Chapter 8
In 1950, I took a little nip Along with Mister Williams on the way to Mississipp Stacked eight deep in a Packard limousine We met Oscar Davis in the town of New Orleans Oscar told Hank that he liked how he looked Liked how he sang, liked how he shook He told us all that we’d soon be rich And we started believing that fat son of a bitch.
“The Ballad of Hank Williams,” to the tune of “The Battle of New Orleans” (attributed to Don Helms)
WITH “Lovesick Blues” and “Wedding Bells” delivering a one-two punch, the Grand Ole Opry simply could not afford to ignore Hank Williams much longer. Fred Rose and Oscar Davis were keeping up steady pressure on WSM and the Opry management team of Harry Stone, Jack Stapp, and Jim Denny. “I came to Jim Denny,” said Oscar Davis, “and Jim said, ‘No we won’t [have him]. We talked about him with Harry Stone and he’s got a bad reputation with drinking and missing shows.’ So I plead and plead with him, and finally he agrees to square it away.” Stone in particular was vehemently opposed to Hank’s joining the show.
Among other things, Oscar Davis guaranteed that Hank would be sober for a year, and reports reaching Nashville from the Opry acts who worked with Hank spoke of his newfound sobriety. Stone, Stapp, and Denny had been around enough alcoholics to know that promises of sobriety were as good as a trailing incumbent’s election promises, but they also knew that they couldn’t afford to ignore Hank Williams if they wanted to remain preeminent. Within a year, the Louisiana Hayride had come from nowhere to mount a serious challenge, and there were rumors of a rival jamboree starting in Nashville. Hank Williams was a wild card, but the Opry figured that he was now a risk that had to be taken.
To sweeten the pot, it’s almost certain that Fred Rose offered the composer credit on a song he’d written, “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy,” to Stapp and Stone (he hung on to the music publishing, though). Red Foley recorded it on November 7, 1949, and it became the second-best-charting country song of 1950, and then a big pop hit when Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra recorded it. WSM executive Irving Waugh remembers Stone and Stapp saying that Rose had given them the song as a token of gratitude for putting him on the air during the 1930s when he was broke, but the timing seems to suggest otherwise, and the fact that Stapp wasn’t at the station when Rose was broke in Nashville in the 1930s also makes this claim unlikely.
The Grand Ole Opry is the most famous radio barn dance, but it wasn’t the first. At some point during the evening of January 4, 1923, WBAP in Fort Worth, Texas, programmed ninety minutes of Captain M. J. Bonner, a Confederate war veteran, sawing away at his fiddle to the accompaniment of a Hawaiian band. No other performer in WBAP’s short history elicited as many telegrams and letters, so the station came up with the idea of a radio barn dance. Much the same thing happened in Nashville. On November 28, 1925, Uncle Jimmy Thompson, then age seventy-seven, came to newly launched WSM with his niece and his fiddle. He played a program of fiddle tunes, and the station was deluged with calls, letters, and telegrams. WSM’s owner, the National Life Insurance Company, was keen to reach rural areas and immediately okayed a radio barn dance. Dubbed the WSM Barn Dance, it was juggled around various time slots until 1927, when it became a fixture on Saturday night. Uncle Jimmy was a bit of a problem. He turned up drunk every now and again, and soon found what other performers on the show would find: he could make much more money just about anywhere else on Saturday night.
WSM wasn’t a country station. Affiliated with NBC from 1927, its broadcast day was a mosaic of society doings, drama, news, and music. Some of the music came from network feeds, and some was generated locally. One night, WSM manager George D. Hay was segueing from an opera on the network feed to the WSM Barn Dance, and told the listeners to get ready for some “grand old op’ra.” The name stuck, but just as WSM was not an all-country station, so the Opry was not an all-country show. There were comedians (some of them in blackface), pop and sacred quartets, dancers, and a black harmonica player named DeFord Bailey. It was a fast-paced vaudeville revue, and its success spurred WSM to begin programming country musicians “live” on air during the early morning hours.
By the mid-1940s, there were countless radio jamborees on stations great and small, but the Opry slowly achieved preeminence. It began reaching a much wider audience when WSM was boosted to fifty thousand watts in 1932, then edged ahead of the pack after the 8:30–9:00 p.m. portion of the show was picked up by the NBC radio network in October 1939. The networked portion was sponsored by R. J. Reynolds’ Prince Albert Tobacco, and by July 1940, the Prince Albert Opry (as it was called) was heard coast to coast on more than 150 stations, and attracted around ten million listeners. The entire show, which ran from 7:30 p.m. until midnight, had an almost biblical importance when Hank joined. Up in the hills and down in the hollers, neighbors would gather on Saturday night. Someone would hook the car battery to the radio, light the coal-oil lamps, and tune in WSM at 650 on the AM dial. Up north, exiled southerners would listen and dream of home. During the late 1940s, photographer Ed Clark came to the Opry and realized that the real story was the crowd. He photographed farm trucks, many with out-of-state plates, lined up outside the auditorium. Grandma and grandpa climbed from the tailgate, where chickens had been the day before. Clark photographed a mother breastfeeding her child up in the highest seats, and kids hanging over the balcony. The Grand Ole Opry was an institution that not only defined country music, but just about defined the South.
Since 1943, the Opry had been held in the Ryman Auditorium. The story goes that the Ryman was built in 1891 by a riverboat tycoon, Tom Ryman, who had come onshore to heckle an evangelist, Sam Jones, holding a tent meeting. But the Reverend Jones chose “mother” as his subject that night — the one subject capable of reducing Captain Ryman to tears. Ryman apparently rushed back to his riverboats, tore out the gambling fixtures, dumped them overboard, and declared that a great preacher like the Reverend Jones should not have to preach in a tent, so he built the Ryman Auditorium for him. Seating was still on wooden pews when the Ryman became home to the Grand Ole Opry.
