Hank Williams’ last ride

Latest addition to the Dorseyland Google Earth canon – Post #214 – is a 53-stop biography of country-music legend Hank Williams, who died on the first day of the year I was born but is still shaping the language of the world. The GE post, excerpted below, is downloadable here.

Spellbound by the music, I started off tracking Hank’s December 1952 Cadillac sprint to doom, the famous “last ride“, and ended up following his whole life.



Back in the ’80s there was a highly acclaimed Canadian touring revue called “Hank Williams – The Show He Never Gave”, about the concert he was heading for on that ride, in Canton, Ohio, but despite the revue playing repeatedly in and around Toronto, to my chagrin it remains The Show I Never Saw. I haven’t even had the chance to see the filmed version on VCD. Someday we’ll link up.









The “father of contemporary country music” was a superstar by age 25 and dead at age 29. He recorded 129 tunes and wrote many more, and about him there have been something like 700 tribute songs.
Among the No 1 hits, “Lovesick Blues”, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”, “Why Don’t You Love Me?”, “Moanin’ the Blues”, “Cold, Cold Heart”, “Hey Good Lookin’”, “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)”, “Take These Chains from My Heart” and the true enough “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive”.

As a live performer, he was an unprecedented show-stopper, regaling audiences from the stage in tailored cowboy outfits from Nudies. He missed a lot of shows because of his drinking, but he was usually there, everywhere, with bells on.
Hank’s legacy lives on not just in many of the places you’ll see on this tour but in his descendants – in legend-in-his-own-right Hank Williams Jr, in his grandson Hank III, born Shelton Hank Williams in 1972, a punkabilly performer with almost as many fans as the patriarch, in Jett Williams, his daughter by a mistress who won her way to acceptance, and most recently in Holly Williams, Hank Jr’s daughter, whose debut album came out in 2005.
The younger generations have followed their own paths but, musically, they’ve found in turn that the roots run deeper than they’d ever imagined.




Mount Olive
There isn’t much to see in Mount Olive, Alabama, today, and there wasn’t much when Hiram “Hank” Williams was born here on September 17, 1923. Long gone is the double-pen log house where he made his debut. It was still called “the Kendrick place” after the man who built it in the late 1800s. In its place today is a barn on private property, but a half-mile south is the Mount Olive Baptist Church where Hank first sang as a toddler. It’s circled in the image below.


His parents were Elonzo “Lon” Huble Williams and Jessie Lillybelle Skipper Williams. He worked on the railroad; she played the organ at church; for a while they ran a general store.
Hank had an older sister, Irene, and a brother who died shortly after birth. Hank also had spinal defect that troubled him throughout his life, and which was further aggravated when he was thrown from a horse at age 17.


The family moved with Lon’s railroad jobs, first to the outskirts of Georgiana, then in 1927 to McWilliams, where Hank attended his first two years of school.

Starting in January 1930 Lon was institutionalised often at veterans’ hospitals, first in Pensacola, Florida, then in Alexandria, Louisiana. It was “shell shock”, a delayed reaction to the horrors he’d experienced during World War I. He never came home again – Lilly divorced him during his 10-year absence.































Georgiana
When his father was first hospitalised, Lilly’s brother-in-law took Hank’s family in at the house in Garland where Lilly’s mother also lived. Then they moved into a dilapidated wooden shack on old Highway 31 in Georgiana, but it burned down a few months later, and they were offered a new house rent-free by Thaddeus B Rose, here on a street he’d named for himself.

The house is today the Hank Williams Sr Boyhood Home and Museum, which for a quarter century has been hosting a Hank Williams Festival of music at the Hank Williams Music Park next door.

And the stretch of Interstate 65 between Georgiana and Montgomery is now knwon as the Hank Williams Memorial Lost Highway, dedicated as such in a 1997 ceremony attended by Hank Williams Jr.

This is where Hank got his first guitar, in 1931. He even went to shape-note singing school in nearby Avant, but in 1934 local blues street singer Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne provided his first real musical education, showing him how to play his guitar properly. Hank was soon performing around Georgiana and Greenville, still in his early teens. Payne died in 1939 and is buried not far from Williams.



Montgomery
Hank was 13 when the family moved to the big city in July 1937. His mother opened a boarding house at 114 South Perry Street.
In December 1937 Hank won the talent show at the Empire Theater, singing his own composition, “WPA Blues”, and was promptly put on the air, broadcasting on WSFA Montgomery.

