Though his professional career was soaring, Hank 's personal life was beginning to spin out of control. He had suffered a mild drinking problem before becoming a star, but it had been more or less controlled during his first few years of fame. However, as he began to earn large amounts of money and spend long times away from home, he began to drink frequently.
Furthermore, Hank 's marriage to Audrey was deteriorating. Not only were they fighting, resulting in occasional separations, but Audrey was trying to create her own recording career without any success. In the fall of , Hank was on a hunting trip on his Tennessee farm when he tripped and fell, re-activating a dormant back injury.
Williams began taking morphine and other painkillers for his back and quickly became addicted. In January of , Hank and Audrey separated for a final time and he headed back to Montgomery to live with his mother.
The move had little effect on his music career, however, with "Honky Tonk Blues" peaking at number two during the spring. In spite of such success, Hank turned completely reckless in , spending nearly all of his waking hours drunk and taking drugs. He also frequently destroyed property and played with guns. Williams left his mother in early spring, moving in with Ray Price in Nashville. In May, Audrey and Hank were officially divorced. She was awarded the house and their child, as well as half of his future royalties.
Williams continued to play a large number of concerts, but he was always drunk during the show, and he sometimes missed the gig altogether. In August, the Grand Ole Opry fired Williams for that very reason, explaining that he could return once he was sober. Instead of heeding the Opry's warning, the singer just sank deeper into his self-destructive behavior. Soon, his friends were leaving him, as the Drifting Cowboys began working with Price and Fred Rose no longer supported him.
Williams was still playing The Louisiana Hayride, but he was performing with local pickup bands and began earning reduced wages. By October, they were married. Hank also signed an agreement to support the baby -- who had yet to be delivered -- of one of his other girlfriends, Bobbie Jett, in October. By the end of the year, Williams was having heart problems and Toby Marshall, a con man doctor, was giving him various prescription drugs to help soothe the pain.
Hank was scheduled to play a concert in Canton, OH, on January 1, He was scheduled to fly out of Knoxville, TN, on New Year's Eve, but the weather was so bad that he had to hire a chauffeur to drive him to Ohio in his new Cadillac. Before they left for Ohio, Williams was injected with two shots of vitamin B and morphine by a doctor. Williams got into the backseat of the Cadillac allegedly with a bottle of whiskey , and the teenage chauffeur headed out for Canton.
When the driver was stopped for speeding, the policeman noticed that Hank looked like a dead man. Williams was taken to a West Virginia hospital and he was officially declared dead at a. At one Drifting Cowboys gig in Alabama, he blew the show by losing his pick and playing guitar with his knuckles, prefacing each song with would-be humorous remarks that incensed the crowd outfront, entertainment that was counter-pointed when Hezzy Adair threw up on-stage.
Once Daddy had to club a guy with the stainless steel fret-bar from a steel guitar, which Daddy had observed worked very well as an argument settler. His vocal style, eventually so distinctive, had hardly developed.
Temporary disillusionment allied to the advent of World War II heralded a change of occupation. Suffering from a back-injury incurred during a brief, ill-advised attempt at a rodeo career, Hank was not eligible for army service. Instead he headed into war work, spending a year and a half, on and off, labouring and welding with the Alabama Drydock And Shipbuilding Company in Mobile.
His period on defence work gave Hank an opportunity to write. Though he had little education, somehow his simple words formed a kind of unbeatable folk poetry. Armed with a batch of songs and a will to succeed, Hank returned to Montgomery in mid and re-formed The Drifting Cowboys. Audrey was even more ambitious than Hank. She urged him to head for Nashville and the Opry, where, like a zillion other hillbilly wannabes, he was initially turned away, presumably because he lacked a style of his own.
Badgered by Audrey, Rose reluctantly agreed to hear Hank perform some of his material. Suitably impressed, he offered to buy the songs for 10 dollars apiece. A publishing contract was offered but no recording deal.
Still, Hank was happy. Roy Acuff was his favourite performer, and to be signed to a company associated with him was one hell of an achievement. Such admiration was hardly reciprocated. Even so, things were moving.
