The phone was busy with well-wishers calling on his 81st birthday, but Don Helms took time to retrieve his steel guitar from the back bedroom and play some of country music’s most famous songs.
The house was filled with the sweet sound of Helms’ still nimble fingers picking out each note. His wife of 63 years, Hazel, came in from the living room to enjoy the impromptu performance.
A sad story accompanied most of the sad songs, like the one about the last recording of “Your Cheatin’ Heart” in September 1952.
“Hank said, ‘Don, give me an intro,’ and I did,” Helms recalled. “We played it through without a mistake, and we never played it together again – and I never saw him alive again.”
Helms is the last of the Drifting Cowboys, the band that backed Hank Williams during the meteoric rise that began with his first performance at the Grand Ole Opry in June 1949 and burned out in the early morning hours of Jan. 1, 1953, when Williams died in the back seat of his baby-blue Cadillac convertible at age 29.
Williams was country’s first superstar, although his reign was brief. But 55 years after his death, 2008 is shaping up to be another big revival for the legend, which comes complete with tales of dominating women, drinking binges and pill popping to ease chronic back pain.
Among this year’s Hank Williams highlights:
•In late March, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville opened “Family Tradition: The Williams Family Legacy.” The exhibit, which runs through December next year, depicts the relationships that inspired Williams and his progeny “to create songs that stand among the greatest, most influential country music ever recorded,” the museum said.
•The state of Alabama is promoting the Hank Williams Trail with brochures and maps that take you from Williams’ birthplace at Mount Olive and his boyhood home at nearby Georgiana, north on his “Memorial Lost Highway” to Montgomery, where he lived, performed and was buried. The Hank Williams Museum in Montgomery tells the whole story with displays that include the ill-fated Cadillac.
Hank Williams Tours in April began motor-coach trips that visit the Hank Williams Boyhood Home & Museum, the grave and the Hank Williams Museum in Montgomery, Ala., where Joe Jones, a Hank Williams look-alike, will perform during dinner. An extra day can be added to visit the exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame and other historic spots in Nashville. The tour packs all the milestones of the singer’s career, from birth to death, in two comfortable days.
Preparations are under way for the release of more than 100 recordings Williams made in 1951 and 1952 in Nashville for a WSM radio show sponsored by Mother’s Best Flour. Williams’ children, Hank Williams Jr. and Jett Williams, won a lengthy court battle with recording companies over the fate of the music. More than 40 of the songs never were released commercially.
Williams also has a stepdaughter, Lycrecia Williams Hoover, and her book with co-author Dale Vinicur, titled “Still in Love with You,” came out in a revised 20th anniversary edition in April. The book is published by Audrey’s Dream Inc., a nonprofit corporation founded by the two authors to honor Williams and his first wife, Audrey.
The last time Helms saw Williams, he was playing at his memorial service, which drew about 25,000 to the streets outside the City Auditorium in Montgomery, Ala., still the South’s largest funeral gathering.
“The coffin was in front of the stage and, from where I was playing, I was looking right into that coffin,” Helms said. “It was a weird situation.”
Helms, for one, is not surprised that the legacy lives on.
“He did have a drinking problem; it cost him his career, and maybe his life,” he said. “Whatever drugs he took were prescription drugs from his doctor. He took more than he should. He thought that if one did you good, two would do you better. We didn’t know about mixing drugs and alcohol in those days.
“But he just left such an impact on people’s lives – they’re not ready to forget it. They won’t forget the music and the man who made the music. That’s where I fit in – I’m the only one left.”
Helms began picking another country classic that featured his guitar. “Bet you remember this one,” he said, playing the intro to Patsy Cline’s 1957 hit, “Walking After Midnight.”
Helms continued his own playing with Cline, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash and a total of 56 members of the Country Music Hall of Fame. His suburban ranch house is filled with music memorabilia, including the plaques that inducted Helms into seven halls of fame. Ol’ Red, the nickname Helms gave his Gibson double neck console grand guitar, is forever immortalized in songs like “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “You Win Again” and “Cold, Cold Heart.”