Built in 1914, the Empire theater-cum-cinema was demolished in August 1997, two months before a hearing on its historical status. Its main claim to fame is as the site where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white passenger. The site is now occupied by the Rosa Parks Memorial Library.
Hank the teenage radio star quit school in ‘39 and two years later had his own band, the Drifting Cowboys, who in one form or another would stick with him to the end.


In May 1943 Hank was the warm-up act at the Montgomery City Auditorium for Pee Wee King. Then at a Labor Day show he happened to be backstage when Hardrock Gunter needed the guitar he’d left onstage. Hank volunteered to retrieve it, but instead picked it up and did a show that brought down the house. Then he tried to leave with Hardrock’s guitar!

Touring with a medicine show in 1943, Hank met Audrey Mae Sheppard, a married 20-year-old from Banks, Alabama. She lived and worked with him for a couple of months in Mobile and then, 10 days after her divorce was finalised in December ‘44, they got married on the 15th at a filling station here in Andalusia, Alabama, a little burg where he had a regular gig.

Williams‘ performing style has been described as intense, his head and torso movements restricted by his bad back. Tall and rangy, Hank half-bent into the microphone, crouching around his guitar, his knees pumping and swinging from side to side.


Nashville
Audrey, having displaced Hank’s mother as his manager, brought him to Nashville in September ‘46 to meet Fred Rose of Acuff-Rose Publishing, who bought a pair of Hank’s songs for singer Molly O’Day. “Never Again” and “Honky Tonkin’” were both successful, and Williams was invited to record for Sterling Records, but got swiftly promoted to the higher-profile MGM label.

In December he did his first recording sessions, the Willis brothers backing him up at WSM Studios and here at Castle Studio. “Move It on Over”, released later in ‘47, became Hank’s first Top 5 hit.
In April 1948 Hank warmed up the audience at a Grand Ole Opry package show in Montgomery featuring Johnny Bond and Cowboy Copas. Hank went out drinking with Copas later and disappeared for two or three days.

His domestic squabbles with Audrey were getting serious. One was bad enough to drive him to Pensacola for a few days, but now she’d had enough. She filed for divorce, complaining that he had “a violent and ungovernable temper” and that “during the last month he has been drunk most of the time”. The divorce was finalised in May, but by then, they’d already reconciled.

Not too well, of course. He checked into the Tulane on April 15, 1950, after another scrap with Audrey, and ended up falling asleep with a lit cigarette and setting his bed on fire.


The Louisiana Hayride
On August 7, 1948, Hank Williams debuted on the Louisiana Hayride, and quickly became a fixture on its tours and radio programs. “Honky Tonkin’” was released that year, followed by “I’m a Long Gone Daddy”, both popular, though not matching the success of “Move It on Over”.

A latecomer in the era of radio “barn dances”, which began in the 1920s, the Hayride was the brainstorm of Horace “Hoss” Logan (1916-2002), who emceed the shows right from the start on April 3, 1948.



“The Cradle of the Stars”, as the Hayride became known, played a crucial role in the careers of Johnny Cash, Faron Young, Jim Reeves, Willie Nelson, Slim Whitman, George Jones and Johnny Horton, as well as Hank Williams, and of course Elvis Presley debuted there in October 1954. (It was Logan, trying to quiet a frenzied Hayride audience after a Presley show, who first said, “Elvis has left the building.”)



Domestic blues
In early ‘49 Hank’s recording of Emmett Miller’s “Lovesick Blues” hit No 1 and stayed there for 16 weeks, even crossing over into the pop Top 25. He was now a star who could no longer be ignored by the biggest show in country music, the Grand Ole Opry.

Before he claimed that venerable stage, he welcomed into the world a star of his own. Randall Hank Williams – the future Hank Williams Jr – was born on May 26, 1949, in Shreveport. Hank nicknamed him “Little Bocephus” after a ventriloquist’s dummy that was featured on the Opry at the time.

By August, Hank and Audrey had moved to Nashville, and the following month he bought a home at 2510 Franklin Road.




The Grand Ole Opry
Hank Williams took the stage in triumph for his Grand Ole Opry debut here at the Ryman Auditorium on June 18, 1949. (Some accounts say June 11, but that appearance wasn’t part of the broadcast segment.)

