Family Tradition: The Legacy of Ol’ Hank Williams

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Family Tradition: The Legacy of Ol’ Hank
IN the opening scenes of the 1964 biopic “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” Hank Williams hawks patent medicine, swills whiskey and throws a few punches. Moments later, at a church social, Hank — played by George Hamilton — makes a pass at his future wife and busts a guitar over the head of a heckler. Overripe with swagger and excess, Mr. Hamilton’s performance comes off as a clumsy composite of James Dean, Jerry Lee Lewis and John Wayne.

Though cartoonish, the movie underscores the enduring challenge in deciphering this country music pioneer. More than five decades after his death, in 1953, of an overdose of morphine on his way to play a show, Hank Williams lives on in myth that is so fraught with melodrama — the liquor and pills, heartache and gloom — and so calcified by decades of redaction and hype that it’s almost impossible to tell the singer of “Lost Highway” from his songs.

But two recent projects help recast him in a revealing new light, without whitewashing the intemperance and scandal. The first, an exhibition at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum here, features family artifacts that have never been displayed in public before. The second, a CD box-set called “The Unreleased Recordings,” is the first installment of unearthed radio transcriptions to be issued by Time Life. Far from presenting this archetypical singer-songwriter as ghostly or morose, the exhibition and box-set leave the impression of a devout man who, despite debilitating health and personal problems, loved his family and liked nothing so much as a good prank.

“You talk about pulling practical jokes — him and the band, that’s all they did,” said Hank Williams Jr., 59, in an interview at his customized R.V. here this summer. (He also owns several residences.) “We’re talking about a bunch of 20-year-old guys,” he continued, referring to his father’s band, the Drifting Cowboys. “He would sign autographs and they would come up behind him with a stink bomb.”

The exhibition, “Family Tradition: The Williams Family Legacy,” depicts the lives of three generations, from Hank and his wife, Audrey, to Hank Jr.’s five children, and features items like the 1944 Martin D-28 guitar on which Williams wrote many of his hits. The Scotch-taped scrapbooks that Hank’s mother kept during his rise to fame are presented alongside touch-screen recreations of their contents. There are candid family photos from the late 1940s, home movies of a trip to Disneyland and a snapshot, taken decades later, of a young Hank Williams III taking a bath with his half-sisters Holly and Hilary. (All three now sing professionally.) The singer Jett Williams, Hank Sr.’s daughter from his brief affair with Bobbie Jett, is also a subject of the exhibition.

Originally preserved on 16-inch acetate discs, the 143 transcriptions included in “The Unreleased Recordings” — the first 54 of which were released last week — nearly double Hank Williams’s recorded output. The music was rescued from a Dumpster in the late 1980s by an employee of WSM-AM, the Nashville radio station on which the songs were originally broadcast, on an early morning program sponsored by Mother’s Best Flour Company, in 1951. The decision about what should be done with the transcriptions was delayed by protracted litigation over the Williams estate. The recordings greatly expand what we know of Williams’s persona and repertory. We hear him not only exulting in the pleasures of making music, but also clowning with his band and crooning old hymns like “Softly and Tenderly” and Victorian parlor ballads like “The Blind Child’s Prayer.”

“What the Mother’s Best Flour shows reveal is that Hank was a fully fleshed-out man, with a silly sense of humor, deep religious faith and a sentimental side that comes off as borderline cheesy today,” said Brenda Colladay, curator of the Grand Ole Opry Museum in Nashville. “This isn’t the tortured, tragic genius who died in the back seat of a Cadillac. This is the Hank who can’t quite believe he is playing on WSM radio, has a closet full of custom suits, a string of hit records and a beautiful blond wife sitting next to him as he steers that Cadillac toward his dream house.”

In one touching between-song segment, Williams promises young Bocephus — his nickname for Hank Jr. — that he’ll be home for breakfast to “sop biscuits” with him. Williams had just reached new heights in popularity, including appearances on national television programs like “The Perry Como Show” and being billed above Bob Hope and Milton Berle on the touring Hadacol Caravan. Nevertheless, the eagerness in his voice at the prospect of being home with his family is palpable.

Hank Jr. was only 3 1/2 when his father died, and he remembers little of their time together. Nearly eight years his senior, Hank Jr.’s half-sister Lycrecia Williams Hoover has more firsthand memories of what Williams was like.

