The Miserable Life, Death and Immortality of Hank Williams
By David Rapp
In the early morning of New Year’s Day, 1953, chauffeur Charles Carr pulled his Cadillac into the lot of a drive-in movie theater in Oak Hill, West Virginia, to check on his passenger, the country-music superstar Hank Williams, who had not moved in the back seat for hours as they drove from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Canton, Ohio. Carr discovered that Williams wasn’t breathing. His skin was blue and cold. The music legend was dead at 29 years old.
In his short but spectacular career in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Williams helped bring country music out of backwoods honky-tonks and into the mainstream. He wrote or cowrote many songs that would become classics, including “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “Hey, Good Lookin’,” the rollicking “Move It on Over,” and such wistful ballads as “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love with You).” He did it all despite uncontrolled alcohol and drug use, that caught up with him fast, depriving the world of a talent that continues to inspire musicians today.
He was born Hiram Williams, near the small town of Georgiana, Alabama, in 1923. More than one biographer has invoked Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the book by the writer James Agee and the photographer Walker Evans documenting Depression life in rural Alabama, to illustrate the hardscrabble, poverty-stricken environment Williams grew up in. He was a thin and sickly child, born with a deformity in his spinal column, spina bifida occulta, which caused severe back pain and likely encouraged his later substance abuse.
His family moved around southern Alabama following his father’s job as train conductor. When he was seven, his father nearly died of a brain aneurysm and remained hospitalized for several years; the young Williams rarely saw him after that. An aunt taught Williams how to play the guitar at 10—soon he was hanging around a local black blues musician, Rufus “Tee Tot” Payne. By his early teens, he was writing his own songs and entering local talent shows. Williams landed a twice-weekly show on local radio station WFSA, where he was billed as “The Singing Kid.” Around that time, he adopted “Hank” as a stage name, a popular appellation among performers of “hillbilly music.”
The radio exposure created a demand for Williams at honky-tonks all over Alabama, where he frequently got drunk and got into fights. He married a divorcee with a small child in 1944. The next year, he entered a hospital for treatment of his alcoholism—the first of many such visits he would make in his short life. He was 22.
He kept writing songs, and in 1946 his songs caught the notice of Fred Rose, a Nashville songwriter and producer who ran Acuff-Rose, a music publishing company with the country singer Roy Acuff. Acuff liked Williams’s music but disapproved of his hard-drinking life. “You got a million-dollar voice,” he told him, “and a ten-cent brain.”
In a year he had a contract with MGM Records. In 1949, he and his wife had a son, the future country musician Hank Williams, Jr.
He spent long stretches traveling from town to town, playing honky-tonks, and the long car trips aggravated his back. He started taking painkillers, which together with all the alcohol occasionally made him unable to sing—or even stay conscious. When he could perform, he would sometimes rant at his audience. Once in Lafayette, Louisiana, he stumbled onstage and asked the crowd, “I bet y’all drove a long way to see Hank, didn’t you?” The crowd roared. “Well, now you’ve seen him,” he said. He laid down his guitar and stalked off without playing a note.
He fought frequently with his first wife, Audrey; there was infidelity on both sides. He poured his feelings into his songs. “Cold, Cold Heart,” about Audrey, became a massive hit for him and an even bigger one when Tony Bennett covered it in 1951.
Williams’s timeless songs crossed over into other genres easily; soon they were being covered by Louis Armstrong, Perry Como, and Dinah Washington, among others. (Since his death, musicians of every imaginable style have performed his work, including the Bee Gees, Guy Lombardo, Lawrence Welk, and the Grateful Dead.)
Williams would ultimately claim 11 number-one hits and several more top-10 songs in his brief career. He appeared often on the Grand Old Opry radio show, then as now, the ultimate destination for country-music stars. He recorded religious songs under the pseudonym “Luke the Drifter.” But all the hard work and success was undercut by his alcoholism; he and Audrey divorced in mid-1952. He was banned from the Opry after repeatedly failing to show up. His unreliability became legendary, and many of his backing musicians deserted him.
He would briefly marry again, but would also make another woman pregnant. (He would never know his daughter, born just days after his death.) His back pain worsened, and surgery failed to relieve it. Near the end, he began taking morphine and the sedative chloral hydrate in combination with alcohol. He was ravaged physically and looked at least twice his age. It was only a matter of time before it caught up to him.
When it did, in the back seat of that Cadillac in 1953, the cause was a heart attack. Before getting in the car, Williams had a doctor inject him with morphine and vitamin B12—morphine for his chronic back pain; B12 to rectify a vitamin deficiency brought on by his alcoholism. The medical examiner did not test for drugs, so the full details of what killed him may never be known. But no one would dispute that the true cause of death was Hank Williams himself.
After his death, he became more popular than ever. Some 20,000 people attended his funeral at the City Auditorium in Montgomery, Alabama. Several of his songs were posthumously released, including “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “Kaw-Liga,” and “Take These Chains from My Heart.” All went to number one on the country charts, and his legend grew to almost godlike proportions. He is revered—and probably always will be—as one of the fathers of country music, and his songs are still performed by musicians in every realm of popular music.
But not everyone was calling Williams a saint back on New Year’s Day in 1953. Jerry Byrd, a Nashville musician who had played steel guitar on Williams’s classic 1949 single “Lovesick Blues,” and who knew how difficult and unreliable Williams could be, was talking with his fellow musicians after hearing the news. One of the old studio hands said, “We’ll never see his likes again.”
“I hope not,” said Byrd.
— David Rapp has written about history for American Heritage, American Legacy, and Out.
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