He sang “Lovesick Blues”, which by then had sold three million copies. The reception was fantastic, although not everyone believes the legend that he earned six encores and that emcee Red Foley had to plead with the audience to let the show continue. It’s also been said that, in tribute to Williams, they wouldn’t let anyone else get more than five encores after that. Hank was quickly bundled into an Opry package tour that entertained GIs stationed in Germany.

Long before he performed from the stage of the Ryman for the Opry, Hank had recorded here. The place has always been acclaimed for its wonderful acoustics.

The Union Gospel Tabernacle, opened in 1892 by steamboat magnate Captain Thomas G Ryman (1841-1904), was renamed the Ryman Auditorium in his honour when he died, in recognition of his civic contributions. It was soon an entertainment venue, but really found its true calling with the launch of the Grand Ole Opry show in 1943. It became the Mother Church of Country Music.

The 2,362-seat Ryman was used for Grand Ole Opry broadcasts until 1974, when the Opry moved to larger quarters at the Opryland USA theme park (now the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center) on the city’s outskirts.

The Ryman sat vacant for 20 years until its restoration in 1994, and today again hosts music concerts, although it’s unlikely to see shows of the historic calibre that made it a legend among entertainment venues.

No fewer that three ghosts have allegedly haunted the building, and Hank’s is one of them. The first was that of old Captain Ryman himself, who’d make a fuss over performances he didn’t like, including one risque show in the early 1900s that made him crash about so loudly that he drowned out the actors.

“The Gray Man” – a patron dressed in grey – was seen by many employees and artists sitting in the balcony during rehearsals, but always vanished when someone went looking for him.

Several Ryman employees claim they’ve come face to face with Hank Williams, sometimes backstage, sometimes onstage singing, and at least once in the alley between the auditorium and Tootsies Orchid Lounge, where he used to tank up.

Tootsies Orchid Lounge
Tootsies Orchid Lounge at 422 Broadway was called Mom’s in the days when Hank infamously sneaked in here between turns onstage at the Ryman across the alley.

It’s “legendary” status really developed, though, after the late Tootsie Bess bought the place in 1960. A singer and comedienne with Big Jeff & The Radio Playboys (Jeff Bess was her husband), Tootsie had a couple of records of her own out.

Her customers included Patsy Cline, Kris Kristofferson, Faron Young, Willie Nelson, Tom T Hall, Hank Cochran, Mel Tillis, Webb Pierce, Waylon Jennings and Roger Miller, who allegedly wrote “Dang Me” here. Willie Nelson got his first songwriting job after singing at Tootsie’s.








Corralled
In June 1951 Hank and Audrey’s Corral, a shop selling cowboy outfits, opened here at at 724 Commerce Street, two doors down from the original Ernest Tubb record store. These days you can find it online here. Purchases benefit Audrey’s Dream, founded in Hank and Audrey’s memory by Lycrecia Williams Hoover, Audrey’s daughter by her first marriage, and her partner Dale Vinicur. It and the planned Hank & Audrey Williams Center are described as “a whole new idea in recovery centres” for people with substance-abuse problems and their families.

Alcohol cut short Audrey’s life too, at age 52 at the home on Franklin Road.

Throughout 1950 and ‘51, Hank and the other Drifting Cowboys – guitarist Bob McNett, bassist Hillous Butrum, fiddler Jerry Rivers and steel guitarist Don Helms – were earning thousands of dollars per sold-out show across the country, and the hits just kept on coming, many of them being covered by stars like Tony Bennett, Frankie Laine and Teresa Brewer. Williams also began recording spiritual records under the name Luke the Drifter.

The booze also kept on coming, though. In July 1950 Hank was a no-show in Greenville, Texas, and it was neither the first nor certainly the last time that drink would scratch his name from the bill.

The shows he managed to make, however, were invariably sensational, and he was a frequent guest on radio, twice appeared on Perry Como’s TV show from New York and toured with Bob Hope and Jack Benny.








Naggin’ back
Williams had bought a farm in Williamson County outside Nashville in 1951. He injured his back while hunting here in 1951 and underwent a “spine fusion” at Vanderbilt University Hospital, but the injury necessitated a diet of painkillers to keep him working.

On and off in 1952, Hank stayed at a place at 2718 Westwood with Ray Price. He and Audrey had split for a final time. On Mother’s Day, Lillie came by to visit with Lycretia and Hank Jr. By mid-year Hank had moved back to Montgomery to live with his mama, and put on a homecoming show in Greenville, Alabama.







