Ribowsky Mark - Hank: the short life and long country road of Hank Williams

Copyright 2017 by Mark Ribowsky

All rights reserved
First Edition

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Ribowsky, Mark, author.
Title: Hank: the short life and long country road of Hank Williams /
Mark Ribowsky
Description: First edition. | New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation,
2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016026928 | ISBN 9781631491573 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Willliams, Hank, 19231953. | Country musicians
United StatesBiography.
Classification: LCC ML420.W55 R53 2016 | DDC 782.421642092 [B]
dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026928

ISBN 978-1-63149-158-0 (e-book)

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of Southern Soul

The Last Cowboy: A Life of Tom Landry

Howard Cosell: The Man, the Myth, and the
Transformation of American Sports

Hes a Rebel: Phil SpectorRock and Rolls Legendary
Producer

Slick: The Silver and Black Life of Al Davis

Dont Look Back: Satchel Paige in the Shadows of Baseball

The Power and the Darkness: The Life of Josh Gibson
in the Shadows of the Game

A Complete History of the Negro Leagues, 1844 to 1955

The Complete History of the Home Run

Crazy and in Charge: The Autobiography of Abe Hirschfeld,
by Abraham Hirschfeld with Mark Ribowsky

Eleven Days of Hell: My True Story of Kidnapping, Terror,
Torture, and Historic FBI and KGB Rescue,
by Yvonne Bernstein with Mark Ribowsky

The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success,
and Betrayal

Signed, Sealed, and Delivered: The Soulful Journey
of Stevie Wonder

Aint Too Proud to Beg: The Troubled Lives and Enduring
Soul of the Temptations

CONTENTS

A WHEEL IN THE DITCH AND
A WHEEL ON THE TRACK

At the Georgiana Gas and Garage station off Interstate 65, exit 114, somewhere in southern Alabama, May 2015

T he Alabama sky isnt, as Hank Williams sang in Im So Lonesome I Could Cry, a sad purple today. Its bright blue, and the burning sun tears through it with no mercy as two men in their sixties stand at a pump, squeezing unleaded gas into their tanks. One, a cherubic, red-faced fellow with a dinged-up maroon Pontiac, wearing rumpled jeans and a T-shirt reading GENUINE FORD PARTS, is asked if hes from around here. He nods.

Do you know where the old Hank Williams house might be? is the next question. He lived around here as a boy, didnt he?

From what Ive been told, the man says in a thick drawl, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, he had to move cause the law was after his daddy. They also say his momma ran some whorehouses, too, so you get the picture.

Didnt she run boardinghouses?

Well, they couldnt call em that. You still cant. But down here, you know, people gotta eat. Gotta make a living. You do what you gotta do on Saturday night, then go to church on Sunday morning and make it all right with God.

A belly laugh. Having heard the questioners New York accent, he knew he was enlightening an out-of-state guy about Alabama, and there had to be a little clarification.

These are stories, you understand? A big star like Hank Williams was treated like God here, because there arent many stars who ever came from Alabama. God dont put us here to make a lot of money. Were all in the same situation. So everyone knows everything about everybody else. And then someone makes it big, goes to the top and kills hisself with booze and whatever other shit hes doing, and those little secrets about him get out.

Another laugh. Sometimes it pays to stay a nobody in Alabama. Then, getting into the Pontiac, But Ill say this, Hank was good folks. He sang what the folks around here were thinkin, what they would sing about if they could sing a lick. And no matter what anyone would say about him or his daddy and momma, nobodys gonna ever think bad about him. When you talk about a legend, thats what youre talkin about.

GO TO CHURCH OR THE DEVIL WILL GET YOU

Billboard sign on I-65, north of Prattville near mile marker 191

Interstate 65 snakes 360 miles from Gary, Indiana, all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico, ending in Mobile, Alabama. It runs down through Birmingham and Montgomery, before veering southwest. Although it didnt exist when Hank Williams was alive, and was called Route 31 until 1959, following it can take one on a tour of Hank Williamss life. Indeed, in 1997, the Department of Tourism designated the several hundred-mile stretch of it the Hank Williams Trail, though people also call it the Lonesome Highway and the Lost Highway, the latter being engraved on bright green signs at spots along the road. Some will even tell you the highway is haunted, not just by Hank but because it was paved over Creek Indian burial grounds. Then, too, they say Hank was part Creek.

Only one of his boyhood homes still stands, in Georgiana, its white wood frame and wraparound porch now the exterior for a Hank Williams museum, which contains items like his old bed, records, straight razor, first guitar, the Victrola he listened to when country music was in its infancy, and the church bench he sat on with his mother and sang hymns to the glory of Godwhich couldnt keep the devil from getting him. An old boxcar painted red, white, and blue, sits on nearby abandoned tracks, adorned with a red, white, and blue sign that says: HANK WILLIAMS BOYHOOD HOME AND MUSEUM... DRINK COCA-COLA. Every summer for the last thirty-seven years theyve played honky-tonk blues here at a festival in his memory.

In Montgomery, where Hank Williams went on this road to become Hank Williams, his gravebeneath a twenty-by-twenty family plot out at Oakwood Cemetery Annexdwarfs most of the other stones, including those of three Confederate generals and four Alabama governors. Unlike in Nashville, where Hank molded country music as we know it, Hank seems to be in the loam and woodwork of Montgomery. You dont have to find Hanks past; it finds you, in the life-size bronze and pewter statue of him decked out in his cowboy hat and natty suit, strumming his guitar, at Dexter and Perry, where he first lived here, a block north of the City. There is the whoreer,