By 1949, when Hank moved to Nashville, the Opry had become WSM’s principal money-spinner, accounting for two-thirds of the station’s advertising revenue. The eighty cents scooped up at the door from the three thousand admissions more than covered the hall rental, talent, and backstage staff. Sponsors were lined up five deep, and WSM would soon start a Friday night jamboree (the Friday Night Frolics) and pre-Opry shows in WSM’s auditorium to increase the sponsorship opportunities. The hokiness, in which the Opry took a great deal of inverted pride, disguised ruthlessly aggressive management and shrewd organization. Harry Stone had taken over from Judge Hay in 1930, leaving Hay as the Opry’s chief announcer. Stone hired an out-of-work concert violinist, Vito Pelletieri, to work on scheduling, and they divided the show into sponsored time slots, giving each time slot its own star. The structure ensured that no artist would become more popular than the show. The Prince Albert Opry made its host, Roy Acuff, into a star, but the entire show could be picked up over a huge listening area, and made stars of Bill Monroe (who joined in 1938), Eddy Arnold (1942), and Ernest Tubb (1943). When Acuff tested his commercial clout by quitting the Prince Albert Opry in 1946, the Opry replaced him with Red Foley, who had already headlined shows on WLS in Chicago and WLW in Cincinnati. In hiring Foley, Harry Stone and Jack Stapp served notice that they would keep the Opry preeminent, but wouldn’t let any star eclipse the show.
Hank was eased onto the Opry through a guest shot on the non-networked portion. It was the back door, but a door nonetheless. His first appearance was on June 11, 1949, during the 9:00–9:30 Warren Paint segment hosted by Ernest Tubb. Hank sang “Lovesick Blues” and made another appearance on the 11:00–11:15 Allen Manufacturing segment when he sang “Mind Your Own Business.” His reception that night guaranteed that he would be offered a spot on the Prince Albert section the following week. He probably remained in Nashville all that week. On June 15, he signed a two-year contract extension with MGM Records. MGM paid him a nonrecoupable bonus of one thousand dollars.
The structure of the thirty-minute Prince Albert Opry was much tighter than the non-networked portion. The cast held a rehearsal on Saturday morning to do a complete dry run, with commercials, jokes, and music timed out to the second. Every word, every wordless gooberism was scripted. For his debut, Hank worked with the house band that included Grady Martin on fiddle or guitar, Zeb Turner and Jimmy Selph on guitars, Billy Robinson on steel guitar, and bassist Ernie Newton. The Prince Albert host, Red Foley, introduced him.
“Well, sir, tonight’s big-name guest is making his first appearance on Prince Albert Grand Ole Opry. He’s a Montgomery, Alabama, boy, been pickin’ and singin’ about twelve years, but it’s been about the last year he’s really come into his own…and we’re proud to give a rousing Prince Albert welcome to the ‘Lovesick Blues’ boy, Hank Williams.”
Hank walked out to fairly muted applause. Foley stepped back up to the microphone.
“Well, sir, we hope you’ll be here for a good long time, buddy.”
“Well, Red,” said Hank, coming in right on cue, “it looks like I’ll be doing just that, and I’ll be looking forward to it.”
The band kicked off “Lovesick Blues,” and the audience buzz rose noticeably during the song; the crowd may not have known the name, but it certainly knew the song. Contrary to myth, there were no encores, but as Hank indicated to Foley, he had now been accepted for membership in the most exclusive club in country music. When they played acetates of the show at the usual postmortem in Jack Stapp’s office on Monday morning, everyone was well pleased. Hank’s quick acceptance was such that less than a year later, Easter 1950, when Foley was off for what was called some “much-needed rest,” Hank emceed the Opry‘s flagship Prince Albert show.
After the June 18 show, Hank prepared to go back to Shreveport to mop up some engagements and see his family. He was staying at Nashville’s toniest hotel, the Hermitage, when Bob McKinnon, a deejay from Hank’s part of the world, came to see him. McKinnon offered a drink while Hank got dressed. “No, I quit,” said Hank. “I can’t handle it. I don’t ever expect to take another drop.” And he truly, truly meant it. With the world falling into his lap and a healthy boy child less than three weeks old, he must have thought that he would never again feel the need to take to the bottle.
Soon after he became a fixture on the Opry, Hank set about assembling another band. He called Bob McNett in Pennsylvania and asked him to rejoin. Then he tried to find Don Helms. When Helms had turned down Hank’s Hayride offer, he had been making good money playing at a skating rink that he and Boots Harris’ brothers leased in Andalusia. Then one night someone was shot and a local preacher got up a petition to close the rink. This left Helms and the Harrises with two thousand pairs of skates and nowhere to play. The Harrises went off to Mississippi, and Helms went up to Richmond, Virginia, where his wife’s sister lived. He’d heard that Buddy Wheeler, the steel guitarist on the WRVA’s Old Dominion Barn Dance was moving to Phoenix, and Helms hoped to take his place, but by the time he got there, Wheeler had decided to stay. Four or five days later, Helms’ wife called and told him that Hank Williams was trying to reach him. Helms called Hank. “You remember when I was going to Shreveport, you told me that if I ever got to the Grand Ole Opry you’d go with me,” said Hank. “Well, have your ass here next Friday night.” Helms said, “You got it, chief.”
