Chapter 6
I’ll tune up my fiddle, rosin up my bow, I’ll make myself welcome wherever I go.
“Rye Whiskey” (unknown)
SHORTLY after signing off WSFA, Hank and Audrey loaded Lycrecia and a few possessions into an old Chrysler and set off for Shreveport, Louisiana. They stopped in Houston on July 31 so that Hank could make an appearances at Pappy Daily’s Record Ranch and Daily’s jukebox distributorship, Southern Amusements. Daily would someday have the thankless task of managing and producing George Jones, but in 1948 he was still a retailer and distributor. His young son, Donald, shot some photos before Hank drove on to Shreveport.
Hank Williams spent just ten months in Shreveport, but during those months he became a star. Country music was localized, and cities like Shreveport were self-contained scenes. Artists would usually work a city until they’d “played it out,” and it’s a testament to Hank’s appeal that he’d worked Montgomery on and off for ten years without coming close to playing it out. Every artist’s goal was to join one of the premier radio barn dances, such as WLS’s National Barn Dance in Chicago, WLW’s Boone County Jamboree (later known as the Midwestern Hayride) in Cincinnati, the Renfro Valley Barn Dance (also in Cincinnati), and of course Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. Hank had a lot to prove before one of those would touch him.
The Louisiana Hayride was a minor-league jamboree when Hank joined, but, between 1948 and 1954, it gave the all-important first break to Webb Pierce, Faron Young, Johnnie and Jack, Kitty Wells, Johnny Horton, Slim Whitman, Jim Reeves, the Browns, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Tommy Sands, Claude King, Billy Walker…and Hank Williams. One by one, they left, together with a crew of backing musicians that included James Burton, Floyd Cramer, and Jerry Kennedy. If only a few had stayed, Shreveport might have taken a run at Nashville’s preeminence, which was newly established and vulnerable. As it was, the Hayride simply became an Opry farm club, or, as it called itself after everyone had left, the Cradle of the Stars.
Just as WSM was the key to Nashville’s preeminence, so KWKH could have made Shreveport’s hillbilly music business achieve critical mass. The station’s long and tangled history began with a local businessman, W. K. Henderson, whose initials it bore. Henderson conducted quixotic crusades against chain stores, and his abuse of clear-channel wattage made him an early target of the Federal Radio Commission (the forerunner of the FCC). Not content to own the station, Henderson went on the air with his trademark greeting, “Hello world, doggone ya!” Jimmie Davis was one of the station’s early mainstays. Twice governor of Louisiana and the man who popularized (and claimed to have written) “You Are My Sunshine,” Davis made his first recordings for Henderson’s short-lived “Doggone” label.
Henderson sold KWKH in September 1932 to a Shreveport consortium that brought the station into the CBS network, and then, in 1935, it was purchased by John D. Ewing, owner of the Shreveport Times. In 1939, KWKH became a fifty-thousand-watt clear-channel station. Fifty thousand watts (compared with WSFA’s one thousand) was the maximum allowable in the United States, and the clear channel meant that the frequency was assigned to just one station. The only stations with more power were the five-hundred-thousand-watt border stations that operated from Mexico, with a signal so powerful that it obliterated everything within fifty kilocycles of the stations’ frequency path. Fifty thousand watts was enough for Hank Williams, though. It would bring him to a larger audience than he’d ever known.
As far back as 1936, KWKH hosted a radio jamboree, the Sunday afternoon Hillbilly Amateur Show with Bob and Joe Shelton (the Sunshine Boys). The following year, the Sheltons’ show became the Saturday Night Roundup, but it was discontinued during the war. Immediately after the war, John Ewing’s daughter, Helen, married a naval pilot from Atlanta named Henry Clay, and Clay was handed KWKH as part of Helen’s dowry. He’d managed a radio barn dance, the Dog Patch Jamboree, in Florence, Alabama, before the war, and now he decided to start another. The new show’s producer would be Horace Logan, who’d been in and around KWKH since 1932. Logan, whose stories usually demand close scrutiny, claimed to have started the Louisiana Hayride. “They were toying with the idea of starting another show like the Saturday Night Roundup but hadn’t reached a decision,” he said. “Then after I came back, they decided that they would go with it because I had worked with the prior show.” Contemporary reports downplay Logan’s role, giving credit for the show’s structure to Dean Upson, the station’s commercial manager, who’d worked for the Grand Ole Opry’s parent station, WSM. “Prior to starting the Hayride, we had a lot of talent on daily,” Clay once said. “Dean Upson knew a lot of hillbillies, and that helped too.”
