Chapter 5
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive
Robert Loius Stevenson
ONE more opportunity was opening up for Fred Rose as he tried to place Hank Williams with a major record label in the spring of 1947. The giant Loews corporation, which owned MGM Pictures, had just started a record division. The same economic conditions that had prompted the formation of Sterling Records hadn’t gone unnoticed further up the corporate pecking order. MGM had seen songs from its fabled musicals go on to sell hundreds of thousands of records for other companies. They had, for instance, stood by helpless as José Iturbi’s “Polonaise in A-Flat” from A Song to Remember sold more than eight hundred thousand copies for RCA. Loews saw this income slipping through its fingers. Viewed from the outside, the record business seemed like a no-lose proposition in those immediate postwar years. But MGM didn’t want its record division to be a lowly independent, so industry veteran Frank B. Walker was hired away from RCA in August 1945. MGM bankrolled him for a couple of years as he prepared to launch a fully functioning quasi-major label.
Born in upstate New York in October 1889, Walker had, as he liked to tell Hank and Fred Rose, been cutting country records since before Hank was born. One of them had been the Coles’ “Tramp on the Street.” Walker had broken into the music business in 1919 as a concert booker with Central Concerts in Detroit, then joined Columbia Records in 1921. As the label’s head of “race” music, he signed Bessie Smith in 1923, and recorded country music on his field trips. He liked to recall how he rode horses back into the woods in search of a singer or musician that someone had told him about. He sold records in the rural areas by renting vacant storefronts, setting up benches, playing the new releases, and taking the cash himself.
In 1933, Walker moved to RCA and launched Bluebird Records as a Depression-era budget label. During the Second World War, he was seconded to the government’s V-Disc unit, resuming with RCA before being seduced by MGM. Walker had seen and done it all. He could talk as easily about injection molding in the plant as he could about the innards of music publishing, or the respective merits of two blues singers. He was the sort of generalist that doesn’t exist anymore. Short and dapper, with steel-rimmed glasses and a patrician air, he wasn’t entirely convincing in his attempt to make Hank feel as though they were both ex–farm boys, but of all the record company CEOs in New York or Los Angeles, he was the only one with much understanding of what Hank Williams was doing.
After Walker came onboard, MGM paid $3.5 million to convert a munitions plant in Bloomfield, New Jersey, into a pressing plant capable of churning out forty million discs a year. Walker then set up distribution through Zenith Radio stores, supplemented by a network of independent distributors. Despite MGM’s clout, MGM Records never really became a major player. For one thing, Walker was notoriously cheap. He told his promotion staff to write to radio stations because it was cheaper than phoning, and he didn’t like to give away promotional copies. His first signings were in December 1946 for a scheduled launch in March 1947. Waving MGM’s checkbook, he culled Jimmy Dorsey, Kate Smith, Ziggy Elman, and Billy Eckstine from the ranks of established artists whose contracts were up. His initial signings in what could loosely be termed country music were Sam Nichols, the Korn Kobblers, and Carson Robison. Of those, Robison was the best known. He’d written topical songs through the Depression and the war (such as “Prosperity Is Just Around Which Corner?” and “Hitler’s Last Letter to Hirohito"). To give MGM a little filip at launch time, Walker lowballed the price of his records to sixty cents instead of the usual seventy-five cents, maintaining the lower price until May 1948. By the time he hiked the price, the label had its first hits, one of them by Hank Williams.
Most writing about Hank Williams has taken its cue from Wesley Rose, who said that it was the success of “Honky Tonkin’” on Sterling that encouraged his father to seek a better deal and persuaded Walker to sign Hank. This could not have been the case, though. The MGM contract was dated March 6, 1947, two months before “Honky Tonkin’” was released, and it became effective on April 1, 1947. Hank received an artist royalty for the first time: two cents per record, or roughly 3 percent of MGM’s low list price of sixty cents. Three percent was, if anything, on the high side of what an untested act could expect. There is an apocryphal — but probably true — story that Hank didn’t understand percentages and opted for a flat fee instead.
