The Lonesome Cowboy Hank Williams was laid low by his sins and addictions

FOR six years Hank Williams was the biggest name in American country music. Then, on New Year’s Day in 1953, he died on the back seat of his car. His story is being retold in a film at this weekend’s Sydney Film Festival.

Hank Williams was afflicted with spina bifida occulta and became addicted to chloral hydrate and alcohol as a result.

MAUDLIN as a lonesome coyote howlin’ across the plains of his native Alabama, for six years Hank Williams’ quavering anthems to lost love were the biggest drawcard in American country music history.

Then, on New Year’s Day in 1953, Williams’ penchant for wailing odes to bad luck and loneliness proved prescient when he died on the back seat of his chauffer driven, baby blue Cadillac.

Just 29 and twice married, Williams’ addiction to morphine and alcohol, blamed on a congenital back ailment, had already cost him regular billing at The Grand Ole Opry in Memphis.

A movie about the shy, gawky son of a poor WWI veteran who became a country music star is retold in I Saw The Light, screening at the Sydney Film Festival this weekend.

Born Hiram Williams on September 17, 1923, in Mount Olive, Alabama, the third child of logger and rail worker Lon and his wife Lillie. Lon was admitted to a Veterans’ hospital when Hank was six and seldom saw his son, who recounted his loss in a later poem, I Wish I Had A Dad. Lillie moved the family to Greenville and later Montgomery, Alabama, where she ran boarding houses.

UNSPECIFIED - CIRCA 1970: Photo of Hank Williams Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

From about age nine Williams was sent out to sell bags of peanuts and shine shoes, and cultivated a friendship with black street musician Rufus Payne, known as Tee-Tot, who taught Williams gospel, black spirituals and traditional country songs, and how to play guitar.

Intent on a music career, Williams adopted the name Hank when he started junior high school in Montgomery, where he pestered staff at WSFA radio station until they sent out a microphone for him to perform from the street as “the Singing Kid”.

Eventually offered his own twice-weekly 15-minute show, at 14 Williams entered an amateur hour show, winning the first prize of $15.

Encouraged by his mother to start his own band, Williams teamed with his sister Irene, harmonica player Smith “Hezzy” Adair and fiddler Freddy Beach as Hank and Heddy’s Drifting Cowboys. Gigs in “fightin’-’n’-dancin’ clubs” along the Alabama-Tennessee border regularly ended in bloodshed, occasionally settled by Lillie wielding a broken bottle.

Williams left school in 1939 to travel with his band, which folded by 1942 when several members were drafted for WWII. Afflicted with spina bifida occulta, made worse in a fall from a horse, Williams was rejected for armed service.

Although praised by band mates for his crowd-appeal and early business sense, by 1942 alcoholism was interfering with his career, making it hard to recruit new band members or organise regular bookings. He left to work in shipyards, but returned after Lillie booked shows for 60 days straight in 1943, when Williams met his first wife Audrey Williams in Banks, Alabama.

The country music star was in and out of sanatoriums for back treatment.

Audrey, mother of a daughter, had been divorced for 10 days when they married before a JP at an Alabama service station in December 1944. Audrey then became Hank’s booking agent, road manager, promoter and insisted on performing in his stage shows. The couple travelled to Nashville in 1946 to meet Acuff-Rose publisher Fred Rose, who asked Williams to write a song on the spot. His composition, Mansion On The Hill, earned Williams a publishing contract with Acuff-Rose. In 1947 he secured a recording contract with MGM Records and a regular spot on KWKH radio’s Louisiana Hayride.

After the birth of his son Randall in May 1949, Williams assembled another Drifting Cowboys band, with guitarist Bob McNett, bassist Hillous Butrum, fiddler Jerry Rivers and steel guitarist Don Helms. They debuted at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry on June 11, 1949.

Face shaded by a short-brimmed, white cowboy hat with his lanky frame wrapped around the microphone, the crowd went wild over Williams’ Lovesick Blues, calling him back for several encores. Scoring hits with Moanin’ the Blues, Why Don’t You Love Me, Hey, Good Lookin, Cold, Cold Heart, Honky Tonk Blues and Jambalaya over the next three years, Williams was country music’s top artist. But as he clocked up more than 60 recordings and a film offer, his marriage collapsed as his drinking increased. Divorcing Audrey in 1951, by the time Williams married Billie Jean Jones, 19, in October 1952 before 7000 people at the Municipal Auditorium in New Orleans, his band and the Grand Ole Opry had also dumped him.

In and out of sanatoriums for back treatment, addicted to chloral hydrate and alcohol, even fans booed him off stages. But on January 1, 1953, more than 4000 were waiting to see his show in Canton, Ohio.

Williams recruited Charles Carr, 19, the college freshman son of an Alabama taxi driver, to drive him from his mother’s boarding house in Montgomery. He asked Carr to drive him to a doctor for a morphine shot to ease his back pain. They stopped at a hotel in Knoxsville, Tennessee, on New Year’s Eve, leaving in the early morning to reach Canton by 2pm.

Carr discovered Williams was dead in the back of the car at 5.30am during a stop at Oak Hill, West Virginia.

Originally published as The Lonesome Cowboy Hank Williams was laid low by his sins and addictions