Williams' hard-drinkin' ways were getting worse and worse, and he also began taking painkillers and morphine. (oops!), but by 1951, they divorced for good. During one of their reunions in 1949 the couple ended up with Hank Williams Jr. Both he and Audrey ran around with other people. His marriage deteriorated into a series of threatened break-ups and dramatic reunions. He developed a heavy drinking habit, partially to self-medicate for increasing back pain. Suddenly his career was big time: Hank scored a spot on a weekly radio show in Louisiana, and in 1949 he appeared at the Grand Ole Opry, the mothership of country music.īut Williams had always been a tortured soul, and fame did his personal life more harm than good. They met producer Fred Rose, and a first record on his small label led to a big record deal with MGM in 1948. He and Audrey traveled to Nashville, where, in those days, all country recordings were set down in a single studio. They married in 1944 and Audrey, who had musical ambitions of her own, became his manager.īy 1946, Hank was a celebrity in Alabama and searching for a big national break (harder to pull off in the days before American Idol, apparently). He also met his first wife, Audrey Mae Sheppard, a farm girl from rural Alabama, at a medicine show (a traveling infomercial promoting miracle cures). It was probably in his early days traveling and singing that Williams started drinking. Roadhouses were like today's truck stops, except there was also live music, a full bar, and slack local enforcement of DUI tickets. The group soon started touring on the Alabama roadhouse circuit. He was a great frontman, full of magnetic stage presence and memorable original songs. The Singing Kid eventually found himself some new Driftin' Cowboys. Williams could not be drafted because of chronic back problems, but worked in war-related jobs in the meantime. He formed his first band, the Driftin' Cowboys, only to lose every single member to the massive draft for World War II. He got a spot on a local radio station and quickly became known locally as the Singing Kid (sort of like Justin Bieber, but without Usher or YouTube). Hank, still selling peanuts and shining shoes on the street to supplement the income, started to get attention by winning an amateur talent show. In 1937, the Williams family moved to Alabama's capital, Montgomery, where his mother opened a boarding house. As the legend has it, they sang on street corners and Tee Tot taught him to sing the blues. By age 11, the little Williams could be found hanging out on the Greenville streets with African-American blues singer Rufus "Tee Tot" Payne. Hank's mom, an organ player in the church, bought Hank a guitar for $3.50 when he was eight years old, and he started writing songs. The family moved to Greenville, Alabama, and along the way Hank lived with relatives in a railroad camp for a while. His father, shell-shocked and disturbed after fighting in World War I, went into the hospital when Williams was only seven, leaving his mother, Lillie, to raise him and his sister alone. Williams was born Hiram King Williams in 1923 in a sharecropper's shack in rural Alabama. He had a way of looking at you that said, do you know who I am? I am the greatest singer in the world." Hank had that special combination of tortured soul and wild talents-in other words, he was totally miserable and totally brilliant. Another described him this way: "He was the most cocky, most confident man I have ever met in my life. But he had something no one could put a finger on: "When he walked onstage and started bending his knees, kind of humped over in the shoulders, and started singing those old songs he had written, the audience just came unglued," says one friend, quoted in USA Today. He spent more money than he made and burned more bridges the more famous he got. He was magnetic on stage, but impossible to deal with in real life. What was such a big deal about Hank's 29 years on the planet? From the start of his stardom as a teenager, Williams was self-absorbed and charming, addictive and prolific, and a bit irresponsible when it came to women. Sort of like myths or folk tales, nobody really knows the origins of archetypes (they seem to develop over time in a nebulous sort of way)-but when it comes to the hard-drinkin', down-and-out country music type, Hank Williams is an early artifact, if not the original. But Hank Williams is not just a guy who fit the bill and then made it big-he was arguably the first guy in country music who fit the bill and made it big. By all accounts, the story of Hank Williams Sr.
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