According to a deposition that Walker gave in February 1963, he had known Fred Rose since the early 1930s, and seemed to imply that he had met Hank before the Sterling contract. “[Hank] was submitting songs he had written to Mr. Rose for potential publication,” Walker said. “Mr. Rose and I looked at them together, and we agreed to the possibilities.” Walker also said that he, Fred Rose, and Hank jointly chose all the Hank songs recorded for MGM, although he’s probably overstating his involvement. Rose acted as producer, or “A&R Representative.” Today, a producer would expect to receive around 3 percent of a record’s gross, but Rose, like many A&R men at the time, worked solely for the music publisher’s share of the songwriter’s royalty. RCA Victor’s legendary A&R man, Ralph Peer, reportedly received just one dollar a year from RCA, but secured the publishing on almost everything he recorded (thereby acquiring songs that became standards, like “Walk Right In” and “Wildwood Flower"). Rose agreed to give MGM a bargain rate of 1.25 cents per song when the standard rate was 2 cents per song. This income was split fifty-fifty with the songwriter. When Hank’s contract was renegotiated in April 1951, the publishing royalty (or “mechanical,” as it was known) was upped to 1.5 cents.
Hank’s first MGM session was held on April 21, 1947, with the core of Red Foley’s band. Rose knew what was at stake. Hank would get one or two shots on MGM, and if the sales weren’t there, he’d be dropped. Nashville had no session men in April 1947, and Foley’s band was the sharpest in town. Rose probably figured that he needed a touch of class on the instrumental track to offset Hank’s hillbilly edges. Guitarist Zeke Turner would play on several of Hank’s sessions, and his brother Zeb would play several more. The backwoods aliases (Zeb and Zeke’s real names were Edward and James Cecil Grishaw) disguised two of the more adroit pickers Hank ever used; they were perhaps too fancy for his taste. Brownie Reynolds played bass. Tommy Jackson was on fiddle, and Smokey Lohman on steel guitar. This was a group capable of delivering exactly what Rose wanted, and more than Hank wanted.
“Move It on Over” was the first song Hank cut for MGM. More than any other song he’d recorded to that point, it betrayed his debt to black music. It rocked. The melody was as old as the blues itself; a variant had done business as “Your Red Wagon” and another variant became “Rock Around the Clock.” Hank, like Elvis Presley some years later, never played black music in the tragically white way — oversouling and overplaying. “Move It on Over” was a lazy record even at its brisk tempo. This may have been Tee-Tot’s legacy to Hank, and — if it was — it was worth all the nickels and dimes Lilly had scrimped to pay him. Zeke Turner played a lovely little solo, a model of brilliant economy. If the melody of “Move It on Over” had been around the block, the lyrical content was pure Hank Williams. As Hank’s future fiddle player, Jerry Rivers, once said, “[Hank’s] novelty songs weren’t novelty — they were serious, not silly, and that’s why they were much better accepted and better selling. ‘Move It on Over’ hits right home, ’cause half of the people he was singing to were in the doghouse with the ol’ lady.”
The sound edged closer to Roy Acuff on the session’s second song, “I Saw the Light.” It remains Hank’s best-known hymn, but if gospel composer Albert E. Brumley had been a litigious man, his name would be bracketed alongside Hank’s in the composer credit. Not only was the melody very close to Brumley’s “He Set Me Free,” but even the lyrics bore a passing resemblance. The hugely prolific Brumley, best known for “I’ll Fly Away,” had published “He Set Me Free” in a 1939 songbook titled The Gospel Tide, and it had been cut in March 1941 by the Chuck Wagon Gang. Another white gospel group, the Southern Joy Quartet, recorded it shortly before Hank wrote “I Saw the Light.”
By all accounts, “I Saw the Light” was written on the way back from a dance in Fort Deposit. If all the people who later claimed to be in the car with Hank that night had actually been there, he would have needed a twenty-passenger bus. One who claimed to be there was Leaborne Eads, who had flyposted the dance for Lilly. He remembers:
Mizz Williams had given me money to hand out circulars at Fort Deposit. Hank was higher than a kite by the time the show was over. She drove home, and he was in the back seat sleepin’ it off. There was a beacon light near Dannelly Field Airport, and Mizz Williams knew it always took time to get Hank awake when he was drunk like that, so she turned around and told him, “Hank, wake up, we’re nearly home. I just saw the light.” Between there and home he wrote the song.
