in beating him senseless and tossing him out onto the street.
Occasionally, when the three-way strife mounted and he could bear it no longer, Hank would take off for the Florida panhandle. He would hole up in the San Carlos Hotel in Pensacola, and stay drunk for several days, often a week or more. Sometimes Lilly would send Hank to Lon’s house when he was on a bender. Watching him sober up one morning, Lon’s daughter, Leila, came to know why Hank would refer to himself as her “half a brother.” Everyone knew that Hank’s drinking was abnormal. His cousin, Walter McNeil Jr. (or “O’Neil McNeil,” as Lilly called him), had never — and would never — see anyone who drank with such singlemindedness as Hank. Whether he was a happy drunk or a mean drunk depended on his mood when he started drinking. Lilly couldn’t understand it at all. “She’d demand that he stop drinking,” says McNeil, “but he needed to pitch his drunk and get it out of his system for a few weeks or a few months.” Lilly saw Hank’s alcoholism in terms of weakness of will. She railed against it, cursed him, but never cast him out, perhaps because he was her only son, and perhaps because she guessed that he would one day amount to something despite himself.
Bernice Turner remembers driving to a gig in southern Alabama. Hank couldn’t drive because his license had been revoked, so he sat between Doyle and Bernice, asking them to stop every few miles so that he could get another beer. Doyle and Bernice decided to let him pass out, hoping that he would sleep it off and sober up in time for the show. “Hank mumbled something about wanting to lay his head in my lap,” said Bernice, “and as he said it he was falling anyway. When we got there, I eased out from underneath him, went in and set up.” They’d almost played a complete set when Hank came weaving in. He picked up his guitar and started singing “There’s a New Moon over My Shoulder.” “He was singing in one key and playing in another,” said Bernice. “Doyle looked at me and said, ‘Blue Steel Blues,’ and we started playing to try and drown him out. The place was packed, and Hank looked at us — a dirty look, then he looked at the fiddle player. He was gonna leave and take the musicians with him, but they didn’t go.” Later, there was a commotion outside when Hank picked a fight with a policeman. He was hauled off to jail, and the Turners went to get him out after the show, but found that the police had decided to keep him. They drove home, gave the takings to Lilly, and went to bed. The next day Lilly and Audrey drove down to get him out.
It seems that Hank was first treated for alcoholism early in 1945 at a sanatorium in Prattville, Alabama, although the treatment probably consisted only of rest and deprivation. As such, it was no more successful than any of the other treatments Hank was forced to take. Going on a spree was his way of dealing with life’s problems. It was also a means of relieving the back pain. When the band saw him gobbling aspirins, they knew that a bender was imminent. It probably never occurred to Audrey and Lilly that if Hank had a low tolerance for stress when the load was light, the success they craved might be a mixed blessing. “I’ll tell you something,” Audrey said many times, “if some woman, equally as strong as I am, had not come along, there would never have been a Hank Williams.”
Everyone associated with Hank felt that he could be their passport to better times, and they all fell into a dispiriting cycle with him. For several weeks everything would be fine. Hank would be straight, on time, and in tune for every gig. They’d go fishing down on the Alabama coastline. Hank and Audrey would be holding hands in the car, and the talk would be upbeat. Then something would snap, and Hank would be off on a drunk. The Turners eventually quit because he damned so many promising opportunities with his unreliability, which they — like everyone else — saw in terms of lack of willpower.
Toward the end of 1946, Hank tried to solve part of the problem by moving out of the boardinghouse and into a small rented house at 409 Washington Avenue. From the time that Audrey took up with Hank, Lycrecia had been living with her grandparents in Banks, but now she joined her mother and new stepfather. For the first time since he had lived with the McNeils, Hank was part of a mom-pop-and-the-kid relationship. He tried desperately hard to fill the role for which life had ill prepared him. When Hank was sober, Hank and Audrey’s relationship looked like true love. He tried especially hard not to drink around Lycrecia, and with encouragement and not-so-subtle pressure from Audrey, he began to look beyond the limited horizons of south-central Alabama.
