“There ain't a man livin' who hasn't talked to his dog.”
- Hank Williams
On this day, September 17, the most important artist in country music history arrived, Hank Williams. Hiram King “Hank” Williams was born in Mt. Olive, Alabama in1923. He grew up in a hardscrabble home. He had a distant relationship with his father who was hospitalized for much of Hank's childhood. His mother, Lillie, ran a boarding house to support her three children. She was an intense and controlling woman and over the course of his life, she and Hank had a complicated relationship. Early on, she taught him church hymns on the organ and bought him his first guitar when he was eight.
Williams was born with spina bifida and his disability set him apart from other kids growing up. It's often suggested that it was a factor in creating a sense of loneliness in Hank. By the time Lillie moved her family to Montgomery, Alabama in 1937, twelve-year-old Hank's music career was already underway. He made his radio debut at 13 and a year later he had his own band, Hank Williams and His Drifting Cowboys. By the early 1940s, Williams had caught the attention of music executives in Nashville.
He married Audrey Mae Sheppard in 1943. She had desires on a career in music, and in spite of her limited talent, convinced Hank to let her play bass and sing in his band. She also butted heads with her mother-in-law as they vied for Hank's attention. That was fun for him. Being caught in the middle between your mother and your wife is every man's dream.
In 1946, Williams signed a recording contract with MGM Records and scored his first hit with Move It On Over. The next five years brought a string of hits including 35 singles that reached the Top 10, and 11 of them went to #1, such as I Saw the Light, I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, Lovesick Blues, Hey Good Lookin' and Your Cheatin' Heart.
Throughout his life, Williams was a drinker. Some of it has been attributed to his trying to cope with the chronic back pain he struggled with. Much of it maybe just his disposition and inherent alcoholic genes. Whatever the reasons, his career, reputation and health suffered because of it. He was often known to show up drunk for performances or not at all, and in August of 1952, the Grand Ole Opry fired him for “severe unreliability and habitual drunkenness.”
By 1952, his marriage to Audrey was over and his health worsened as his drinking and morphine intake accelerated. In October of that year, he married 19-year old Billie Jean Jones. He was due to play a show in Canton, Ohio on January 1, 1953 but was unable to fly from his Montgomery, Alabama location due to an ice storm. A college student named Charles Carr was hired to drive him there in Williams' baby-blue 1952 Cadillac convertible. In route, Williams died in the backseat of the vehicle, discovered by Carr when they stopped at a gas station in Oak Hill, West Virginia. The cause of death was determined to be heart failure due to a combination of alcohol, morphine and chloral hydrate. He was 29.
Since his death, Hank Williams has become mythic. The “Hillbilly Shakespeare” as he's often referred, was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1961, the Songwriters Hall of fame in 1970 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. It's impossible to know exactly, but the number of recorded songs about Hank Williams well exceeds one hundred.