Waiting to disappear
Williams did a string of shows in California in April 1952 – San Jose, Oakland, Bakersfield. Ralph J Gleason interviewed him on the 15th for the San Fransisco Chronicle and wrote about the experience later in Rolling Stone. He went to his room at Oakland’s Leamington Hotel.

“I was a little surprised by the pills, but then he looked pale and thin, and had deep-set eyes and might have been hung over for all I knew.” Hank told Gleason he was doing 200 one-nighters a year and grossing over $400,000.
In San Diego, during the first of his two shows in one night, he was so drunk that he fell off stage before the third number. Minnie Pearl and the wife of the promoter drove him around town in hopes of to sobering him up for the second show and tried the old sing-along ruse. He managed one verse of “I Saw the Light”, then told Minnie, “I don’t see no light. There ain’t no light.”





In September 1951 Hank had signed a movie contract with MGM, and they talked about projects when Hank was in Los Angeles, but the deal floated in limbo until the studio finally abandoned it in June ‘52. He ended up being portrayed by George Hamilton in a rather scurrilous 1964 biopic that Audrey helped script.

On the road, Hank was wrecking hotel rooms, throwing money out of windows and toying with guns. His divorce from Audrey was finalised in July. She got the children, the house and half of his future royalties.



Kaw-Liga!
On August 15, 1952, Hank Williams bought the car he’d die in – a brand-new, baby blue Cadillac – and the next day drove out to a cabin here at Camp Kawliga on Lake Martin for a vacation. He was joined later by 19-year-old Billie Jean Jones Eshlimar, a girl from Bossier City, Louisiana, he’d met in June at the Opry (she’d been Faron Young’s date).
This is where he wrote “Kaw-Liga”, about the Native American legend of Kowaliga that gave the creek and bay here their name. He was soused at the time, and in fact was later arrested, shirtless, at a hotel in neighbouring Alexander City for public drunkenness, a press photographer capturing the scene for posterity.

That same month the Grand Ole Opry fired him for too many no-shows. Even the Drifting Cowboys began working with Ray Price instead of him; Fred Rose slammed the door. Hank was back playing the Louisiana Hayride, but with local pickup bands and at reduced wages. By the end of the year Williams was having heart problems and receiving heavy medication from shady doctors.

The Lake Martin cabin, owned at the time by a local car dealer, was moved in 1989 when construction began on a camp for Children’s Harbor, a non-profit charity, but brought back in 2001 and restored to the way it was when the singer was a tenant.



Triple wedding
On October 18, 1952, Williams married the newly divorced 19-year-old Billie Jean Jones Eshlimar before a Justice of the Peace in Minden, Louisiana, following his appearance on the Hayride.

The next day at the New Orleans Municipal Auditorium they got married again – twice – in front of 14,000 people who paid $2 apiece to witness the nuptials. They were both terrified that Audrey would show up and make a scene.

Two weeks later Hank checked into a sanitarium to dry out, then played a slew of shows in Texas, Kansas and Louisiana, then went right back into rehab.

In the midst of all this, Hank signed an agreement to support the baby of a Nashville secretary named Bobbie Jett. The baby, due in January, would grow up to be country singer Jett Williams.


Shreveport
On December 12 Hank walked out of a sanitarium in Shreveport, got hammered downtown, and was arrested and carted straight back.

On the 13th he made his final appearance on the Louisiana Hayride, and the next day began a one-week tour of Texas and Mississippi. He was in great voice, but bodily on the verge of a breakdown. “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” was heading for No 1 on the charts.

His mother took him home to her boarding house on North McDonough Street in Montgomery to recuperate from the flu over Christmas, ready for his big “comeback” dates in Charleston, West Virginia, on New Year’s Eve and Canton, Ohio, on New Year’s Day.






On the 21st Hank retraced his path to Greenville and sang for his cousin at their store. On Christmas Day he went to visit his father in Pensacola, but he wasn’t home, so Hank left a box of chocolates, scrawling a note on the cellophane wrapper. Old Lon, who would only see his son again in a casket, kept the cellophane for the rest of his long life.

The last show
On December 28, Williams played his last gig, a New Year’s party for the Montgomery chapter of the American Federation of Musicians at the Elite Cafe, somewhere here on Montgomery Street. The next night he had trouble sleeping. “Billie,” he told his new wife, “I think I see God coming down the road.”

One for the road
On December 30, Hank loaded his guitar and stage outfits into his Cadillac outside his mother’s boarding house, which was here at 324 North McDonough Street (318 by another account).