Helms had probably figured out that the steel guitar was the crucial instrument for Hank; its notes were the wordless cry that completed his vocal lines. The steel guitar sustained the mood and took most of the solos. Nearly all of the great country singers had a steel guitarist who functioned as their musical alter ego. Technically, Jerry Byrd might have been a better player than Don Helms, but Byrd’s tone was rooted in the cloying sweetness of Hawaiian music and his melodic invention was sometimes a little too intricate for Hank’s liking. Helms had precision, economy, and a bluesy tone that echoed his master’s voice. He liked to use the high E6 tuning on one neck of his lap steel, and the notes he found there and juggled into Hank’s rudimentary chord changes were simple, direct phrases that precisely complemented Hank’s songs.
Fiddle player Jerry Rivers was born in Miami in 1928, the son of a dentist, but grew up in Nashville and started playing semiprofessionally in 1945. Three years later, he quit his job as an electronic parts salesman to become a road musician with the Short Brothers, a breakaway unit from Ernest Tubb’s Texas Troubadours. When the Shorts decided to stay in Houston, Rivers returned to Nashville to work with Big Jeff Bess. Big Jeff was a Nashville legend, and his band became known as Big Jeff’s Finishing School for the number of top-flight musicians that started there. These days, though, Jeff is chiefly famous for marrying Tootsie, founder of Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, the legendary drinking hole near the Opry. Rivers says that Hank had phoned from Shreveport offering him a job at the time the Shreveport band was being put together, but he’d turned him down. Hank was offering fifty dollars a week then, and Rivers was making that much closer to home.
Rivers was still kicking himself for not going with Hank when he heard through Jack Boles, who worked with Little Jimmy Dickens, that Hank was looking for a fiddle player. Rivers headed straight for WSM, looked around, and found Hank at the shoe-shine stand. Hank listened in silence while Rivers made his pitch, then beckoned him into unoccupied Studio C. Rivers opened his fiddle case and was surprised when Hank reached in, grabbed the fiddle and started sawing away at “Sally Goodin.” When he finished, he said, “Kin you play ‘Sally Goodin,’ boy?” Rivers lit into it, and Hank picked up his guitar. “He was stompin’ that foot, flailin’ on the guitar,” says Rivers. “We must have played it for five minutes, then he set down his guitar and I set down the fiddle, and he said, ‘Well, anyone can play “Sally Goodin” better ’n me is a darn good fiddle player. You’re hired.’” Or, as Hank said, “harr’d.”
Rivers found out that Hank still needed a bass player, so he called his friend Hillous Butrum. From rural Tennessee, Butrum had also been raised in Nashville, and he had played with Rivers when they were growing up. He graduated from tent shows with the blackface duo Jamup and Honey to the Opry staff band, and by 1949 he was working with Benny Martin and Big Jeff Bess on WLAC. Just after Hank arrived in town, Butrum headed out to North Carolina to work on a tent show, but he starved out a few weeks later and came back to Nashville. When Rivers called asking if he’d like a job with Hank, Butrum told him he’d like a job with anyone. Butrum met Don Helms and Hank Williams at eleven o’clock one morning at WSM. They ran through a few tunes, and Butrum was hired. He went straightaway to see Big Jeff and bought a western suit for twenty bucks to look the part of a Drifting Cowboy.
Hank rehearsed the band in an empty WSM studio, then brought in Jim Denny, who was in the position to let them play on the Opry or insist that Hank use staff musicians. Denny said, “They sound good to me,” and Hank settled their wages at fifteen dollars a show, five dollars over union scale. They could make much more selling songbooks and photos during the intermission. Hank was grossing around $250 a show (from which the Opry deducted its 15 percent commission), but his asking price soon increased.
The Grand Ole Opry formally hired Hank on Monday, July 11, 1949, and Jerry Rivers reckons that the new Drifting Cowboys first worked together the following Thursday. They played the Opry the following Saturday, then rolled out of town in Hank’s Packard en route for Cincinnati. “In those few moments on the stage of the Opry watching Hank perform, and watching the audience respond,” Rivers wrote later, “I regained a humility I had lost somewhere along the line.” The really great musicians evince that kind of respect. “God is in the house,” a jazz musician once said when Art Tatum stepped up to the piano stool. Hank had his fellow performers watching from the wings. He was good and he knew it. With the applause of the Opry crowd still echoing in his ears, Rivers knew he had met the man who would change his life. Helms and McNett were less in awe of Hank because they had known him earlier, but Helms was overwhelmed at finally playing the Opry and meeting all the artists he had heard about all those years.
Hank had never been happier. The atmosphere in the Packard was warm and convivial. Very soon, Hank had given everyone in the band a nickname. Don Helms was “Shag” because, as Rivers said, “before the days of much hair, Don had much.” Rivers had a G.I. crewcut so Hank called him “Burrhead.” “When I’d tip my hat, he’d say, ‘Look at that, looks like a stump full of dead grandaddies,’” said Rivers. Hank called Hillous Butrum “Bew” because he was intrigued by his middle name, Buell, and Bob McNett was dubbed “Rapid Robert” because he played a song called “Fingers on Fire.” Occasionally, Hank would call McNett “The Mayor of Roaring Branch, Pennsylvania,” and tell the audience that he had to roll peanuts off the mountain to get him to come join the band. That was the sort of homespun humor the crowds liked. The Cowboys called Hank “Bones” or “Gimly” (short for “Gimly-Ass") because he was so skinny he had no ass to speak of.
