Hank Williams performing with the Drifting Cowboys (Photo by GAB Archive)
Gallery of Hank Williams
1945
Nashville, Tennessee, United States
Hank Williams
Gallery of Hank Williams
1945
Nashville, Tennessee, United States
Hank Williams
Gallery of Hank Williams
1945
Nashville, Tennessee, United States
Hank Williams
Gallery of Hank Williams
1945
Montgomery, Alabama, United States
Hank Williams (on violin) and the Drifting Cowboys pose for a promotional photo at the studios of WSFA Radio circa 1945 in Montgomery, Alabama. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives)
Gallery of Hank Williams
1945
Nashville, Tennessee, United States
Hank Williams
Gallery of Hank Williams
1947
Shreveport, Louisiana, United States
Hank Williams performs on KWKH Radio circa 1947 in Shreveport, Louisiana. Photo by Michael Ochs Archives)
Gallery of Hank Williams
1947
Shreveport, Louisiana, United States
Hank Williams performs on KWKH Radio circa 1947 in Shreveport, Louisiana. Photo by Michael Ochs Archives
Gallery of Hank Williams
1948
Nashville, Tennessee, United States
Country singer Hank Williams poses for a portrait circa 1948 in Nashville, Tennessee. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives)
Gallery of Hank Williams
1948
Nashville, Tennessee, United States
Country singer Hank Williams poses for a portrait circa 1948 in Nashville Tennessee. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives)
Gallery of Hank Williams
1948
Nashville, Tennessee, United States
Country singer Hank Williams poses for a portrait circa 1948 in Nashville Tennessee. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives)
Gallery of Hank Williams
1949
Nashville, Tennessee, United States
The Williams family: Audrey Williams, Lucretia Williams, Hank Williams Jr and Hank Williams Sr pose for a portrait in 1949 in Nashville Tennessee. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives)
Gallery of Hank Williams
1949
Nashville, Tennessee, United States
Hank Williams and Audrey Williams pose for a portrait circa 1949 in Nashville Tennessee. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives)
Gallery of Hank Williams
1950
Nashville, Tennessee, United States
Hank Williams (with hat and guitar) and the Drifting Cowboys (Don helms at right on steel guitar) pose for a promotional photo at the studios of WSM Radio circa 1950 in Nashville Tennessee. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives)
Gallery of Hank Williams
1950
Nashville, Tennessee, United States
Hank Williams and the Drifting Cowboys (Don Helms, Bob McNett, Hank Williams, Jerry Rivers, and Hillous Butrum) pose for a promotional photo at the studios of WSM Radio circa 1950 in Nashville, Tennessee. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives)
Gallery of Hank Williams
1950
A group of country music stars (bottom row 2nd from left) Audrey Williams next to her is country singer George Morgan and Hank Williams and others who are unidentified pose for a portrait circa 1950. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives)
Gallery of Hank Williams
1950
Photo of Hank Williams with son Hank Williams Jr. (Photo by GAB Archive)
Gallery of Hank Williams
1950
Hank Williams and Don Helms. (Photo by GAB Archive)
Gallery of Hank Williams
1950
Photo of Hank Williams, with his wife Audrey. (Photo by GAB Archive)
Gallery of Hank Williams
1951
Columbus, Ohio, United States
Country singer Hank Williams performs at the Hadacol Caravan Show in September 1951 in Columbus, Ohio. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives)
Gallery of Hank Williams
1952
Photo of Hank Williams and Billie Jean Williams (nee Billie Jean Jones Eshlimar) on their wedding day October 18, 1952. (Photo by GAB Archive)
Hank Williams (on violin) and the Drifting Cowboys pose for a promotional photo at the studios of WSFA Radio circa 1945 in Montgomery, Alabama. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives)
The Williams family: Audrey Williams, Lucretia Williams, Hank Williams Jr and Hank Williams Sr pose for a portrait in 1949 in Nashville Tennessee. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives)
Hank Williams (with hat and guitar) and the Drifting Cowboys (Don helms at right on steel guitar) pose for a promotional photo at the studios of WSM Radio circa 1950 in Nashville Tennessee. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives)
Hank Williams and the Drifting Cowboys (Don Helms, Bob McNett, Hank Williams, Jerry Rivers, and Hillous Butrum) pose for a promotional photo at the studios of WSM Radio circa 1950 in Nashville, Tennessee. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives)
A group of country music stars (bottom row 2nd from left) Audrey Williams next to her is country singer George Morgan and Hank Williams and others who are unidentified pose for a portrait circa 1950. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives)
Hank Williams was one of the most famous country and western performers in the United States. He wrote and recorded songs that are still considered to be country music standards.
