There are few stars whose careers burned hotter, brighter and shorter than Hank Williams. Born Hiram King Williams in Alabama in 1923, Hank was afflicted with spina bifida and the disease would plague him until his death. Young Hank started playing guitar at age six and he taught himself to improvise chords. By age eight, Hank was known locally as something of a child prodigy and it was at this time that he met Rufus “Tee Tot” Payne.
Payne was a blues street musician and he began giving Hank informal lessons. It was through Payne that Hank learned the blues and began incorporating blues into his mélange of folk, Appalachian, and Country and Western music. While rock and roll did not start with Hank Williams it is appropriate to view Hank as a kind of uncle to rock and roll.
The Williams family moved around the South quite a bit due to Hank’s father’s job with the railroad. His father suffered a brain aneurysm that would keep him hospitalized for the majority of his life. Hank and his mother eventually ended up in Montgomery in 1937 where he entered and won a city talent contest. Hank began performing on the streets outside the local radio station and eventually was earning $15 a week to produce a fifteen minute show twice per week for broadcast.
Hank put together a backing band called the Drifting Cowboys and began his professional career at age fourteen. Two years later he dropped out of school to focus on music full-time. He began touring the states surrounding Alabama, playing at fairs, in movie theaters and eventually in the honky tonk bars. This was Hank’s first exposure to alcohol and he rather enjoyed it. Alcohol began causing him problems almost immediately, with Hank often drinking up the money made from the shows.
Hank had trouble keeping the Drifting Cowboys together as many of them were drafted into the Army to serve in World War II. Many of the replacements he found would quit the band over Hank’s drinking. In 1942, the radio station fired him for habitual drunkenness. Hank continued playing but had to find work in a shipyard in Mobile. In 1943, Hank met Audrey Sheppard and they married in 1944. The wedding was performed by a justice of the peace at a Texaco gas station in Andalusia, Alabama (if that ain’t country I don’t know what is.)
When the war was over Hank returned to Montgomery and resumed playing for the radio station. In 1946 Hank auditioned for the Grand Ole Opry but was passed over. He signed a six-song deal with Roy Acuff’s record label. His work through Acuff caught the interest of MGM Records and he signed with them in 1947 and immediately released a huge hit in “Move It on Over”. In 1948, Hank and Audrey moved to Shreveport, Louisiana to join the popular radio show Louisiana Hayride.
The exposure Hank received as part of that show lit the fuse that would launch his career to an unprecedented level in country music. Hank was touring steadily while playing on the Hayride and times were good. His son, Hank Williams Jr., was born in 1949 and in that same year Hank toured Europe. 1950 saw Hank release multiple Top Ten country hits and in 1951 Hank toured the country with Bob Hope and made his first television appearance on the Perry Como Show.
1951 was also the beginning of the end for Hank. He fell while on a hunting trip and re-injured his back (in addition to spina bifida, Hank hurt his back when he was thrown from a bull years earlier). Hank turned to pain killers and booze and was quickly back to his bad old habits. He checked into a hospital for alcohol rehab but it didn’t do him much good. In December of 1951 he had spinal fusion surgery but it did little to ease his pain.
Hank continued his boozing and soon had an affair that produced a daughter (born five days after his death). Audrey divorced him in 1952 and the wheels came off of ol’ Hank’s wagon. He recorded some of his finest music at this time, including “Jambalaya”, “You Win Again”, “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “Kaw-Liga”, and when Hank was sober he was undisputedly the best in the business. When he wasn’t sober, which was the majority of the time, he was unreliable. He was fired from the Grand Ole Opry in August and from there everything only got worse.
Hank met a convicted con man named Toby Marshall late in 1952. Marshall was sent to prison in Oklahoma for forgery and once he was released he obtained a phony degree from the Chicago School of Applied Science. Now passing himself off as a doctor, Marshall prescribed morphine and amphetamines for Hank. The boozing and drugs started giving Hank heart troubles but he kept on keeping on.
On New Year’s Eve 1952, Hank had a show in West Virginia. There was a winter storm raging at the time and Hank was unable to fly to the show. He hired a college kid, Charles Carr, to drive him to his New Year’s Day show in Canton, Ohio and they hit the road. Hank wasn’t doing well on the trip and they checked into a motel in Knoxville, Tennessee. Carr called for a doctor and the doctor injected Hank with a combination of B-vitamins and morphine. Carr and Hank got back into Hank’s Cadillac to continue on to Canton.
Hank never made it to Ohio. At some point on the trip he had died in the backseat of the car. It was determined that he died of heart failure at the age of 29. His body was transported back to Montgomery and over 15,000 people attended the viewing of his body. It is claimed that Hank’s funeral was the biggest in the history of Montgomery. Hank released his last single, “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive”, only a month before his death.
Hank Williams’ legacy is enormous in country, folk and rock and roll music. Williams had eleven number one hits and his albums continue to sell long after his death. It was Hank, not Woody Guthrie, who served as Bob Dylan’s original inspiration. The list of artists who have covered his songs is too big to mention everyone, but the most telling part of that list is how many different genres it crosses.
When you have people like Elvis Presley, Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Jerry Lee Lewis, Al Green, Tony Bennett, Isaac Hayes, Roy Orbison, Van Morrison, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, George Jones, Johnny Cash, Glen Campbell, Patsy Cline, Waylon Jennings, Clint Black, Jeff Buckley, Tom Petty, The Melvins, Volbeat, Red Hot Chili Peppers and George Thorogood covering Hank’s music you get an idea of just how big he was.
Hank Williams was part of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s second induction class in 1987 and he was one of only three members of the first induction class into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1961. Since his death there have been over 100 songs recorded that are either about Hank Williams or make reference to him. Hank released 31 singles during his lifetime, of which seven failed to make the chart, while the other 24 all reached at least #14 on the country singles chart. 22 of those 24 songs reached the Top Ten and seven reached #1.
Hank’s legacy is still alive today. Hank’s son, Hank Williams Jr., became a country music star in his own right while Hank’s grandson, Hank III, is an accomplished multi-instrumentalist that has had success in country and heavy metal music. In 2015 a movie about his life, I Saw The Light, was released.
(This is a rerun from last year. http://www.elevenwarriors.com/forum/anything-else/2016/01/65754/hank-wil...)