At about 11.30am, he set off on his last ride. He’d hoped to fly to Charleston but a snowfall changed his mind. Behind the wheel was Charles Carr, a 19-year-old college freshman whose father knew Hank and arranged the chauffeur’s job.

They visited a succession of radio DJs around Montgomery, and Hank agreed to put in an appearance at a highway contractors’ convention at a local hotel, where he likely had a few drinks.

Carr next drove him to his doctor to get a shot of morphine to ease his back pain for the ride to Charleston, and they bought a six-pack of Falstaff beer, though Carr said Hank drank little. Williams evidently also brought along chloral hydrate to help him sleep. It’s designed to slow the heartbeat, but it’s dangerous when mixed with alcohol – the combination was infamous as the surreptitious knock-out formula involved in “slipping someone a Mickey”. With morphine added to the cocktail, psychosis can result – or self-euthanisia.
By early afternoon they were northbound on Highway 31.


Shelter for the night
A snowstorm blew up in the late afternoon, forcing Williams and Carr to check into the Redmont Hotel in Birmingham. Within 30 minutes, several women had found their way into Hank’s room. Hank asked where they were from, and one replied, “Heaven.” She was the reason, Hank replied, that he was going to hell.
The journey resumed early the next morning, December 31.


Somewhere en route Hank bought some booze, and “Jambalaya” was on the radio. Carr told him it made no sense. “That’s ‘cause you don’t understand French,” Hank laughed.

In Fort Payne, Alabama, Williams bought a pint of bourbon and they went to a restaurant for breakfast. “He walked up to our server,” Carr recalled, “and said, ‘Here’s the biggest tip you ever got.’ And he gave him $50. Money didn’t mean anything to Hank.”

Grounded
It’s widely reported that a snowstorm again stalled Carr and Williams , but newspaper records suggest fog ahead of Chattanooga, not snow, as the likely reason they couldn’t follow through on a plan to speed their progress.





Arriving in Knoxville around 10.30am, it was obvious that the only way Hank was going to be on time for the Charleston show was to fly. At McGhee Tyson Airport they board a 3.30 flight, but the weather turned the plane around. They were back on the runway by 6pm.

Carr and Williams checked into the Andrew Johnson Hotel in Knoxville at 7.08pm, Hank by this time requiring the help of a pair of porters to get to his room.

Hank began convulsively hiccuping and a doctor was summoned. Finding the patient “very drunk”, he administered shots of morphine and vitamin B12. There has been speculation that Williams had earlier been injected with morphine by a sympathetic physician at the same city’s St Mary’s Hospital.

Carr phoned promoter AV Bamford to let him know they wouldn’t be making it to Charleston. Bamford urged him to try and be on time for the 2pm New Year’s Day matinee in Canton. That was still more than 400 miles away, so Carr decided to check them out early and had the porters take Williams to the car in a wheelchair. By one account, the porters said Hank was wheezing and/or coughing, leading to drawn-out debate as to whether a dead man could make such sounds.

“Hank got in on his own,” Carr testified. “I clearly remember that.” But the porters said they hoisted him into the back seat and covered him with his blue overcoat. A lot of people think he was already dead at this point.

No stopping now
Carr set off at 10.45pm. An article written on the 50th anniversary of Williams‘ death for Knoxville-based MetroPulse.com set a sardonic scene: “Carr likely drove north on Gay Street, which was quiet at that hour except for some boys milling around on the sidewalks with firecrackers in their pockets, waiting for midnight. He likely drove by the Tennessee Theatre, which was then opening its doors for an 11:15 showing of a Broderick Crawford movie called ‘Stop, You’re Killing Me’.”

Heading out of town, they stopped for gas at about 11 at a 24-hour Esso station on Magnolia Avenue at Winona. The pump attendant noticed the prone figure in the back seat. “He was dressed up in dress clothes, white shirt, no tie. He was foaming at the mouth. I told that young man, ‘He looks like he’s dead’. The guy said, ‘Don’t worry about him. He’s drunk and passed out’.”

At about 11.45 Carr was stopped near Blaine, Tennessee, by Patrolman Swan Kitts after he almost hit Kitts’ cruiser while trying to pass someone. Carr explained that he was rushing Hank Williams to a show in Ohio, and said Williams had been drinking and had had a sedative.

Tracking the last ride in 2002, Peter Cooper of The Tennessean placed the pull-over spot at what had been the location of the Skyway Drive-In Theater in Corryton.