Background
Ethnicity:
Hank Williams was of Welsh, English, and German ancestry.
Hiram King "Hank" Williams was born on September 17, 1923, near Mt. Olive, Alabama, the third child born to Elonzo Huble and Lillian (Skipper) Williams. Cut from rural stock, Williams, the third child of Lon and Lillie Williams, grew up in a household that never had much money.
When he was five years old, his father, a shell-shocked veteran of World War I who drove locomotives for an Alabama lumber company, entered a veterans' hospital, where he remained for ten years, apparently suffering from an emotional rather than a physical illness. Hank's mother was a strong-minded, resourceful woman who managed to provide for her family during the Great Depression. His mother played the organ at Mt. Olive West Baptist Church. Neighbors in Georgiana, where they had moved, remembered Hank as a frail boy who shined shoes and sold peanuts on the streets, and was so fascinated by cowboys that they called him "two-gun Pete."
Education
The world Williams seemed to identify most with was the musical sounds that poured out of the radio and emanated from church choirs. A quick study, Williams learned how to play folk, country and, thanks to an African-American street musician named Rufus Payne, the blues.
By the time he'd moved with his mother to Montgomery in 1937, Williams' music career was already in motion. Picking up the guitar for the first time at the age of eight, Williams was just 13 when he made his radio debut. A year later he was entering talent shows and had his own band, Hank Williams and his Drifting Cowboys.
Williams attended Sidney Lanier High School in Montgomery, but left school at the age of 16.
Yet another musical inspiration for the lanky teenager were the ever-present sounds of traditional country music performers like the Carter family and Monroe brothers.
Hank Williams was only fourteen when he began performing on radio station WSFA in Montgomery. He spent the next nine years working at menial jobs, traveling as a performer with medicine shows, and singing on weekends in honky-tonks where. He had several broken guitars to show for it. Williams was working with a medicine show in Banks, Alabama, forty-five miles from Montgomery, when he met Audrey Shepard, a singer who had a young daughter.
It was Audrey who inspired many of Williams' heartbreak songs, including "Cold, Cold Heart," and whose initiative led to his vital association with songwriter-publisher Fred Rose of Nashville, Tennessee. After auditioning Williams, Rose recommended him to Sterling Records, a small New York company that was searching for a promising country singer. Williams made his first recordings in 1946, in the studios of WSM in Nashville, with the Oklahoma Cowboys (later known as the Willis Brothers). Over a two-year period he cut four records; on them were his gospel original "When God Comes And Gathers His Jewels" and his more autobiographical song "Honky Tonkin'." Although the records did not sell well, in 1947 Williams became a regular performer on the "Lousiana Hayride" show, originating over radio station KWKH in Shreveport, Louisiana.
The following year he signed an exclusive contract with Acuff-Rose, a leading song-publishing firm in Nashville. Fred Rose then negotiated a contract for him with MGM Records, and Williams recorded his first sides on this label in Cincinnati, Ohio. The backup group with whom he recorded and performed until his death was formed in July 1949. Williams called them the Drifting Cowboys (a name he had also used for earlier groups), and he released some of his singles under the cognomen Luke the Drifter. It was a revealing choice of names, disclosing Williams' inability to overcome the feeling of being an outsider. He continually expressed this anguish in haunting songs like "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" and "Nobody's Lonesome for Me." During a guest appearance on the prestigious Grand Ole Opry show in June 1949, Williams sang "Lovesick Blues," a song from the 1920s. He elicited such a strong audience response that he was immediately signed as a regular on the show, and his MGM recording of the song became the number-one country-and-western record of the year. It was the first in a series of hit records that flowed in an unbroken stream until and after his death.