“I Saw the Light” wasn’t just “He Set Me Free” with new lyrics, though. It was the prayer of the backslider, who lives in hope of redemption. Hank wrote at least two drafts, which was unusual for him. The first was dated Sunday, January 26, 1947, so perhaps, as Eads said, it was written right after the Saturday night dance in Fort Deposit. “Lord” was spelled “Loard.” Why? Probably because the words Hank knew best were “Room and Board” posted outside Lilly’s boardinghouse. If “board” was “b-o-a-r-d,” then “Lord” was “l-o-a-r-d.” Hank was the first to record the song, but wasn’t the first to release it. His version was held back until September 1948, but Rose pitched the song around. On August 13, 1947, Clyde Grubbs recorded it for RCA, and then on November 18 the song’s copublisher and spiritual mentor, Roy Acuff, recorded it. Both versions were released before Hank’s.
The other two songs from that first MGM session, “(Last Night) I Heard You Crying in Your Sleep” and “Six More Miles (to the Graveyard),” became flip sides for “Move It on Over” and “I Saw the Light,” respectively. An embryonic version of “(Last Night) I Heard You Crying in Your Sleep” exists as a lyric sheet in the Alabama Department of Archives and History. As with the early version of “I Saw the Light,” the words are quite dissimilar, suggesting that songwriting wasn’t quite the spontaneous act that Hank later made it out to be.
“Move It on Over” was released on June 6, 1947, and, two months later, it became Hank’s first Billboard hit. On August 21, 1947, he received his first extended write-up in the Montgomery Examiner. Calling him the “spur-jangling Sinatra of the western ballad,” the writer stated that Hank had already sold more than one hundred thousand copies of “Move It on Over.” Then, inviting gales of laughter from those close to Hank, the article went on to say, “Where the inspiration for the song came from [Hank] couldn’t say,” adding, “it’s not his own married life. Mr. and Mrs. Hank Williams lead a model domestic life.” The model for the Bickersons, perhaps.
Around the same time, there was another write-up, this one by the Reverend A. S. Turnipseed in the Montgomery News. Turnipseed had evidently attended one of Hank’s shows. He described the audience as young and “not dressed as to indicate any affluence.” It was, he noted, a mostly restrained crowd. “Any preacher who has preached in the rural sections of the white counties of Alabama has observed the same restraint even when highly emotional preaching was going on,” he said. Turnipseed went on to say that fully half of Hank’s program was devoted to comedy routines and horseplay. There was one religious number, but the only time the crowd was whipped up was when Hank sang “Move It on Over” and “Pan American.” Turnipseed concluded by trying to put Hank in a broader context. Changes were taking place in Montgomery as white sandyland farmers like Hank moved into town, challenging the right to rule of the state’s old-money families. “As Hank Williams plays,” Turnipseed noted apocalyptically, “Rome is burning.” There was a half-valid point beneath the bluster. There was a migration into town from the rural communities, and even if the new migrants weren’t challenging the old money’s right to rule, they were certainly bringing their music with them. The former farmers weren’t stopping in Montgomery, either. That’s why Hank had ready-made audiences when he eventually appeared in places like Cleveland, Washington, and even Oakland. He was a letter from home.
On August 4, just as “Move It on Over” was breaking, Hank was called back to the studio. This time he brought up a band from Montgomery, but they weren’t used to recording and Rose quickly became frustrated. Midway through the session, he sent for Red Foley’s fiddle player, Tommy Jackson, to replace the man Hank had brought up. Two of the four songs recorded, “Fly Trouble” and “I’m Satisfied with You,” were written or cowritten by Fred Rose. As incomprehensible as it seems now, it was common during the 1940s to release a new record just as a hit was peaking, so “Fly Trouble” was released in September 1947, just as “Move It on Over” reached number four. Rose wrote it with the blackface comedy team of Jamup and Honey, modeling it on slick West Coast country novelty songs like “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette).” It seemed to signal Rose’s intention of easing Hank uptown. From the hokey lyrics to Sammy Pruett’s jazzy guitar breaks, the entire production was precisely what Hank’s music was not about, and it was precisely what white sandyland farmers who had just moved to town did not want to hear. Rose issued it with “On the Banks of the Old Pontchartrain,” a ballad along traditional lines, in the sense that it related a story. The writer was Ramona Vincent, a crippled woman from Louisiana. She had mailed the song to Hank as a poem, and he put a melody to it. There’s correspondence in which Hank asks Fred Rose how to go about buying a song. It remains the least typical song with Hank Williams’ name on it. The coupling of “Fly Trouble” and “On the Banks of the Old Pontchartrain” flopped miserably, and in later years Hank would use it as a personal metaphor for a poor-selling record. “Sure am glad it ain’t another damn ‘Pontchartrain,’” he’d say when people would congratulate him on a hit. More than anything, it proved how much Rose had yet to learn about Hank’s music and his audience.