Hank’s early Opry tours were organized by Oscar Davis in conjunction with the Opry’s Artist Service Bureau manager, Jim Denny. Second only to his relationship with Fred Rose, Hank’s relationship with Denny was critical to his professional career, and it was a relationship founded on a mixture of mutual respect and antagonism. With a steely sense of purpose, Denny had worked his way up from the mailroom at WSM’s parent company, National Life and Accident, and had persuaded National Life to give him the concession stand at the Opry as a side venture. He sold souvenirs, food, and fans, and it became the first of many operations that blurred the line between his interest and that of his employer. One of his moonlight ventures was a short-lived recording studio.
Denny found his niche when he was made Artist Service Bureau manager in November 1946. Originally set up in 1934 to arrange charity appearances, the Bureau controlled how the Opry name was used on touring packages, and acted as a coordination point for the various tours and shows that Opry stars were on. Denny parlayed his position into one of the most powerful jobs in country music. He could have written the book on winning through intimidation. Although only five feet nine inches tall, he was built like a bear, and had been a bouncer at the Opry stage door during the 1930s. He had a habit of staring at people and saying nothing, which spooked the naturally garrulous country performers.
Denny divided the country into regions and assigned them to different promoters who would have the right to book Opry shows into those regions. He would then work with the artists’ managers or directly with the artists to assemble package shows that he offered to these franchisees. For this service and the right to use the Grand Ole Opry name on shows, the Artist Service Bureau took 15 percent of the artist’s fee; in fact, the fee was required whenever the Opry trademark was used, regardless of whether the Service Bureau had booked the show. That explained how it was possible that Hank Williams was one of the Opry’s biggest stars but often owed the show more than he was paid.
If Hank didn’t have much leverage at the Opry, he had newfound clout at MGM. The first session under his new contract was held in Cincinnati on August 30, 1949. Records were the key to everything now. Hank had to answer the question of whether he was a flash in the pan who’d gotten lucky with a pair of someone else’s tunes or an artist with staying power. Increasingly, he decided to stand or fall with his own songs, and on the evidence of this session and every other session until his last, he had quite suddenly become the most accomplished writer in country music.
Country song craft was in transition. From the dawn of recorded country music in 1923, country songs had been a mixture of traditional ballads, dance tunes, Victorian parlor songs, hymns, blues, and vaudeville numbers. Deep introspection was rare. If there was sin, there would be retribution by the final verse. Then honky-tonk singers like Ernest Tubb and Floyd Tillman began writing almost embarrassingly intimate songs, clearly rooted in personal experience. In old parlor ballads, such as “After the Ball,” a man lives alone his entire life because he thinks he has seen his fiancée with another man. Tillman’s “It Makes No Difference Now” was almost diametrically opposite. Its message was quite blunt: “So you’re leaving? Screw you!” Tillman went on to write “Slippin’ Around,” the first cheating song that neither moralized nor condemned. His vocals were just as revolutionary. He sang as if his world were viewed through the bottom of a shot glass. He slurred words, broke meter, and bent notes. Ernest Tubb wrote sour valentines to his wife, and achingly confessional songs that spoke of weakness, drunkenness, and acute loneliness. Hank’s songs began taking their cue from Tillman and Tubb, but he didn’t sing with their detached irony; instead, he clung to Acuff’s emotionalism. On tour with Tubb in 1949, Hank had told him that he had “found me a place right between you and ol’ Roy Acuff.”
As far back as a 1947 Montgomery Advertiser feature, Hank was dubbed “the hillbilly Shakespeare,” though in truth there was more Shakespeare in songs the bog Irish sang on the way back from the pub, or in half-forgotten Tin Pan Alley tunes. Hank’s achievement lay elsewhere. He cast the highs and lows of everyday life in terms that were simple enough to register quickly over a car radio or jukebox yet profound enough to bear repeated listening. His songs were the true-to-life blues. Any art form at its best has the one-on-oneness of physical intimacy, and that’s what Hank brought to country music. Like most truly great songwriters, he flirted with banality, but nearly always managed to sidestep it. After he’d been writing for a few years, he stopped rejuggling clichés and gave his songs the little flashes of detail that led people to think he was writing about them. He never lost his audience with wordiness or poeticism. From Fred Rose, he also learned the importance of starting with a commanding image, as in “Mind Your Own Business.”
One of the enduring myths about Hank Williams is that he purchased finished or half-finished songs. It’s true that he bought a few songs, stole a few melodies, and occasionally even wrote new songs to titles he had found on MGM release schedules ("I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” was one), but many, probably most, Hank Williams songs were the pure product of Hank himself. With few exceptions, the songs that bear his name have the imprimatur of sole authorship. The Acuff-Rose archives are full of lyrics that Hank brought in. He wrote screeds, compulsively diarizing his life. He did most of his writing on the road. There wasn’t even room to break out a guitar in the sedan, so he’d beat out a rhythm on the dashboard and someone would get something like a cardboard stiffener from a pressed shirt and take the words down. “We were coming back from a Minneapolis–St. Paul show,” said promoter A. V. Bamford. “Hank pulled out a notebook, opened the glove compartment, and leaned into its light. He had a little pencil. A small, stubby, stubby pencil. And he had a notebook. He wrote something and we’d be driving, then he’d write some more. I’d say he wrote, altogether, an hour or so. Next day, he went to Fred Rose’s home studio.” Hank would come back off the road with a billfold full of scraps of paper on which he had verses, half-completed songs, and abandoned ideas. The band would kid him because his billfold was so thick. They’d say, “Hoss, be careful, you’ll fall off that billfold, break an arm and we’ll have to get us a new lead singer.” All the melodies were in Hank’s head.