Louisiana Hayride was a name that carried connotations of the state’s infamous governor Huey P. Long; one of the first books about Long was Harnett P. Kane’s Louisiana Hayride: The American Rehearsal for Dictatorship, published in 1941. There had also been a pop hit in 1932 called “Louisiana Hayride” from the Broadway show Flying Colors, so it was a far from original name, but Logan says he decided upon it because “I wanted something that would connote country music — and then localize it.” Logan also takes credit for the show’s presentation. He went to the Opryfor what he claims was his first and only visit, and came away with a rival vision:
With the Opry, they’d bring a guy on, and you’d have to suffer through him for a half hour whether you liked him or not. He’d bring on some guests, but essentially you had the same guy, say, Roy Acuff, for a half hour. If you liked him, it was great; if you didn’t, it wasn’t. My idea was to put the artists in extreme competition with each other. If they were going to be stars, they had to establish themselves and then reestablish themselves every Saturday night. When one of my artists came onstage, he did two numbers. If he encored, he came back later and did another two numbers, and that was all for the evening. It forced the artists to reestablish their eminence; it was a terribly difficult show to work.
The first Louisiana Hayride was held on Saturday, April 3, 1948, in Shreveport’s Municipal Auditorium. That was the day Hank sold his house in Montgomery, and tried hard to blow the proceeds. The Bailes Brothers headlined the first Louisiana Hayride. The Baileses were on Columbia Records and they’d been Grand Ole Opry stars before their enforced exile to Shreveport in December 1946. In October 1946, Johnnie Bailes’ girlfriend had stabbed herself three times, then jumped to her death from his room in Nashville’s Merchants Hotel. The Opry immediately canceled the Baileses’ contract, and five weeks later they were in Shreveport; that’s how quickly the Opry blackballed its transgressors. Hank almost certainly knew what happened to Johnnie Bailes and should have paid attention. The Baileses’ supporting acts included Johnnie and Jack, together with Johnnie’s wife, Kitty Wells, and another Nashville act, Wally Fowler’s Oak Ridge Quartet. The other acts were mostly local, but within weeks of launching the Hayride, Henry Clay attracted Curley Williams and his Georgia Peach Pickers, still featuring Hank’s former sideman, Boots Harris, on steel guitar. It was the beginning of a great lineup.
Hank arrived in Shreveport four months after the Louisiana Hayride started, but it’s still unclear exactly how he came to be there. Horace Logan’s account strains credibility:
When we started the Hayride, we publicized it through Cash-box and Billboard and the like, and we immediately started getting deluged with audition tapes to be on the show. Hank was one of the fellows who phoned in, but [it was] Fred Rose [who] decided to try and get Hank on the Hayride.He called KWKH and talked to Henry Clay, and Henry talked to me about it. I’d heard of Hank Williams, heard his records on some little ol’ label. I’d also heard that he was a drunk. I suggested that we tell Fred Rose if Hank could stay sober for six months and prove it, we’d put him on the Hayride. Hank called me every week, and almost invariably he would have the manager of his radio station with him. “Mr. Logan, Hank has been sober, he’s been here every morning, he hasn’t missed a single morning. He’s sober as a judge,” and Hank’d say, “That’s right! I’m sober.” And at the end of six months, we told him to come on over.
It’s just possible that Hank tried to get on KWKH before Rose got into the picture, but what are the chances that the manager of WSFA would smile benignly while his star tried to secure a job elsewhere? And, of course, Hank was anything but sober during the six months before he joined the Hayride. The key factor was probably Dean Upson’s longstanding relationship with Fred Rose. Upson had sung in a pop quartet, the Vagabonds, who were on WSM when Rose had first come to Nashville in the 1930s. They’d written songs together, and it’s likely that Rose prevailed upon Upson to give Hank a chance. To confuse the issue, though, Johnnie Bailes insisted that he had known Hank for several years, and told people that he arrived at KWKH one day to find Hank leaning disconsolately against a parking meter. Hank told him he had been turned down by KWKH, and Bailes says that he went to see Upson to insist that Hank be hired.