At this point, Hank was no more than a sidebar to Fred Rose’s activities and was far from MGM’s best-selling artist. In October 1947, Rose was in Chicago producing Bob Wills’ last Columbia session for Art Satherley. As Satherley knew, Wills had been seduced away by Frank Walker, an acquisition that seemed to be the coup Walker needed. By the end of October 1947, MGM’s country roster consisted of Bob Wills, Hank Williams, Carson Robison, Denver Darling, Jerry Irby (who’d written the beer-joint anthem “Driving Nails in My Coffin"), and another Rose protégé, Rome Johnson. It was Robison who would give the country division its biggest hit in 1948 with “Life Gits Tee-Jus, Don’t It.” Bob Wills’ career was in a slow, inexorable decline, and it would be another year and a half before Hank got his career back on track.
“Move It on Over” gave Hank the first serious money he had ever seen. When he talked to the Alabama Journal in 1947, he estimated that his songwriting alone would bring him between $15,000 and $20,000 that year, but he was a little overoptimistic. His MGM royalties came in at $439.55 (equating to roughly twenty-two thousand copies of “Move It on Over"), and his Acuff-Rose royalties totaled $1,709.11. Under pressure from Audrey, Hank put some of that money down on a house — his first — at 10 Stuart Avenue in Montgomery, and some toward a fur coat for Audrey. Citizens Realty (owned by Bill Perdue, who co-owned Radio Recording, where Hank cut his songwriting demos) had to give Hank the commission it made on the sale to help him with the $2,200 deposit.
The delays built into royalty accounting meant that more “Move It on Over” money came through in 1948, and it seems likely that some of it was earmarked for 318 North McDonough Street, a large boarding-house that Lilly purchased that year. Perhaps she had made it unambiguously clear that since she had supported Hank from the first guitar to the first hit, the bill was now due. Lilly was a married woman again. On May 1, 1946, she had divorced J. C. Bozard, and on March 1, 1947, she married one of her boarders, William Wallace “Bill” Stone, from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Everyone liked Stone, a widower some years younger than Lilly, but he had a fondness for the bottle and remained a shadowy presence in Hank’s life. Stone had been a taxi driver and had apprenticed as a carpenter with Crump Craft, but was working at Pelham and Shell Antique Reproduction Furniture when he married Lilly. Later, he brought one of Hank’s cousins, Walter McNeil, into the company as an apprentice.
Number 10 Stuart Avenue was small, boxy, and sparsely furnished, and Audrey spent money that should have gone into stocking the icebox on tony metal awnings over the windows. It might have been home, but if Audrey and Lycrecia were out of town, Hank would do anything to avoid being in his little house by himself. “He’d come over to where I lived,” said Lum York. “He’d say, ‘Come on, go with me.’ I’d say, ‘Where you goin’?’ He said, ‘I’m goin’ to the house.’ I’d say, ‘Hank, I don’t want to go out there, all you gonna do is git a funny book and sit there and read, and I’ll be sittin’ there with nobody to talk to.’” Like many entertainers, Hank always needed an audience. Nothing unsettled him more than his own company.
Lycrecia insists that times were good on Stuart Avenue; others, particularly band members, remember the spats. Both Hank and Audrey had low boiling points, and arguments would blow up out of inconsequentialities. Once, Hank called the Radio Hospital to come and repair his wire recorder (the forerunner of the tape recorder) and the bill came to $17.50. Audrey hissed at him for squandering all that money on his recorder, and Hank grabbed Audrey’s fur coat and began trashing it. The repairman ran for the door. A couple of days later, Lilly appeared at the store with the $17.50. Peace had returned to Stuart Avenue. On another occasion, Fred and Irella Beach were at the house working up a new song (Fred had worked in one of the earliest incarnations of the Drifting Cowboys). “Audrey was whining and whining,” said Irella. “Then Hank said, ‘Fred, let’s us try another song,’ and Audrey went storming off into the bedroom and sent her little girl into the living room. She said, ‘My momma says for you all to go home.’ When we left, Hank was yelling at Audrey and screamin’ at her like nothin’ you ever heard. He hit her hard, too.”