The other enduring myth is that Fred Rose wrote the songs. Starting with the August ’49 Cincinnati session, Hank came closer to hitting a home run every time at bat than anyone in popular music before or since, and some say that Fred Rose was more responsible than Hank himself. It’s true that you’d be hard-pressed to see promise in the songs that Hank wrote before his Acuff-Rose contract (although Rose must have seen something), and the dramatic improvement led many to the conclusion that Rose was responsible. The fact remains, though, that Rose wrote hundreds, perhaps thousands, of songs, and few sounded anything like Hank Williams’ songs. Rose himself emphasized that point when he spoke after Hank’s death: “Don’t get the idea that I made the guy or wrote his songs for him,” said Rose. “He made himself, don’t forget that!” Rose deliberately excluded everyone from his writing sessions with Hank, so we’ll never know who did what. In all likelihood, Rose brought no more than a commercial gloss and organizational skills to Hank’s work. He encouraged him to write bridges rather than simply string verses together, and provided a much-needed element of quality control. He also probably told Hank to dispense with archaic folk forms like “ne’er” and “o’er,” and assert the primacy of everyday speech.
Whenever Hank was asked about his songwriting, he was always careful to downplay the element of song craft, something he perhaps thought unbecoming a “folk” musician. “People don’t write music,” he told Pathfinder magazine in 1952, “it’s given to you; you sit there and wait and it comes to you. If [a song] takes longer than thirty minutes or an hour, I usually throw it away.” It was up to Fred Rose to separate the gold from the dross and work with Hank to transform the best ideas into integrated, complete statements, taut with commercial logic. If Rose contributed substantially, as he did on “A Mansion on the Hill” and later “Kaw-Liga,” he took half-credit; if he simply doctored Hank’s songs, he didn’t take a share. Rose knew that he would get the publisher’s half of the royalty, and there is consensus that he was not a greedy man.
The only person to walk in on Hank and Fred Rose working together was Roy Acuff, and his description was studiedly trite. “They worked as a good team of mules,” Acuff said on an MGM Records documentary. “They pulled right together. Hank would come up with the ideas, and Fred would say, ‘Well, write it down and let me look at it.’ Hank’d bring it to Fred, and Fred would sit at the piano and complement Hank and say, ‘Well maybe you ought to express this a little differently, let’s change it a little bit,’ but Fred never changed Hank’s thinking.” For his part, Hank took Rose’s lessons to heart, worked hard at his craft, and received the best positive reinforcement there was — hits.
Hank’s ultimate triumph as a songwriter was that he learned to tell an audience of thousands what he couldn’t tell someone sitting one-on-one across the room. “If he’d had the personality offstage that he had onstage, he’d have been all right,” said Lum York, so often the victim of Hank’s interminable, impenetrable silences. Hank felt the need to mask his tenderheartedness with callousness and shitkicker bravado, but in his songs he let his weakness show, increasingly so once he discovered that everyone else was weak too.
By late 1949, Hank had shaken off the dry spell that had afflicted him in Shreveport, and was in the process of becoming the most accomplished songwriter in country music history. The session held between 2:00 and 5:30 p.m. on August 30, 1949, at the Herzog Studio in Cincinnati was the first convincing proof that Hank had arrived.
Fred Rose still insisted that Hank record with the Pleasant Valley Boys — Zeke Turner, Jerry Byrd, and Louis Innis — and was prepared to go to Cincinnati if necessary. Hank drove down from Milwaukee to meet them. He had been working a weeklong stint at the Palace Theater with Ernest Tubb, Cowboy Copas, and Minnie Pearl. His road band stood in the studio and watched, but didn’t play. The first song they cut was “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” Its poetic form comes from the fact that it was originally intended to be spoken — not sung. Acuff-Rose staff writer Vic McAlpin said that Hank had written it for his first session of recitations slated for January 1950, but changed his mind. “I think ol’ Hank needs to record this,” he told McAlpin. Hank was concerned that some of the lines might sound artsy and alienate his audience, so he tried them out on friends, fellow performers, and Fred Rose, and let them convince him that he had excelled. Zeke Turner underpinned “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” with recurring figures on the bass strings of the electric guitar. A few weeks earlier, Turner had led the backing on the Delmore Brothers’ recording of “Blues Stay Away from Me” using very similar licks, so perhaps they were still echoing in his mind. Jerry Byrd played a solo of unusual simplicity, paraphrasing the melody to haunting effect, subtly adjusting tone and volume. Hank sang with unshakable conviction. It was, as he surely knew, a masterpiece.
“I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” was the song Hank would cite as his personal favorite, but when it was released on November 8, 1949, it was on the flip side of “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” another song that Fred Rose didn’t want to touch. We’ll never know what prompted Hank to record it, but it’s his only commercial recording with direct antecedents in black music, and the only one on which he takes a guitar solo. Some have advanced the theory that Tee-Tot taught him the song, but Pappy Neal McCormick also took credit. Perhaps Hank was scouring his mind for ancient, up-tempo songs because “Lovesick Blues” had been so successful, and his own songs less so. The song began in the brothels of New Orleans during the early part of the twentieth century, and it’s the kissing cousin of a very similar song, “Keep a’Knockin,’” later recorded by Louis Jordan and Little Richard. The riff that underpins both songs probably came from the church. The first recorded version of “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” (then called “The Bucket’s Got a Hole in It") was by Tom Gates on Gennett Records in 1927. Then, in 1933, it was copyrighted by Clarence Williams, one of the first African Americans to cross the line between the music and the business. Williams produced and accompanied Bessie Smith, among others, and worked with Frank Walker for years. His own recordings were part jazz, part hokum, and part blues: in other words, much the same mix that Hank heard from Tee-Tot. Clarence Williams’ version of “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” is very different from Hank’s. Among the song’s eight couplets, one berates a frigid woman:
Wintertime is cold, dear, summertime is too
You know a doggone iceberg’ll turn black to blue.