And Sterling Records of New York set up his debut recording session, albeit one that produced four maudlin songs, pure hicktown gospel that sold surprisingly well. Back into Hank Williams, back into Jimmie Rodgers. Because the human thing in those records is just beautiful and awesome. A couple of years on, the first hillbilly record chart was installed.
Industrial workers from the South carried their ditties cross-country into the aircraft plants and shipyards of the Pacific Coast. Servicemen from the hillbilly districts toted guitars and laments of — and for — home from camp to camp. The establishment of the Acuff-Rose publishing empire in completed the foundation on which Music Row would be built, All that was needed now was a beacon of exciting new talent to attract fresh energy and ideas. Encouraged by the admittedly moderate sales of his Sterling releases, Hank had signed for MGM, a young but wealthy label originally launched by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in as an outlet for film soundtrack material.
But there were problems. It was basically a vaudeville ditty, though it was blues singer Ann Chandler who began featuring it in , the same year that the song was recorded by Elsie Clark. Miller was the whole enchilada. It was either by record or he heard him perform it in person at a minstrel show. The record not only topped the country listings but stayed in pole position for 16 weeks.
Such was his reception that, within a short space of time, he became an Opry fixture. Such a prestigious residency called for a new band, one formed from the best young musicians around.
His wife wished to further her own career, and insisted on singing on-stage with her husband and cutting duets at recording sessions — ill-advised projects considering that Audrey could hardly hold a tune. Lord, how they pushed!
But success brought more problems than failure. Following an argument that ended with a then-pregnant Audrey puncturing the tyres on his car and Hank responding by smashing furniture and anything else he could lay his hands on around the house, he took to his bed having tranquillised himself with sleeping pills. From then on, his drinking sessions would only be matched by his pill-popping. Within two weeks it sold two million records. Hank Williams loved the royalties but had a very humorous way of thanking me for its success.
There were plenty of others. Penned in , it was recorded by Patti Page in and became one of the biggest hits of all time, topping the US pop charts for 13 straight weeks and selling an unprecedented six million copies. What began with Williams writing material for singer Molly O'Day eventually gave way to a record contract with the recently created MGM label. But along with this early success came increased erratic behavior from Williams, who often showed up at live performances drunk.
For a time his relationship with Fred Rose deteriorated, but the two were able to mend fences, paving the way for Williams to become a regular on the "Louisiana Hayride," a regular Saturday night performance hosted by a radio station in Shreveport. The performances greatly increased Williams' name recognition, but he still lacked a number one hit.
That all changed in with the release of "Lovesick Blues," a throwaway rendition of an old show tune he'd pushed to tape at the end of a recording session. The song resonated with music fans, as well as executives at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, who invited Williams to perform. In ways that must have seemed unimaginable to this poor country boy, Williams' life quickly changed. His stardom put money in his pocket and gave him the kind of creative freedom artists long for.
As the titles of some of Williams' songs suggest, heartbreak and turmoil were never that far from his life. As his success deepened, so did Williams' dependence on alcohol and morphine.
The Opry eventually fired him, and in , he and Sheppard divorced. His physical appearance diminished, too.
His hair began falling out, and he put on 30 extra pounds. In late , he suffered a minor heart attack while visiting his sister in Florida. A little more than a year later, on December 30, , Williams, newly married to a younger woman named Billie Jean, left his mother's home in Montgomery for Charlestown, West Virginia. Liquored up and abusing morphine, he collapsed in a hotel room in Knoxville, Tennessee. A doctor was called to examine him. Despite his physical failings, Williams was cleared for more travel.
On New Year's Day , he took his seat in the back of his powder blue Cadillac. As his driver, college student Charles Carr, barreled toward a concert venue in Canton, Ohio, Williams' health took a turn for the worse. Finally, after not hearing from the singer for two solid hours, the driver pulled the car over in Oak Hill, West Virginia, at in the morning.
Williams was pronounced dead a short while later. His passing did not bring about the end to his stardom, however.
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