The Beaches had walked in on one of the problems that plagued Hank and Audrey’s relationship. From the time they married, Audrey had been a part of the show. She played bass, even drums on occasion, and she sang. Now she sensed Hank distancing himself from her professionally. She wanted to be more than a happy homemaker, which would be easier to applaud if her singing were better. It’s hard to know if Hank was trying to ease her out of the picture because she couldn’t sing, or because he thought she should be at home cooking and cleaning. Clearly, it was a source of tension. In a letter to Fred Rose dated August 19, 1947, Hank mentioned that he had mailed a demo of himself and Audrey singing “I Saw the Light.” He’d already recorded it for MGM, but it hadn’t been released, so perhaps Audrey wanted to redo it as a duet. “We didn’t do much on [it],” Hank wrote, as if trying to discourage Rose from doing much on it either. “We never had tried it until we went to make the record.” Rose had no problem resisting the notion that Hank and Audrey should record together, but, as Hank became more successful and Audrey more insistent, their pairing on record became inevitable.
If Rose didn’t already know it, the demo would have told him that Audrey’s singing voice was shrill and tuneless, and, like many people who sing badly, she seemed to have no sense of how bad she was. “Audrey couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket,” said R. D. Norred, “and the more she practiced, the worse she got.” Her duets with Hank were like an extension of their married life as she fought him for dominance on every note. For the present, she would be confined to occasional show dates and morning radio in Montgomery, but she wouldn’t be denied much longer.
In late 1947, the music trade papers were consumed with talk of an upcoming recording ban. It soon became clear that the American Federation of Musicians would call a strike effective December 31, 1947, when agreements with all the record companies expired. The problem was a dinosaur named James C. Petrillo, who held the presidency of the AFM as a virtual fiefdom. Petrillo was bitterly opposed to records, the use of records on radio, and the network broadcasting of live and prerecorded music. All of these, he declared, were inimical to his members’ best interests. The AFM’s agreements with radio were good until 1949, but, with the recording agreements running out at the end of 1947, Petrillo wanted to send a message to the networks via the record companies. It was a more direct hit than it seemed because two of the three major labels, RCA and Columbia, were owned by NBC and CBS, respectively. As a long-term goal, Petrillo wanted to shut down the record business; one of his oft-repeated lines was, “These records are destroying us.” In the short term, though, he wanted to test the union’s strength against the Taft-Hartley bill, wring a few financial concessions from the record companies, and fire a warning shot over the bows of the radio networks.
Petrillo’s first attempt at strangling the record business had come a few years earlier. He’d called a strike in August 1942 that lasted until various points in late 1943 and early 1944. One by one, the companies settled with him, and he won some concessions. In 1947, the companies were ready for Petrillo and began stockpiling masters as year-end approached. The majors viewed the ban as a blessing in disguise; they could work through their backlog of masters, press up catalog, squeeze out the independent labels and, as one unnamed executive said, “There’ll be no placating artists with expensive sessions.” Petrillo’s crusades against records for home use and broadcast as well as the networking of live broadcasts were all doomed. Fewer remotes of live broadcasts were being picked up every year, and more deejays were being hired. And, by 1947, the growth of the home record market was a tide that no one — least of all Petrillo — could stem.
Down in Montgomery, Hank Williams was barely aware of this. He knew he was being called to Nashville for two sessions on November 6 and 7, 1947, and needed to have some songs ready. Rose wanted eight usable sides that could be doled out over the length of the strike. MGM, only in business for nine months, had more reason to feel jittery than the other major labels because its overhead was already high and its back catalog was shallow.
“We had worked up some songs ’cause of the ban coming,” says R. D. Norred.
Fred Rose had called Hank and told him to get his songs together, and we had maybe fifteen worked up. I knew you made forty dollars a session, so I went down to Art Freehling’s [music store] and got me a real steel guitar and we was ready to go. We had it pretty well complete, then Fred come down to go over things, and he said he couldn’t use the band. Hank said, “Why?” and Fred says, “You know how Lum was the last time he was up there. Fidget, fidget, it took all night cutting songs. This time, you ain’t gonna get to try it twice.” He said, “Them staff musicians up there, you’re not gonna have to practice with them boys, you just do your part and they’ll do theirs.” Hank said, “Well, I’ll take Norred with me, anyway,” and Fred said, “No, you just can’t put Norred with Zeke Turner and expect it to work.” Hank didn’t like it, but there wasn’t too much he could say about it.