Five years after Clarence Williams copyrighted the song, blues singer Washboard Sam recorded yet another version that he credited to himself. This one was about pimping, prostitution, and dope dealing.
When you walkin’ down Thirty-first Street, boy you better look round
The vice squad is on the beat and you’ll be jailhouse bound
Standing on the corner, everything is so slow,
Can’t make no money, tricks ain’t walkin’ no more
Gonna start a new racket, gonna start it out right
Sell moonshine at day, peddle dope at night.
Like “Frankie and Johnny,” “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” lent itself to endless additions and permutations, and as the Dixieland jazz revival took shape in the mid- to late 1940s, the song rose to the surface once more. New Orleans old-timers George Lewis and Kid Ory recorded it in 1944 and 1946 respectively. When Hank demo’d the song for the band in the studio, he included a couplet that didn’t make it to record:
Me and my baby, we got a Ford,
Now we change the gears from the running board
Fred Rose’s opposition to the song had a lot to do with the fact that it mentioned beer, and probably had something to do with the fact that Acuff-Rose didn’t publish it. If Hank was to record it, though, the couplet about the Ford definitely had to go. If Hank endorsed Ford, then deejays sponsored by GM, Chrysler, and Studebaker wouldn’t spin his record. Hank came to the studio with a guitar solo already worked out. He played it twice as he demo’d it for the band, then reprised it on the record, and while it didn’t break new ground, it was loose and swinging, and wonderfully bluesy. The entire record had a mellow compelling swing that showed just how deeply Hank was immersed in black music.
Hank Williams made “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” into a minor standard. Right away, there were cover versions: Murv Shiner recorded it for Decca, Dave Denny for RCA, and T. Texas Tyler for 4-Star. Fat Man Robinson’s R&B cover version for Decca was interesting in that it included the verse about the Ford that Hank dropped, suggesting that either Hank and Robinson were copying another record or that Robinson had somehow acquired Hank’s demo. Just as Hank’s record was descending the charts, Louis Armstrong recorded it, thereby bringing it back to New Orleans. In 1956, Sonny Burgess recorded a rockabilly version for Sun Records, and Ricky Nelson covered it. With Ozzie Nelson behind the control board, the reference to beer disappeared. The refrain now went, “My bucket’s got a hole in it, won’t work no more.” Completely deracinated, the song finally scaled the pop charts. In fifty years, it had made its way across the breadth of American culture from the whorehouses of Storyville to The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.
The other two songs Hank cut that day in Cincinnati were somber reflections on what his life had quickly become. “A House without Love” resonates with emptiness and unfulfillment. “We slaved to gain a worthless treasure” and “the simple things have gone forever” were a bleak commentary on what success was doing to the Williamses’ ever less-than-stable relationship. “I Just Don’t Like This Kind of Living” was a tad faster and had flashes of Hank’s dark humor ("You ain’t never bin known to be wrong, and I ain’t never bin right"). Audrey’s thoughts can only be guessed at as she heard the substance of their domestic disputes on the radio, particularly as only one side ever got aired. Perhaps, like a game show contestant, she was willing to live with any amount of humiliation for the prize money.
Audrey was, in fact, spending the prize money, and more that Hank had yet to make. She and Hank bought a house at 4916 Franklin Road from Mr. W. Raymond Denney, and the deal closed on September 3, 1949, the Saturday after the session. Hank was back in town for the Opry that day. The Williamses paid $21,000 for a three-bedroom, ranch-style house set back from the road on three acres of land. It was more or less in the country, but still conveniently close to the new Acuff-Rose building at 2510 Franklin that Hank had also partly paid for. Audrey had big plans for the house, which, like Graceland, became a monument to what good money and bad taste can accomplish. A new bedroom, den, breezeway, and two-car garage were added almost immediately, and Audrey went out and bought the most expensive furnishings she could find. The prevailing motif was Oriental: shiny black lacquer and dragons — lots of dragons. To Audrey, kitsch was a step up. The furnishings looked and felt so unusual and cost so much that Hank told his band he was afraid to sit on them. He preferred to lounge on the floor instead. The simple things really had gone forever.
Just days after the house purchase, Hank joined an Opry troupe led by Ernest Tubb on a tour of the Northwest, and on September 13, he made his first appearance in Canada when the troupe played in Vancouver, British Columbia. Later that month, Hank was back on the West Coast with the same troupe, this time in California. On one of those trips, he outfitted himself at Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors in Los Angeles. When he had arrived in Nashville, his principal stage outfit was still the poorly fitting western suit that Tillman Franks had sold him, but now he had something more flamboyant in mind. Nudka Cohn, better known as Nudie Cohen, was born in Russia in 1902, and came to the United States in 1913. He was a boxer and a bit-part actor before finding his calling in western apparel. There were several other western outfitters in Los Angeles, but Nudie became the most lurid of them all. Tex Williams, chiefly remembered these days for “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette),” was Nudie’s first country music client, and Hank was one of his first Nashville clients. Hank and Nudie became close friends, and Nudie later told friends that Hank would be sent to his house to dry out. In 1957, Nudie tailored Elvis’ gold lamé outfit and designed Webb Pierce’s silver-dollar-encrusted Pontiac. Staying abreast of the times, he tailored the infamous rhinestones-inlaid-as-marijuana suit for Gram Parsons of the Flying Burrito Brothers.