It’s possible that Hank’s reputation was already so bad that it took Bailes, Rose, and Upson to prevail upon Henry Clay. What is clear, though, is that KWKH wasn’t mortgaging the farm to acquire him. Like the Opry, the Hayride paid only American Federation of Musicians scale. Financially, Hank was going to be in worse shape than if he had stayed in Montgomery; only KWKH’s fifty thousand watts made the move attractive.
Hank and Audrey appear to have made a brief preliminary trip to Shreveport to meet Henry Clay. They also met the KWKH regulars at the Bantam Grill opposite the studio. Hank was wondering how he could supplement his meager income from the station. Homer Bailes went to get Tillman Franks. At one time or another, Franks has been a bass player, booking agent, songwriter, song plugger, producer, and manager. He managed and booked Johnny Horton, Claude King, David Houston, Faron Young, Webb Pierce, and Elvis Presley. Hank’s WSFA paycheck had amounted to around $120 a month, but he was so well known around Montgomery that he could fill his datebook. Remebered Tillman,
Hank said Henry Clay had offered him fifty dollars a week. He said he couldn’t live on that, but if I booked him into schools, he’d stay. I said I’d do my best, but people didn’t really know him. I told him, “If you can get a program on the radio and announce a few times that you’re open for bookings I’ll take a crack at it.” I was starvin’, and me and my wife was living with my mom and daddy, and I invited Hank and Audrey out for Sunday dinner. We had a catfish supper and Hank and Audrey really put it away. After the meal, Hank sat down at this old upright piano and played “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” chording the piano like a guitar, and Audrey was singing with him. After he’d finished playing my daddy got me in a corner and he said, “Son, I hope you ain’t thinking of making any money with him, ’cause he just cain’t sing.”
Hank then launched into one of his set pieces, said Tillman.
He was talking about how he had to leave Montgomery ’cause he owed ever’body in town. He said, “I bought this stove and bed on credit at this furniture store, and ever’ month they’d send me a nasty note, and ever’ month they was getting nastier. I went down to see the owner of the place, and said, ‘I’m Hank Williams. I thought I’d come by and tell y’all how I pay my bills.’” The guy said, “Good,” and Hank said, “Ever’ month I take ever’one I owe, I write their names on a little bit of paper, put them all in a hat, shake ’em up real good, and I pull out one name and that’s the one I pay. You write me one more nasty note and even if I pull your name out, it’s going back in the hat.”
On August 7, 1948, Hank made his first appearance on the Louisiana Hayride. He was the fifth act on the opening 8:00–8:30 p.m. segment. Merle Kilgore was a starstruck teenager hanging around the Hayride that night. Later, Kilgore was a performer and composer ("Ring of Fire” and “Wolverton Mountain"); later still, he was an opening act for Hank Jr., and after that, vice president of Hank Williams Jr. Enterprises. “Hank had the same look in his eye that Elvis had,” said Kilgore. “That ‘I know somethin’ you don’t know’ look. Hank was cocky. That first night, the Baileses were on before him and he said, ‘How did they do?’ I said, ‘Real good. I hate that you have to follow ’em.’ He said, ‘I’ll eat ’em alive.’” In fact, Johnnie and Jack separated Hank and the Bailes Brothers that first night, but clearly Hank wasn’t suffering from stage fright. He sang “Move It on Over,” then gave way to a commercial for the Asco Loan Company. Johnnie and Jack launched the second half with a gospel song, followed by a comedy sketch. Next, Curley Kinsey’s band played an instrumental, “Red Wing,” then Hank and Audrey came out to sing an old wartime song, “I Want to Live and Love.” Hank was through for the night, and the show was rounded out by the Four Deacons, the Mercer Brothers, and Johnnie and Jack.
Three days earlier, Hank had started his regular fifteen-minute show at 5:15 a.m. He arrived in Shreveport with a band he’d recruited in Montgomery. Lum York dutifully rejoined, and Hank recruited a fiddle player, George Brown, and guitarist Chris Criswell. He tried to get Don Helms to join him, but Helms was earning more money in a band with Boots Harris’ brothers. Boots had briefly quit Curley Williams to join his brothers at a skating rink in Andalusia before moving back to California to rejoin Curley. Helms was brought in to replace him. The skating rink gig paid well, so when Hank called, Helms turned him down. “I’m gonna let you off this time,” Hank told him, “but one of these days I’m goin’ to the Opry and I ain’t gonna take ‘no’ for an answer.” Helms wouldn’t have bet much on the chance, but he told Hank he would go with him when that day came.