“Of the two of us, I always considered myself the luckiest one because I got to do things with Daddy,” said Ms. Hoover, 67, a dignified woman with intense blue eyes. A stay-at-home mom much of her life, Ms. Hoover, who today works part time in a beauty shop, spoke from the patio of her home in rural Bon Aqua, Tenn., about 40 miles from Nashville.

“Daddy was a fun person,” she said. “He would take me bowling a lot. He would go horseback riding and fishing with me. I just feel like Hank Jr. missed out on so much.”

Audrey Williams’s daughter from an earlier marriage, Ms. Hoover wasn’t enthusiastic about the prospect of another retrospective about her stepfather when representatives of the museum in Nashville contacted her about the project. She doesn’t shy away from talking about her parents’ “fussing and fighting,” or about Hank’s darker side or drinking. She was, however, wary of yet another tabloid treatment of the Williams legacy.
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“They said, ‘We promise you this is not going to be like the others,’ ” she said.
Particularly welcome, Ms. Hoover said, is the museum’s depiction, through telegrams and other documents, of her mother’s career as a businesswoman. Audrey married Hank in 1944, at a gas station near Andalusia, Ala. After playing a critical role in helping her husband start his career, Audrey, a performer who has often been portrayed as conniving and shrill, went on to become a successful song publisher and movie producer. In 1964 she was a founder of Aud-Lee Attractions, Nashville’s oldest privately owned talent agency (now called Buddy Lee Attractions).

“Had it not been for Mother, I just don’t think Daddy would have gotten to Nashville, unless somebody else could of got a hold of him and pushed,” Ms. Hoover said. “Daddy, he liked to entertain. He was a genius, but Mother was the mastermind behind getting him where he needed to be.”

Carolyn Tate, the curator, with Michael McCall, of the Family Tradition exhibition, stresses the importance of putting Audrey’s accomplishments in historical context. “She was a single mom in the mid-’50s,” Ms. Tate said. “She was left to run a business and raise children and to deal with a lot of legal issues.”

Despite her business acumen, Audrey died bankrupt, in 1975, after years of struggling with addiction to alcohol and other drugs. “After Daddy passed away, Mother blamed herself,” Ms. Hoover said. “She loved him and felt like she should have been able to keep him from drinking. Later, little by little, she began to drink, until she became an alcoholic too.” Audrey and Hank Williams divorced in July 1952, less than six months before Hank’s death.

The exhibition also plots lesser-known points in the trajectory of Hank Jr.’s career. Initially cast as his father’s imitator, Hank Jr. transformed himself into a raucous country-rocker, fusing his father’s blues-steeped honky-tonk with disparate influences to create a new Southern hybrid.
“To see me, at 13 and 14 years old with the wavy jellyroll hair and the white Stratocaster, it all comes together,” said Hank Jr., who was born Randall Hank Williams, recalling his days leading a combo called Rockin’ Randall and the Rockets. “I’d go out on the road and be Hank Williams Sr. and come back home and be Rockin’ Randall. That’s how I would do it — two worlds. And guess what? Rockin’ Randall consumed the other guy. My cloning days were over.”

Hank Jr.’s son, Hank Williams III (born Shelton Hank Williams), 35, has felt the burden of his birthright too. In his case, this has meant pressure to differentiate himself not just from his father but also from his grandfather, to whom he bears an uncanny physical and vocal resemblance.

“I’m almost following in the same footsteps as my dad, but instead of Skynyrd, I’ve been into Pantera and David Allan Coe and bands like that,” he said of his assortment of country, punk and heavy metal. “The energy’s just different.”

The most emblematic items in the exhibition from Hank III’s career are his duct-taped cowboy boots. Hank III, whose album “Damn Right, Rebel Proud” (Curb Records) was released on Oct. 21, estimates that before loaning them to the museum, he had worn them for as many as 4,000 consecutive performances.

Cropping up again and again in the exhibition is the struggle of Williams family members to define themselves as inheritors of Hank Sr.’s legacy while also striving to preserve some semblance of normality. Most telling is a photo from the late ’50s in which Ms. Hoover and her brother and mother are playing in the snow in front of their ranch-style home in Nashville.
“People don’t understand that part — a kid with his sister and his mother,” Hank Jr. said, referring to the scene in the photo.

“It’s real normal, yeah, until this big bus comes by with all these tourists, and as this little bitty kid I think, ‘Why are they stopping there?’ And then it hits you. That’s why they’re stopping there.”