Hank arrived in Nashville to find a group drawn from two Opry bands. Zeke Turner was back, together with two other members of Red Foley’s band, steel guitarist Jerry Byrd and rhythm guitarist Louis Innis. Rose paired them with Bill Monroe’s fiddle player, Chubby Wise, and might have played the barely audible piano himself. The first song they cut, “Rootie Tootie,” was one of Rose’s songs. He’d already pitched it to Pee Wee King and country bandleader Paul Howard, and all three versions were released in January 1948. Rose did very well from King’s version because it got a free ride on the flip side of King’s original version of “Tennessee Waltz,” but the song otherwise did little business.
Hank then cut three of his own songs, “I Can’t Get You Off of My Mind,” “I’m a Long Gone Daddy,” and a remake of “Honky Tonkin’.” The following day, he cut three more original songs, “My Sweet Love Ain’t Around,” “The Blues Come Around,” and “I’ll Be a Bachelor ’til I Die,” and one not-so-original song, “A Mansion on the Hill.” The originals were a marked departure from the Sterling songs, recorded just one year earlier. Perhaps the success of “Move It on Over” had shown Hank the way, and given him some encouragement. These recordings sounded like hits, not like 1930s field recordings caught out of time.
“A Mansion on the Hill” was credited to Hank and Fred Rose. The old story that Hank had written it in a side room when he first met Rose wasn’t the way Audrey remembered it:
Fred said…"To prove to me you can write, I’m gonna give you a title, and I want you to take it back to Montgomery and write a song around it.” Hank worked with it and worked with it, but he never could do too much good with it, and the reason he couldn’t was because it wasn’t his idea. One night I had just finished with the dinner dishes, and I started singing “Tonight down here in the valley…” After I got through with it, I took it in to Hank and said, “Hank, what do you think of this?” He really liked it, and it was a mixture of my lyrics, Hank’s lyrics, and Fred Rose’s lyrics. Hank sent it in, and for a long time I wouldn’t tell anybody that I had anything to do with that because I wanted it to be all Hank.
The reason Hank had a problem with “A Mansion on the Hill” was that he couldn’t write narrative ballads. All of his best songs froze a moment, a feeling, or a grudge. The only shred of personal experience he could draw on for “A Mansion on the Hill” was the unrequited ardor he’d once had for the daughter of the mayor of Montgomery. Boots Harris remembered driving him around in Lilly’s station wagon looking for her night after night in theater lineups, knowing all the while that she was unattainable. Perhaps a little of that surfaced in the song.
Hank set “A Mansion on the Hill” to a melody he’d poached from Bob Wills’ 1938 recording of “I Wonder If You Feel the Way I Do.” Released in December 1948, just as the ban was ending, “A Mansion on the Hill” did little business until March 1949, when it was caught up in the tidal wave of Hank’s career.
The two sessions before the record ban were a template for the years ahead. Under Rose’s guidance, Hank began to realize his strengths and weaknesses as a writer, and he brought along songs that improved with every session. The sessionmen might have looked down their noses at Hank’s music, but they were attuned to the challenge of bringing the Acuff sound into the honky-tonk. Rose’s role was to hone Hank’s songs before the session and work with the pickers during the session to keep a tight commercial focus. He seemed happiest to let Hank follow his instincts, although he continued to feed him dumb little novelties like “Rootie Tootie.” Perhaps Rose included his own songs to double his money from MGM, but it’s likelier that Hank simply wasn’t generating enough material that Rose considered worth releasing.
At the time the ban came into effect, Hank’s band was still composed of R. D. Norred, Lum York, Little Joe Pennington, and Red Todd. The stability in the lineup was itself an indication of the growing confidence level around Hank. That November, it looked as though Rose would land them a gig on WLAC in Nashville, which would be a step toward the Opry. Penington recalled the group buying matching outfits in anticipation:
We’d ordered in western outfits. Pea-green shirts, western-cut khaki pants, and western boots. [Hank’s cousin] Marie did appliqué embroidery on the shirts from a pattern that you ironed on. We were a real band when we had suits like that, but those outfits cost thirty dollars each, and thirty dollars was about what we made a week, and we had to pay our board out of that. Hank paid for all the outfits when the order come in. He said, “Boys, any y’all got the money you can pay me off, the rest that don’t come on down to the loan company and we’ll sign you up.” So Lum and Red and me went down and signed up with the Montgomery Loan and Finance Company to pay off these outfits.