Hank rented a garage apartment at 4802 Mansfield Road and the band lived in a trailer, but the arrangement didn’t last long. He meant nothing in Shreveport, and couldn’t get enough gigs to support the band. Most of them drifted back to Alabama. “He said he’d let me stay out at the house, and he’d feed me and buy me cigarettes,” said Lum York, “and as soon as he got started again, we’d start playing, but I went back to Montgomery to work with Uncle Bob Helton.”
By late September 1948, Hank was picking up some work in school-houses and honky-tonks around Shreveport on weeknights, pulling musicians from the Hayride staff band as needed, or booking out with other Hayride acts so that he could share their band. Tillman Franks’ diary for September shows Hank working doubleheaders with Johnnie and Jack in little towns like Plain Dealing. Tillman booked school auditorium shows, and remembers Hank preferring schoolhouse dates to honky-tonks. “I think he’d got beat up a few times,” he says. “In school-houses and auditoriums he could really put on a show.” Staying away from the joints was probably part of Hank’s sobriety program too.
Hank got his stage outfit from Tillman. A year or so earlier, Tillman had worked briefly in Houston with Claude King and Buddy Attaway. A car dealer named Elmer Laird sponsored them on radio, bought them matching uniforms, and helped them write a song called “Poison Love.” Then an angry customer stabbed Laird to death on the steps of the dealership. The trio returned to Shreveport, and their song eventually became Johnnie and Jack’s first hit. Tillman had no use for his stage outfit now that he was booking acts, so he sold it to Hank Williams. Tillman was short and rotund; Hank was tall and almost anorexically thin, so the outfit was far from a perfect fit. “Mrs. Maxie Goldberg, who had a tailoring place across from KWKH, tailored it to fit Hank, but the britches never did fit,” says Tillman. “I sold it to him for sixty dollars, but he never did pay me.”
The fact that Tillman Franks was booking acts into schoolhouses in northern Louisiana and eastern Texas was symptomatic of the problem that plagued the Hayride throughout its existence: the Ewings had no commitment to the music business. Franks remembers Henry Clay telling him that the family patriarch, John D. Ewing, viewed KWKH as a sausage factory; in other words, he didn’t care what went in — only about the profits coming out the other end. At the same time, WSM had the Artist Service Bureau assembling and booking Opry package shows. “The KWKH management wasn’t interested in the future,” said Horace Logan, in rare agreement with Tillman Franks. “They were interested in this fiscal year. They wouldn’t put up the money to let me start an Artist Service Bureau, which would have been self-supporting very quick.”
In fact, the Ewings were socking some money into the Hayride roster, bringing in big second-tier artists like Zeke Clements, Red Sovine, Sheb Wooley, and America’s first singing cowgirl, Patsy Montana. Later, the Ewings made a couple of half-hearted stabs at setting up a booking agency, first with Jim Bulleit in 1951, then with Tillman Franks in 1957. When Hank was in Shreveport in 1948 and 1949, he couldn’t unravel the paradox that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, heard his voice every Saturday night, but the following Monday he was driving all day to play a schoolhouse in eastern Texas for a hundred people. Then he’d have to drive back in time to do his early morning show. All that for thirty or forty bucks.
It might have been a marginal existence, but those close to Hank throughout his career say that the early months in Shreveport were the happiest. It was a new start. Audrey was several hundred blessed miles from Lilly, which improved her disposition enormously. Hank was mingling on a regular basis with some of the hottest minor-league prospects in country music, and he and Audrey got along particularly well with Johnnie Wright and Kitty Wells. Johnnie and Hank would go fishing on Sundays and have a fish fry that night. All the while, Hank was making a determined effort to stay sober, which improved Audrey’s disposition still more. An article in the Shreveport Times in November 1948, though, seemed to hint that, in some respects, Hank was still his old self. The Ewings cross-promoted the Hayride through the Times, so criticism was bound to be muted, but the article said, “The trouble with Hank is that you can’t keep him in one place long enough. An announcer in Alabama dubbed his gang as the Drifting Cowboys because of Hank’s inconsistency. The name was so appropriate it just stuck.”