At some point in 1945 or 1946, Hank went to Nashville, intending to try out for the Opry. He went to see announcer Jud Collins at WSM, the home station of the Opry. “They said someone was outside to see me,” said Collins, “and there was this guy with blue jeans and a white hat. He said, ‘I’m Hank Williams. Charlie Holt from WSFA told me to come up here and see you. He said you’d tell me what I have to do to get on the Opry.’” Collins told Hank that there were no shortcuts and that he would have to audition for Jack Stapp like everyone else. “He wouldn’t go see Jack,” said Collins. “He said, ‘You tell Jack Stapp I’m here.’ I think he was disappointed that I couldn’t take him by the hand and say, ‘Hank, you’re on the Opry tonight at eight.’” Hank heard the same thing that thousands of others had heard. Some might get as far as “Judge” Hay, who had the last word on the Opry artist roster. Usually, he would listen politely and then say, “Boys, come back and see me when you’re hot ‘nuff to draw flies.”
Although he returned home empty-handed, word about Hank Williams was slowly seeping out of Montgomery. Ernest Tubb remembered him opening an Opry show as a local added attraction around the time the war ended. In exchange for a spot on the show, Hank would promote it on WSFA. “When I got there, Hank had already started the show,” remembered Tubb. “He was supposed to do twenty minutes, and he was tearing the house down. He came off and they kept applauding. We like to never got him off the stage.” Tubb suggested to his booker, J. L. Frank, that he take on Hank, but Frank knew Hank’s reputation firsthand from working with Pee Wee King and told Tubb to stay clear.
There have been persistent claims that Hank sold songs to visiting Opry stars, but there is no firm evidence that he ever sold anything other than “(I’m Praying for the Day That) Peace Will Come.” One of the prime candidates for purchasing the kind of songs Hank wrote was his idol, Roy Acuff. In common with most of his contemporaries, Acuff bought songs outright when he could. When he became successful, he tried to administer his own music publishing, but then decided to go into partnership with Fred Rose, the man who would secure his future — and Hank’s too.
Fred Rose wasn’t a hillbilly, although he was born on the Kentucky-Indiana line in Evansville, Indiana, on August 24, 1897. He spent a miserable childhood in St. Louis, then set out for Chicago when he was in his teens. He later told an interviewer that he had been on his own since he was seven. He played piano, sang in the speakeasies, and was part of a twin piano feature on the Paul Whiteman show. Almost inevitably he turned to songwriting. He scored his first hit in 1921 with “Sweet Mama (Papa’s Gettin’ Mad).” Then in 1924, Sophie Tucker popularized “Red Hot Mamma,” and Isham Jones cut the first of many versions of “Honest and Truly.” Rose’s most enduring song, “Deed I Do,” was published in 1926. He married for the first time while in Chicago, and had two sons, Wesley and Lester, whom he would later bring into Acuff-Rose.
Through the Jazz Age, Rose was a featured radio performer on WBBM in Chicago, and he wrote prolifically. He remarried, and began grinding out show tunes, novelties, and topical songs, but the Depression and a bad drinking problem scuppered his career. He was thrown off radio in Chicago, moved to New York, and then, in 1933, he joined WSM in Nashville. This was not the comedown that it might seem. Much of WSM’s broadcast day was devoted to pop music despite the fact that it owned the Grand Ole Opry. Its orchestra was among the most renowned in the NBC network. Rose had his own show, Freddie Rose’s Song Shop, and he toured the mid-South with a trio. He also married for the third — and last — time during his first stint in Nashville.
In late 1935 or early 1936, Rose converted to Christian Science. He was back in New York, and his career was in a trough. His newfound faith enabled him to lick his alcoholism and try for a new start in Hollywood. He wrote many songs for Gene Autry, all the while commuting back and forth to Nashville. He also worked a stint at KVOO in Tulsa, where he met Bob Wills, whom he would later produce for Columbia. Rose’s conversion to country music was more gradual and less spectacular than his conversion to Christian Science, and it probably started soon after he arrived in Nashville. “Fred Rose came to Nashville to laugh,” Hank told Ralph Gleason in 1952, “and he heard Roy Acuff and said, ‘By God he means it.’” In the summer of 1942, Acuff approached Rose, who was back on WSM, with the proposition that they form a joint music publishing venture. Acuff offered to bankroll the company with twenty-five thousand dollars, but Rose apparently never needed to draw on that capital. The partnership, technically between Rose and Acuff’s wife Mildred, was launched in October 1942. It would be Nashville’s first professional music publishing company.
While Acuff was at the pinnacle of his career, Hank was just a local star in a small market. He wasn’t even semi-itinerant like most country musicians. No one was sick of him in Montgomery, but he couldn’t use his local success as a springboard to a bigger market because he was already damned as unreliable, and, in a business full of problem drinkers, his reputation was among the worst.