The loan agreements were dated November 3, 1947.
Rose’s approach to WLAC fell through, and in February 1948, Hank thought about moving to the Washington, D.C., area. A promoter there, Connie B. Gay, had a show, Town and Country, that needed a star. On February 23, Hank wired Lilly from Cincinnati, telling her to tell the boys that he was heading for Washington. Lum York says that he’d left tickets for them, but the band had so little faith in Hank’s ability to deliver on the promises that they cashed in the tickets and waited for him to return.
It was still a rare day that the band got more than a day’s drive out of Montgomery. On one occasion, Hank was booked as a supporting act on a show at the Temple Theater in Birmingham. Pennington discovered that it was a union gig, checked with the union hall, and found out that scale (the minimum that could be paid) was roughly twice what Hank was paying. Norred recalled:
Hank said, “I want y’all in the back room.” We got in there and he said, “Who’s the little bright boy been down to the union office?” Joe said, ‘"I did.” Hank said, “Did you find out what you wanted to know down there?” Joe said, “Yeah, union scale is fifteen dollars.” So he paid us. Joe said, “I just wanted to make sure I was gonna get what was coming to me,” and Hank said — sarcastic like — “Friend, you’ll get what’s comin’ to you.”
It was a pattern Hank would follow throughout his professional life. He would leave a twenty-dollar tip on a fifty-cent breakfast, or simply forget where he had stashed the night’s takings, but would chisel his band members out of five bucks if he could.
After it became clear that Hank would not be moving to Nashville or Washington, he could do no more than cement his already high standing around Montgomery. As he told the Montgomery News that year, “I got the popularest daytime program on this station” (the nighttime programming was drawn from the NBC feed). During the spring of 1948, the group landed a regular gig at the 31 Club, a juke joint in Montgomery with a big dance area. But that spring, Hank slowly unraveled. His disintegration is documented in a series of letters from Fred Rose. Over the course of eighteen months, Rose had taken a profound interest in Hank’s well-being. “I’m opening up my heart to you,” he wrote in one letter, “because I love you like my own son, and you can call on me anytime when you are in a problem.” Going well beyond professional interest or self-interest, Rose dispensed advice on every aspect of life.
In February, Audrey gave up on Hank and took Lycrecia back to Banks, leaving Hank despondent. “The trouble with you kids is that both of you want to be boss,” wrote Rose. “Both of you have pride. Pride is one of the most destructive lies on earth.…It is something we should all get rid of as quickly as possible so that we can enjoy the happiness of humility.…If Audry [sic] wants you to wreck your life because of this misunderstanding, fool her, show her you can be a success in spite of her, not because of her.”
One month later, on March 19, Rose wrote to Hank, castigating him.
Wesley [Rose] tells me you called this morning for more money after me wiring you four hundred dollars just the day before yesterday…. We have gone as far as we can go at this time and cannot send you any more.
Hank I have tried to be a friend of yours but you refuse to let me be one. I feel that you are just using me for a good thing, and this is where I quit. You have been very unfair, calling the house in the middle of the night and I hope you will not let it happen again.
When you get ready to straighten out let me know and maybe we can pick up where we left off, but for the present I am fed up with your foolishness.
One week later, Rose wrote to Lilly. Apparently, Hank was holed up in Pensacola, Florida. Rose had sent him some contracts, and Hank hadn’t returned them. “The reason I am asking Hank to sign this particular legal type of contract is for his own protection,” Rose wrote, “so that he won’t get too full of firewater and sign a bad contract with someone else.”
By April 3, Hank had returned to Montgomery, and Rose thought he had come to his senses.
I hear you have been doing a pretty good job of straightening yourself out and nobody is more glad to hear it than me. Hank, anything I’ve written you or said is for your own good as I know what a fool a man can make of himself with drinking….
You are destined for big things in the recording and songwriting field, and you are the only one who can ruin this opportunity. In the future, forget the firewater and let me take care of your business and you’ll be a big name in this business.
Remember that women are revengeful and do all in their power to wreck a man when they separate from him and the only way to win is for the man to become successful.