Starting January 10, 1949, Horace Logan found a new sponsor for one of KWKH’s late-morning drive-time slots, just before Arthur Godfrey came in on the network feed. The Shreveport Syrup Company had a brand, Johnnie Fair Syrup, and Logan, together with KWKH’s time salesman, Red Watkins, persuaded the company to invest five thousand dollars in sponsoring Hank Williams. Hank dubbed himself “The Ol’ Syrup Sopper” and performed alone with his guitar. The KWKH schedule for mid-January 1949 has him on the air for fifteen minutes at 5:45 a.m., again at 6:30, and again at 8:15 for Johnnie Fair. No one else on KWKH’s roster had more than one sponsorship.
Back in November 1948, the Ewings had sprung for two state-of-the-art RCA acetate cutters, primarily to record CBS network shows for playback later. Hank made good use of these machines, cutting shows to be played on air when he was out of town. A few shows survived on acetate, and around 1955, they ended up in the hands of Leonard Chess, boss of the R&B label Chess Records. Chess turned around and sold them to MGM, then in dire need of some new Hank Williams material.
The Johnnie Fair transcriptions rank alongside Hank’s most affecting work. With few hits of his own, he filled the show with his favorite songs. He sang both sides of Jimmy Wakely’s current hits, “I Wish I Had a Nickel” and “Someday You’ll Call My Name.” The songs were trite and affectless in Wakely’s hands, but Hank filled them with vengeance and unrequited longing. The Sons of the Pioneers’ “Cool Water” became an eerie haunting blues. Bill Carlisle’s song about returning servicemen, “Rocking Chair Money,” really rocked. “I love to rock, yeah rock,” Hank sang. He needed no more than his guitar, never appeared to strain, yet never let the tension falter. He once told Tillman Franks that he loved the sound of his own voice, something these shows make clear. Parodists have him singing in a high nasal whine, but he actually had a light baritone; without a band behind him, he explored the natural warm contours of his voice. After every song, he would pitch Johnnie Fair Syrup in two delicious flavors, maple and cane. “Remember, friends,” he would say in closing, “meals are easy to prepare when you set your table with Johnnie Fair.”
During those early days in Shreveport, Hank and Audrey hung out with Curley Williams and his wife a good deal. They’d introduce each other onstage or on the radio as if they were brothers. Curley flitted in and out of Hank’s life from the time he poached Boots Harris in 1942 to the time Hank recorded one of his songs, “Half As Much,” a decade later. Born in southern Georgia in June 1914, Curley had been christened Doc Williams because family legend held that the seventh child would be a doctor; instead, he was a fiddle player. He changed his name to avoid confusion with Doc Williams on the Wheeling, West Virginia, Jamboree. The Peach Pickers’ music was far removed from Hank’s; it was light, jazzy, sophisticated western dance music. Curley, who talked so slowly it seemed like a put-on, rarely sang and used a rotating cast of singers to share the spotlight with his daughter, Georgia Ann. Curley’s Peach Pickers joined the Opry’s parent station, WSM, in December 1942 — shortly after Boots Harris quit Hank. Their Opry tenure started the following September, and they landed a Columbia Records contract in November. Curley recorded for Columbia for seven years, and even backed Fred Rose (then recording for Columbia as “The Rambling Rogue") on one session. He lit out for the West Coast to play dance halls late in 1945, returning east to join the Hayride. Curley and Hank became good friends, and Hank and Audrey lived with Curley and his wife, Louise, when money was tight.
The 1948 recording ban was in effect for the first five months that Hank was in Shreveport, and MGM worked through its backlog, releasing a new Hank Williams single every two months or so. Just before he arrived in Shreveport, MGM issued the recut of “Honky Tonkin’.” Billboard lauded its “deft ork beat,” and its brief appearance in the country charts in July probably helped secure the Hayride spot. To avoid confusion with the Sterling record of “Honky Tonkin’,” Fred Rose bought all of the Sterling masters on May 17 for two thousand dollars, then sold them to MGM. One thousand dollars was charged back to Hank. “This was a real break,” Wesley Rose wrote to Hank, “as you will now get artist royalties on these as they are released on MGM.”