Kitts had Carr follow him here to Rutledge, where Carr was fined $25 for wreckless driving. Kitts noted a soldier with Carr. The drive-in widow thought her husband had spoken of the chauffeur picking up a hitchhiker, a “serviceman”.

Last words
At 1am Carr continued on but, worn out after going without sleep for almost 24 hours, stopped in Bristol, Tennessee. This is where he supposedly picked up a relief driver at a local taxi company, a young man named Donald Surface.

“I remember Hank got out to stretch his legs and I asked him if he wanted a sandwich or something,” Carr said. “And he said, ‘No, I just want to get some sleep.’ “I don’t know if that’s the last thing he said, but it’s the last thing I remember him telling me.”

The Tennessean, reconstructing the route for a 50th-anniversary article in 2002, was dubious about Carr picking up Donald Surface in Bristol, saying Carr remembered that happening in Bluefield, West Virginia, which was, after all, Surface’s hometown and where he worked, at the Bluefield Cab Co. Surface died long ago.

The conventional account of Hank Williams‘ last ride has Donald Surface driving him and Carr from Bristol, up 11W onto curving, rising 19 North into West Virginia, where Carr paid him off in either Bluefield or Princeton when they stopped for coffee.


Got a problem
Most accounts of the last ride have Carr stopping for a toilet break around dawn after a long haul. One actually places a “Skyline Drive-In restaurant” in Hilltop, West Virginia, adding to the confusion when we’ve already seen a Skyline drive-in theater in Tennessee.

Or did Carr not stop until he reached Peter Burdette’s Pure Oil gas station in Oak Hill, where it was finally decided that Hank Williams was indeed dead?

Having interviewed Carr, the best that Peter Cooper of The Tennessean could offer was that “somewhere between Mount Hope and Oak Hill”, Carr noticed Williams‘ blanket had fallen off.

“I saw that the overcoat and blanket that had been covering Hank had slipped off,” Carr told yet another reporter. “When I pulled it back up, I noticed that his hand was stiff and cold.” When he tried to move his hands, they snapped back to the same position the hotel porters had arranged him in.

Carr told Cooper this happened at the side of the road six miles from Oak Hill, but investigating officer Howard Janney placed it in the Skyline Drive-In restaurant’s parking lot, noting that Carr sought help from a Skyline employee. Another researcher decided it could have happened at any of the gas stations near Mount Hope.

Regardless, Carr said he next drove to “a cut-rate gas station”. “I went inside and an older guy, around 50, came back out with me, looked in the back seat, and said, ‘I think you’ve got a problem’. He was very kind, and said Oak Hill General Hospital was six miles on my left.”

Out of gas
Burdette’s Pure Oil gas station “had nothing to do with it”, Carr said in 2002, insisting he’d driven the six miles straight to the Oak Hill hospital, “and two interns looked at Hank and said, ‘He’s dead.’ I said, ‘Is there anything you can do for him?’ They said, ‘No, he’s dead.’ They took him, and they didn’t use a stretcher. They put him on an examining table.”

Ambitions to convert the long-closed, 1935-vintage Pure Oil station into a museum honouring Williams came to nothing in August this year when the local council failed to agree on a lease with owner Charlie Jones, who then said he would demolish it before winter, having waited three years for a decision.


Hank was here
Across Main Street from the gas station is the Oak Hill Library, which today has a bronze plaque mounted on a stone pedestal bearing an affectionate tribute to Hank from his local fans.

It was dedicated on September 17, 1991 – Hank’s birthday. Two years later Oak Hill held a Hank Williams tribute concert at the Fayette Armory, and when the band started playing “I Saw the Light”, there was a power cut.

He’s dead alright
Today known as the Plateau Medical Center, the Oak Hill hospital was staffed early on January 1, 1952, by young physicians and interns from overseas. Hank Williams, still just 29, was pronounced dead on arrival. An intern marked the time of death as 7am but estimated that he could have been dead for as long as six hours.

Carr phoned his father and then got a call from Hank’s mother. “One of the parting things she said was, ‘Don’t let anything happen to the car’.”

Hank’s body was taken across the street to the Tyree Funeral Home. An unexplained welt on Williams’ head and confusion about the time and cause of death led magistrate Virgil Lyons to convene an inquest to try and determine whether there had been any foul play. Local citizens were quickly selected and met at 1pm in an upstairs room at the funeral home.