In fact, Hank hadn’t straightened out. That day, he sold his house at 10 Stuart Avenue. He got his $2,200 deposit back, and the new owner assumed the mortgage. Hank went on a spending spree. Five days later, on April 8, a package show came to the Charles Theater. Cowboy Copas and Johnny Bond were the stars, and Hank was to open for them while the group played the 31 Club. Perhaps he was drunk, but he didn’t go over well at the Charles. Johnny Bond took it upon himself to tell the people of Montgomery not to take Hank for granted. “You people don’t know ‘bout this boy here,” Bond told the crowd. “He won’t be ‘round here very long. His records are going like wildfire all over the West Coast.”
Hank had promised that he would bring the headliners back to the 31 after their show, so the band was surprised when Bond appeared without Hank. “Johnny come in, sang a song,” remembered Pennington, “and we said, ‘Is Hank with y’all?’ One of them said, ‘Well the last we saw him, him and Copas was backstage with a couple of women and a bottle.’ R.D. said, ‘Well, you needn’t look for him for a while.’”
Two or three nights later, Hank showed up. He hadn’t shaved since before the Charles show, and was still pitifully hungover. He went up to the bandstand and tried to play a few songs, but he’d known better nights. He tried to smooth things over with the bartender, who was also the owner, but it didn’t work, and he staggered off into the night. The band was offered Hank’s job and they took it. “Now, who’s gonna tell Hank?” said Pennington.
They decided I was gonna do it, and me and Red went up there — a sanatorium somewhere. Audrey was up there and Hank was propped up in bed. They knew where to take him. Hank said, “How you fellas doing? What’s happening down at the club?” I said, “Well the owner’s fixin’ to get another band.” Hank said, “Oh?” I said, “Well, he’s offered us the job, and we thought we’d go ahead and take it.” He said, “Well, do what you want to,” and he got kinda surly.
Hank never held down another regular gig or assembled another band in Montgomery. His life was a series of peaks and troughs. During the downward spirals, Hank would go to the brink, then pull himself back in the nick of time. He did it so many times that he probably made the fatal mistake of thinking he could always do it. The spring of 1948 was one of his deepest troughs, but he slowly came around. On April 12, he finally signed Fred Rose’s contracts, and Rose placed him on a fifty-dollar-a-month retainer. The first check came through on April 30. Audrey, though, had decided to file for divorce, and it was too late to change her mind. “Hank Williams my husband is twenty-four years of age,” she said in her complaint. “He has a violent and ungovernable temper. He drinks a great deal, and during the last month, he has been drunk most of the time. My nervous system has been upset and I am afraid to live with him any longer.” On May 26, after three and a half years of marriage, Hank and Audrey were divorced.
In Audrey’s complaint and in Rose’s letters we can sense the frustrations involved in dealing with Hank Williams. He was manipulative, selfish, violent, and indiscriminately unfaithful when drunk. Audrey saw Hank’s talent and saw him shooting himself in the foot. He seemed to be damning himself to the joints of south-central Alabama, and she railed against it. Like Lilly, she saw the alcoholism in terms of self-control, a view that was reinforced by the fact that there were times when Hank could control it.
After the separation, Hank moved back to Lilly’s boardinghouse. His old band members would see him there sometimes sitting on the swing, wearing his hat and his suit. He and Audrey reconciled, although the divorce remained in effect. The bridge to Acuff-Rose was mended. Rose inserted a clause into the contract that he subsequently crossed out: “During the three-year period from the date of this contract, the said Hank Williams agrees to conduct himself in a manner not detrimental to Acuff-Rose Publications.” The contract also stated that Acuff-Rose could “accept as liquidated damages all future royalties to which…Hank Williams may be entitled.” Rose’s faith in Hank clearly had boundaries.
Everyone but Lilly knew that Hank had to get out of Montgomery. “Aunt Lilly had mixed emotions about Hank leaving Montgomery,” said Hank’s cousin, Walter McNeil. “She felt that he could stay here and eventually make the Grand Ole Opry. But Audrey knew better.” Fred Rose shared Audrey’s opinion that Hank must move to a bigger market or at least a station with more wattage. Hank, though, was tainted with the twin curses of unreliability and drunkenness. The industry was small, and even though Hank hadn’t been far outside south-central Alabama, his reputation had. The Opry was out of the question, but Saturday night jamborees were proliferating.
Down in Shreveport, Louisiana, radio station KWKH had started a Saturday night jamboree while Hank was on his springtime bender. It didn’t have any big-name acts yet, and it was the best Fred Rose could get. On Thursday, July 29, 1948, Hank signed off WSFA. One way or another, he had to get out of Montgomery, and Shreveport seemed to be the place to take a stand.