Hank arrived in Shreveport promoting “I’m a Long Gone Daddy.” It was in the charts the week he joined, peaking at number six during a three-week stay. Unsure how long the ban would last, Fred Rose paired “Pan American” and “I Don’t Care (If Tomorrow Never Comes)” from the Sterling sessions in June 1948, then released two abandoned cuts from Hank’s first MGM session, “I Saw the Light” and “Six More Miles,” in September. After that, there were only three cuts left before MGM was staring at the bottom of the Hank Williams barrel. MGM scheduled two of the remaining cuts, “A Mansion on the Hill” and “I Can’t Get You off of My Mind,” for December 1948, but by then the ban was falling apart. Some companies were cutting instrumental tracks overseas, then over-dubbing the vocalists (who were members of a different union) at home; others were simply violating the ban. MGM, RCA, and Columbia played closest to the rules because they had union-staffed affiliate companies and couldn’t risk a strike. The ban was ended by an agreement reached on October 27, 1948, which became effective December 14. After all the upset, the union gained a very marginal increase in its pension fund contributions, and a couple of other minor concessions.
Hank usually wrote songs without regard to upcoming sessions, so it’s hard to know if his barrenness in Shreveport was the result of the strike or the side effect of a better relationship with Audrey. In late 1948, Fred Rose sent his promotion man, Mel Foree, down to Shreveport to see what was going on. Hank and Foree went on the road together to Jacksonville, Texas. Hank had just bought a new fishing rod, and threw a line into every creek along the way. Foree’s presence seemed to spur him and they wrote four songs on the road. As soon as they got back, Hank went into the KWKH studio to cut the songs onto acetates. Foree mailed them to Rose. “When I come back Fred had these acetates on his desk,” Foree said. “Each song was written to a melody he [Hank] had already written.” Rose found just one usable song in the batch, “’Neath a Cold Gray Tomb of Stone.” Bill Monroe’s brother, Charlie, recorded it in October 1950. Hank also worked with Curley Williams on some goofy novelty songs like “No, Not Now” and “Honey, Do You Love Me, Huh?” which Curley recorded for Columbia. Hank gave Foree some lyric sheets to take back to Rose, but Foree put them in a suitcase that was stolen before he got home.
Audrey became pregnant just days after arriving in Shreveport, but pregnancy made her sick and irritable; clothes made her skin hurt and she found little joy in bearing a child. The spats continued, but Hank seriously tried to curb his drinking, and Lycrecia was there to bring a little stability. Hank took the rituals of procreation, gestation, and birthing very seriously, and was trying to be a strong family head — a role for which Lon and life in general had done little to prepare him.
Until Audrey outgrew her outfits, she continued to insinuate herself onto Hank’s shows. Horace Logan recalled:
Audrey was a pure, unmitigated, hard-boiled, blue-eyed bitch. She wanted to be a singer and she was horrible, unbelievably horrible. She not only tried to sing, she insisted on it, and she forced herself out onstage when Hank was out there. I’d never let her out, but Hank would say, “Logan, I’ve got to let her sing, I’ve got to live with the woman.” I said, “OK, Hank, here’s what we do. We put two mics out there. Don’t let her sing on your mic. I’ll bring down the volume on her mic, and keep yours up.” We let her sing some just so Hank would get along better with her.
By the fall of 1948, the move to Shreveport still couldn’t be called a success. Hank hadn’t recorded for a year because of the recording ban, and although the records from the stockpile were doing decent business, they weren’t exploding over the charts. Then, during the late months of the year, he began performing “Lovesick Blues.” He’d played it in Montgomery. His former band remembered it clearly because they had to hit minor chords on the bridge, which was very unusual for a Hank Williams song. When R. D. Norred heard it on the radio, he turned to his wife and said, “There’s that blamed old song.” It’s likeliest that Hank played it on a whim at some schoolhouse dates, got a good response, then played it on the Hayride.
“The first time Hank did ‘Lovesick Blues’ on the Hayride, he didn’t have his own band,” remembered Tillman Franks.
Dobber Johnson was on fiddle, Buddy Attaway was on guitar, Felton Pruett was on steel guitar, and I was on the bass. We were rehearsing up there and Hank was singing it in F. Then there was this part where it went from F to B-minor or something, and I said, “Hank, that one chord you got in there, I can’t figure it out.” He says, “Don’t worry ‘bout it, hoss, just stomp your foot and grin.”