A member of the coroner’s jury said they examined the body for 15 minutes and could find nothing wrong, apart from the fact that “he was unhealthy-looking. He was very, very skinny.”

The jury decided there had been no foul play; Williams had died of a “severe heart condition and hemorrhage”. The police told Carr he was free to go (he was given an apartment at the funeral home to stay overnight), but the Cadillac and its contents were secured at Burdette’s Pure Oil station to await Hank’s next of kin.

In the back seat of the Cadillac was a scrap of paper, pictured here, on which were scrawled what appeared to be song lyrics: “We met we lived and dear we loved / Then came that fatal day.”
At about 3pm a pathologist from the Beckley hospital performed an autopsy at the funeral home. The official cause of death was listed as heart failure aggravated by acute alcoholism. Though it’s now known that Hank had been given morphine, no drugs were mentioned in the autopsy report. The physician also noted that, sometime recently, Williams had been beaten up. The state lab in Charleston found alcohol in his blood but apparently did not test for other drugs.

Swann Kitts, the arresting officer in Blaine, was assigned to investigate further, and concluded that Williams was dead when he was carried out of his hotel in Knoxville despite Carr’s insistence that Hank spoke to him in Bristol. The funeral director, however, didn’t think the singer was either cold or stiff enough yet to have died in Knoxville.

Hank’s mother’s telegram to her daughter Irene.
Hank’s mother Lillian Stone and Charles Carr’s father arrived the next morning via taxi from Roanoke airport. At the police station, Lillian proffered legal papers to show she was the closest kin, since Hank’s marriage to Billie Jean in October appeared to be invalid – her divorce hadn’t been finalised until late December.

At the funeral home she chose a casket and from the Cadillac retrieved one of Hank’s white cowboy outfits. Described as “pleasant and composed”, Lillian had everything arranged by the time Billie Jean and her father arrived later in the day.

Mrs Stone arranged for funeral-parlour staff to drive the body by hearse to Montgomery, while she and the Carrs returned in the Cadillac. Hank’s songs were playing on the car radios all the way.


This photo from the City of Montgomery archives shows Lillian and Hank’s ex-wife Audrey sifting through letters later that month. Hank Jr watches.
The mourning masses
 

Hank’s body was returned to Montgomery on January 3. He “lay in state” at his mother’s boarding house, the casket bedecked with a guitar-shaped floral arrangement, as thousands of mourners came by.

Several days after the funeral Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe were passing through Montgomery and signed the book of condolences.

The Montgomery Municipal Auditorium, which had hosted many of Hank’s shows, was the scene of his final public appearance on January 4, 1953, when 20,000 people filed past his coffin. He was dressed in an embroidered Nudie suit that Audrey has designed.










With thousands massed outside listening to a live broadcast, the funeral service drew the biggest crowd the city had seen since Jefferson Davis’ inauguration as president of the Confederacy in 1861. There were 2,700 people inside, among them dozens music stars were on hand, as were Audrey, Billie Jean and Bobbie Jett, who gave birth to Hank’s daughter three days later.


Williams is buried alongside Audrey in Montgomery’s Oakwood Annex. His mother died in 1955, his father in 1970. Bobbie Jett died in 1974 and Audrey a year later.
Across the street from the auditorium today is a life-size statue of Hank, unveiled by Hank Williams Jr in 1991.


The Hank Williams Museum
The Hank Williams Museum was founded in 1999 by Beth Birtley, whose father, Cecil Jackson, rotated and balanced the tires on Hank’s 1952 Cadillac a week before the singer died. The Caddy is now on display here. Hank Williams Jr had a hand in establishing the museum.

Hank Williams once bought a coke for an eight-year-old Cecil when he stopped at a gas station across the street from Cecil’s home, and then three years later, performing at the Lightwood Community in Elmore Country, dedicated a song to Cecil and his fellow “Lightwood flat fixers” after they’d changed a tire for him.

 










FURTHER READING

The official site
Boyhood Home & Museum
The Hank Williams Museum in Montgomery
Hank Williams Appreciation Society
Joey Allcorn’s “Complete Website”
The reconstruction of the last ride from The Tennessean
Lycrecia’s daughterly biography “Still in Love with You” and other good reading available from Hank and Audrey’s Corral
Hank’s entry at Wikipedia
And finally, thank God there are guys like David Church keeping the Hank Williams sound alive. The Nashville recording artist has a major fan club going. Check out his website.