Audrey bought outfits for herself, clearly signaling that Hank and Audrey were back in business. She hired a nurse / housekeeper, Audrey Ragland, in September 1949, telling her that she would be on the road with Hank. Evidence of what a Hank and Audrey radio show was like comes from Hank’s first syndicated radio series, the Health and Happiness show, in October 1949. It was an ironic title, as Hank never had much of either. Eight fifteen-minute shows were recorded on two successive Sundays that October. They were the brainchild of Mack Hedrick, advertising manager at WSM. Hedrick pitched Louisiana state senator Dudley J. LeBlanc, inventor of a foul-tasting patent medicine called Hadacol, on the notion of sponsoring Hank. LeBlanc had seen Hank in Lafayette, and was reaping the benefit of having Bill Nettles’ “Hadacol Boogie” in the charts, so he leaped at the idea.
LeBlanc had little direct involvement with the Health and Happiness shows except to underwrite them, and for once in his life, he was outscammed. Hedrick made sure that Hank never mentioned Hadacol; in that way, he had a set of generic shows he could resell to other sponsors. His philosophy was that you had some pickin’ and singin’ and then, as he put it, a commercial right after the “Come to Jesus” number. The transcriptions were duplicated onto banded sixteen-inch discs that played at 33 rpm. After almost every song, Hank made an all-purpose pitch, like “Here’s someone with some news that’ll make you mighty glad you tuned in.” At that point, the engineers on the local stations would stop the disc, a local announcer would read the pitch, then the discs would be restarted.
Hank was the new boy in town with something to prove. The frightening conviction of his singing was strangely offset by his molassified between-song patter. Audrey was on the first four shows, joining Hank on the closing hymn and taking her own solo spots. She followed “I’m a Long Gone Daddy” with “I’m Telling You,” a song that appears to be a self-composed riposte, but, as always, she shot herself in the foot by singing off-key and breaking meter. It was probably at LeBlanc’s request that she was dropped when the last four shows were recorded. Hank was, if anything, in even better form on the four shows without her. He out-Acuffed Acuff on “The Prodigal Son,” then invested “Mind Your Own Business” with even more damning sarcasm than the record, throwing in a fresh couplet after the break: “If I get my head beat black and blue / Brother that’s my wife and my stove wood too.” The shows also included Hank’s only surviving recording of “Tramp on the Street,” the song that had earned him his break.
The Health and Happiness shows were the first recorded evidence of Hank’s new Drifting Cowboys. In the three months they’d worked together they had clearly been schooled in what he wanted. Hank hated pickers who were too busy. When he was singing, he didn’t want the impact undermined by cute fills, and he wanted the solos as simple and direct as his vocals. He would spin around and glare at any musician who got too close to jazz. “I know a lot of good guitar players,” he once said, “who’ve educated themselves right out of a job.” Later, when Hank Garland came to town and proved himself the most technically adroit picker in country music, Hank was dismissive. “Aw,” he said, “he’s still searchin’ for it. I’ve found it.” Hillous Butrum occasionally got too fancy for Hank. “Mostly I’d play two-four time,” said Hillous. “Hank come to me one night and he said, ‘Hillous, you play as good a bass as anyone I ever heard. At times. Then all of a sudden you’ll take off on that thing and I don’t know where you’re going.’ When we’d do ‘Move It on Over’ I’d switch to four-four on the break and Hank never understood what I was doing. You wasn’t supposed to hear a bass note except ever’ other one.”
Plain and simple — that was Hank’s philosophy. It had taken him to the Grand Ole Opry, and he wasn’t about to try for sophistication now. He’d fought the Willis Brothers on his pronunciation during his first session, and he wasn’t about to change now. If he sang “perhaps,” it would be “pre-haps.” “Picture” was “pitcher.” When he sang “Armageddon” in “The Battle of Armageddon,” he pronounced it “Am-be-gotten.” If he contributed to the social transmission of illiteracy, he didn’t care, and Fred Rose learned not to care, either. “Vanilla, boys,” Hank had told his band back in the mid-’40s, and that was still his credo.
Right after the Health and Happiness shows, Hank and his band hit the road on a tour that took them up into Ontario, Canada, in late October 1949. On November 11, he returned in triumph to Montgomery for a show with Bill Monroe, and then on November 13, he flew to Europe as part of the Prince Albert Opry revue. The Opry troupe was to play U.S. Air Force bases on a two-week tour sponsored by R. J. Reynolds. In Air Force–speak, it was deemed a “non revenue mission,” and according to the protocol of the day, the Russians were informed. Hillbilly music was immensely popular among servicemen overseas. Hillbilly Gasthaus was the highest-rated show on Armed Forces Radio (AFRS), and the Opry came over at the request of the enlisted men. Hank was issued with a sheet of instructions in Russian in case he mistakenly wandered into the Russian zone. He looked at the Cyrillic script and said, “Aw, they ain’t gonna win the next war. They cain’t even spell.”
Red Foley led the troupe, backed by Roy Acuff, Jimmy Dickens, Minnie Pearl, and Rod Brasfield. Another Opry act, Radio Dot and Smokey, were cleared by the Department of the Air Force, but don’t appear in any photos from the tour. Harry Stone, Jim Denny, and announcer Grant Turner joined the show, and Acuff took his daughter, Thelma, who did a tap-dance routine. They were all allowed to bring their spouses because they would be away for Thanksgiving. Acuff and Foley brought their own bands, but Hank was to work with Foley’s band.