When the Shreveport Times published a feature about the Hayride stars on November 21, 1948, it said, “Hank’s rendition of ‘Love Sick [sic] Blues’ is one of the most requested songs.” Presumably, he’d been singing it for a while by then, and had figured out that he was onto something. He cut a demo at Curley Williams’ house with Boots Harris on steel guitar, Smokey Paul on electric guitar, and Curley on fiddle. Hank sent it to Fred Rose, but, according to Boots, Rose wrote back and told Hank that he wanted nothing to do with it.
With the end of the recording ban in sight, Rose began scheduling sessions. Hank insisted that he record “Lovesick Blues,” and he’d written nothing better. On December 22, 1948, eight days after the ban ended, Rose scheduled a session in Cincinnati. Around the twentieth, Hank and Audrey, Johnnie and Jack, and Kitty Wells left Shreveport in a convoy. They dropped off Lycrecia at her grandparents’ house in Alabama, then drove on to Nashville, where they left Johnnie and Jack and Kitty, all of whom were from the Nashville area. Then Hank, Audrey, and Johnnie and Jack’s mandolin player, Clyde Baum, drove on to Cincinnati, where Fred Rose was waiting for them at the E. T. Herzog studio. Rose had fronted one hundred dollars to cover expenses on the trip. He’d also enclosed a song of his that he wanted on the flip side of “Lovesick Blues,” although it’s hard to know what that song was. “Blue it up as much as you can,” Rose wrote when he sent it to Hank, “and if you can better the melody, go ahead and do it because I wrote it quick.” Rose also mentioned that Nelson King would get behind the song. King was one of the first country deejays, and his show, Hillbilly Jamboree, went out every night between 8:05 p.m. and midnight over fifty-thousand-watt clear-channel WCKY.
It’s almost impossible to sort out exactly what happened in Cincinnati. Hank didn’t do the song that Rose sent him unless that song was “There’ll Be No Teardrops Tonight.” Rose’s letter, though, seemed to indicate that he’d written the song, and “There’ll Be No Teardrops Tonight” was credited to Hank with a half-share assigned surreptitiously to Nelson King. King always insisted that he and Hank had written the song together one night. He said that Hank stepped out onto the street and bought a guitar from a passer-by who was glad to sell it to him because he was Hank Williams. The problem with King’s account is that in late 1948 a passer-by was likely to have said “Hank who?” Also, judging from Rose’s correspondence, Hank didn’t arrive in Cincinnati until the morning of the session. A more plausible account of how King came to own half of the song came from Tillman Franks, who remembers a conversation with Hank in 1952 when he came to the Opry with Webb Pierce. All three of them went fishing on Hickory Lake and started talking shop. By then, Tillman had more or less invented payola in the country record business. “I’d given Nelson King half of [Johnnie and Jack’s hit] ‘Three Ways of Knowing’ to get him to play Webb’s record of ‘Wondering,’” said Tillman, “and Hank said, ‘Franks, you and Pierce have done fucked up business giving these deejays songs.’ I said, ‘Hank, I didn’t start it. Nelson told me you’d given him half of “There’ll Be No Teardrops Tonight."’ Hank said, ‘I didn’t mean to, I was drunk.’” Probably not drunk, but grateful for the spins, and hopeful of more.
Hank only had two other original songs to record in Cincinnati; one was a hymn he had written, “Lost on the River,” and the other was a hymn Audrey had written, “I Heard My Mother Praying for Me.” After the session, Hank and Audrey and Clyde Baum drove back to Nashville, where they ate supper with Johnnie Wright’s in-laws and dropped off Clyde Baum. Then they headed to Montgomery for Christmas. Shortly after Hank returned to Shreveport, he met Johnny Bond backstage at the Hayride. Bond was the writer of several big hits like “I Wonder Where You Are Tonight,” “Bartender’s Blues,” and “Drink Up and Go Home,” and he’d met Hank at the Charles Theater in Montgomery earlier that year. Now he found him almost despondent. “I’m tired of tryin’ to get on the Opry,” Hank told Bond. “It’s just too rough. I’ve recorded one song that’s in the can now, a thing called ‘Lovesick Blues’; if that don’t make it, I’m thinkin’ seriously of gittin’ out of the business.”