That last sad song came with one of the saddest stories.
Hank and Audrey had a stormy relationship. “I don’t know if it was her nagging that caused him to drink or his drinking that caused her to nag,” Helms said.
During one tragic episode, Audrey was pregnant with Hank’s child but was angry because she believed he was cheating on her. She had an abortion at their home without his knowledge. When Hank returned from touring, he found Audrey in a hospital with an infection from the procedure. He took her flowers, but she threw them in his face. Hank went home, alone, and wrote these words:
“In anger unkind words are said that make the teardrops start
“Why can’t I free your doubtful mind, and melt your cold, cold heart.”
Helms played the song, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
Robert McLaughlin is a former performer and Hank fan who, with little prodding, will pick up a guitar and sing his favorite Williams songs. He also is a travel agent and was inspired by a memorial marker on the “Lost Highway” to start the Hank Williams Tours.
The tours will leave Nashville for the five-hour drive to Montgomery, with karaoke, a video and trivia games along the way. We traced the route by auto, stopping long enough in Montgomery to pick up Mary Wallace, president of the Hank Williams Fan Club.
McLaughlin said there is talk of a new album, possibly with Bob Dylan, of lost lyrics written by Williams – and a movie.
Hank is “bigger now than he was 55 years ago,” McLaughlin said. “Hollywood woke up after ‘Walk the Line’ was such a success. Johnny Cash was the perfect subject, second only to Hank Williams.”
We drove along the country roads lined by red-dirt ditches and pine forests that have long been the main crop of Butler County.
Legend says Hank started drinking at age 9 by watching where the loggers stashed their moonshine, and stealing it. We drove by the Mount Olive West Baptist Church, where young Hank sang gospel, and through the small town of Georgiana, where Hank learned to play blues guitar from Rufus Payne, a black street musician known as “Tee-Tot.”
Gospel and blues were in Hank’s background. His song, “I Saw the Light,” remains one of gospel’s rollicking best and he recorded religious narratives under the pseudonym Luke the Drifter. But McLaughlin pointed out that songs like “Move It On Over” pre-dated, and sound a lot like, the hits of Bill Haley and his Comets, who often are credited as the first white rockers.
“You listen to Hank’s songs, that was the beginning of rock ‘n’ roll,” McLaughlin said.
The Hank Williams Boyhood Home & Museum is at 127 Rose St. in Georgiana. Hank’s father, Lon, was hospitalized for much of the youngster’s life, so he was raised in the home by his iron-willed mother, Lillian, who ruled over Hank’s career.
Charles Carr was a 17-year-old freshman at Auburn University, home for the Christmas holidays, when his father asked him to serve as driver for a friend. Carr was behind the wheel of the Cadillac convertible the night that Williams died.
Williams was at the end of his rope. He had been fired from the Grand Ole Opry for missing appearances; an operation to fuse his spine had left him in agony; Audrey had divorced him for the second time, and he was remarried to a young brunette beauty named Billie Jean Jones, but they were said to have had a fight over Christmas.
On Sunday, Dec. 28, 1952, Williams sang four songs for members of the American Federation of Musicians’ Local 470 at their annual party in Montgomery. That would be his last public performance.
Carr was hired to drive Williams from Montgomery to Canton, Ohio, where the singer had a New Year’s Day appearance scheduled.
A few miles outside Oak Hill, W.Va., Carr said he stopped at a gas station and checked on Williams.
“Hank was asleep in the backseat, covered with a blanket,” Carr said. “I moved his hand, and felt some resistance, which I didn’t think was natural. I told the attendant I might have a problem. He said Oak Hill General Hospital was eight miles down the road. I pulled into the rear. Two interns came out and checked him. They said he was dead.”
An autopsy determined Williams suffered a massive heart attack.
“I’m sorry,” said Carr, who is now 73. “If there was anything I could have done different about it, I would have.”
Contact the writer: tuhlenbrock@post-dispatch.com