The troupe left Nashville on what had been General Eisenhower’s private plane. They went to Washington, flew on to Newfoundland to refuel, then hunkered down for the night flight across the Atlantic. Hank snuggled next to Audrey and put his coat over them. The next morning, they arrived in Paris, France, to refuel, then went on to Wiesbaden, Germany. A German oompah band played “Dixie” to welcome them. They visited all the base hospitals, playing a few numbers for the patients, and put on shows in Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, and Vienna. The Berlin and Frankfurt shows were recorded for transmission back home on the Prince Albert portion of the Opry. Hank and Red Foley had two of the most popular records of the day, “Lovesick Blues” and “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy,” and they were called back for encore after encore at every hall they played.
Hank was straight as an arrow and so careful to avoid alcohol that he sniffed his glass at mealtimes to make sure that it contained water — not wine — but that didn’t stop him from yelling, “Hey, Herman, bring me the ketchup” any time he was faced with a dish he didn’t recognize. Aside from brief forays into Canada and Mexico, this was Hank’s first and last experience of foreign lands.
On the way back across the Atlantic, the plane hit an air pocket, and dropped precipitously. The performers clung to their seats, and some flew up to the roof of the plane. Nearly everyone had bought cuckoo clocks in the Black Forest, and the clocks fell from the overhead racks, going “cuckoo, cuckoo” as they hit the floor. The plane touched down to refuel in Bermuda and the troupe boarded a bus to a hotel. The roads were narrow and windy, and, because it was a British colony, oncoming vehicles would suddenly appear on what Hank and the others regarded as the wrong side of the road. On arrival back in Nashville, Hank bent over gingerly and kissed the tarmac.
Oscar Davis had dropped all his other clients to handle Hank exclusively, and now Hank was beginning to understand what real pressure was like. He came home to a full date book and a punishing itinerary. In Montgomery or Shreveport, he’d played within driving distance of home, and if he missed a show date or two, he would do a “make-good” later if he felt like it. Now he was working with structured itineraries that took him away from home all week. Too often, he would arrive home on Friday night and leave again on Saturday night or Sunday morning.
Hank arrived back from Europe to see “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” climbing the charts. It had reached number two by the end of December. Among the records that kept it from the top spot were the Delmore Brothers’ “Blues Stay Away from Me” and Red Foley’s “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy.”
After successful tours out west, through the Southwest, and up the Ohio valley into Canada, Oscar Davis had decided to promote Hank on the eastern seaboard during the period leading up to Christmas. On December 8, Hank was to star for a week at the Hippodrome Theater in Baltimore, and was scheduled to follow it with a Potomac River Cruise show and a headline appearance at the Roosevelt Hotel in Washington. He started drinking in Dayton, Ohio, after losing some money in a craps game, and by the time he got to Baltimore he was drunk. It was the first time the new Drifting Cowboys had seen Hank on a bender. They checked into the hotel behind the Hippodrome with everyone on edge because Hank, although drunk, still thought himself able to perform. The band was watching him closely, but when he needed a drink Hank was more resourceful than anyone gave him credit for. He bribed a bellhop to bring up whiskey miniatures hidden inside a pitcher of ice and arranged for one of the girls in the square dance troupe to hide minatures in her skirts for him.
The rule of thumb that people came to use with Hank was that it would take about three days for him to get good and drunk and then three days to get over it. At first, he would make the shows, swaying precariously but always somehow managing to remain upright. “Here I am in Baltimore,” he told the audience. “I ain’t never been in Baltimore. If I come back, it’ll be twice I been here.” He said that every show, four shows a day. Oscar Davis eventually took him off the bill and brought in old-time yodeler Elton Britt as the headliner. Audrey was flown up from Nashville for her expertise, and Helms and McNett went to pick her up at the airport. Later, as she sat disconsolately in the hotel lobby, Audrey turned to McNett and said, “I’m so upset and discouraged, I think I’ve lost the love I had for Hank.” But, since she was there, she decided she would do some shows with him after he’d straightened out.
By December 16, Hank was back on track. He and Cowboy Copas set an attendance record at the Victory Room in the Hotel Roosevelt in Washington. Nine hundred were admitted and five hundred turned away, but Audrey’s insistence upon performing led to another rift. Finally, Hank refused to let her sing, so she stormed back home. Hank came into the room that McNett and Butrum were sharing, put his foot up on the window ledge and said, “Boys, it’s heck to have a wife in the business that wants to sing, but it’s worse’n that to have one that wants to sing and cain’t.”
A few days later, Hank was home for Christmas. It was his first in Nashville, and his first with Hank Jr. When Hank went downtown to buy a copy of Billboard, he saw in the year-end tallies that he had shot from nowhere to become the second-best-selling country singer of the year. Only Eddy Arnold was ahead of him. Hank had placed eight songs in the country charts in 1949, but Arnold had placed thirteen and was still the man to beat.
It wasn’t until December that Hank and Audrey finally sold their house in Shreveport, getting back the $9,500 they paid for it and thus drawing a line under that phase of Hank’s career.
What was Hank thinking as he wriggled uncomfortably in his Oriental furniture that Christmas? Did he wonder what would have happened without “Lovesick Blues,” that “nothing song” that Fred Rose had disparaged? Without its catalytic effect, Rose might have lost interest in the undistinguished songs that Hank was sending up from Louisiana. MGM might have dropped him when his contract was up that year. Hank might even have become so discouraged that he would have gotten out of the business, as he had told Johnny Bond he would do just one year earlier. What if Fred Rose had stuck to his guns and refused to let Hank record “Lovesick Blues"? Instead of soaring in 1949, Hank Williams’ recording career might simply have petered out.