Tony Bennett, Frankie Laine, Jo Stafford, and other pop artists recorded Williams' songs and transformed country music from a sectional into a national phenomenon. In October 1951 Williams signed a five-year film contract with MGM, which promised greatly to increase his yearly income of nearly $250, 000. But he was ill-prepared for sudden fame and fortune. His tensions found expression not only in his marriage but also in his relationship with audiences and even with the management of the Grand Ole Opry. In August 1952, seven months after his final, tortured separation from his wife, he was fired from the Opry for chronic drunkenness and instability.
Williams died suddenly at Oak Hill, West Virginia, as he was being driven in a chauffeured Cadillac to an engagement in Canton, Ohio. Funeral services were held in the municipal auditorium of Montgomery, producing what has been described as "the greatest emotional orgy in the city's history since the inauguration of Jefferson Davis." Three thousand mourners jammed the auditorium, wailing and weeping; another 17, 000 milled outside, listening to the service over loudspeakers; and thousands more followed the proceedings through broadcasts over two local radio stations. Williams was buried in Oakwood Cemetery, where a year after his death Montgomery businessmen erected a huge headstone with a reproduction of a Williams song and his photograph on one side and a poem by Audrey Williams, "Thank You, Darling," chiseled on the other.
Raised as a Fundamentalist Baptist, Williams was steeped from his earliest childhood in the church's distinctive sermons and music.
Williams’ mother was, among other things, an organist in a Baptist church.
Williams never really spoke about faith or God or religion. It’s widely thought that he just wasn’t a religious man. He did, however, write a few religious tunes. But the running theme seems to be the absence of faith. His song, “Dust on the Bible,” talks about friends whose Bible is unused and some lyrics of his song, “I Saw the Light,” include:
"I wandered so aimless life filled with sin/I wouldn’t let my dear savior in/Then Jesus came like a stranger in the night/Praise the lord I saw the light."
Politics
Williams was a Republican all his life. He was particularly impressed with Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom Williams officially endorsed for president, citing his military successes in World War II.
Other than that, Williams didn’t enter the debate much.
Views
Williams found inspiration in black music.
Quotations:
"I must have been five, six-years-old, and louder'n anybody else. "
"I was shinin' shoes and sellin' newspapers and following [him] around to get him to teach me to play the guitar"
"I'd give him 15 cents, or whatever I could get ahold of for a lesson. "
"I was a pretty good imitator of Roy Acuff, but then I found out they already had a Roy Acuff, so I started singin' like myself."
"Thank you for all the love you gave me. There could be no one stronger. Thank you for the many beautiful songs. They will live long and longer."
"I've been around a long time, and life still has a whole lot of surprises for me."
"We make our own whiskey and our own smoke, too. Ain't too many things these ole boys can't do."
"You got to have smelt a lot of mule manure before you can sing like a hillbilly."
Personality
Hank Williams had an unhappy childhood that permanently warped his personality.
Williams' trademark hillbilly-tinged sound remains a country music staple.
Williams continues to lure fans. The key to Williams' long-lasting popularity "is passion," concluded Escott. - "The lyrics were simple, but simplicity does not preclude meaning. In writing for the man who could barely sign his name, Hank Williams wrote for us all."
He cited some of Williams' more poignant lyrics, noting: "There can be few who haven't felt as though Hank Williams has read their mail, their diary, or their mind."
Physical Characteristics:
William's childhood was also shaped by his spinal condition, spina bifida, which set him apart from other kids his age and fostered a sense of separation from the world around him.
But coupled with Williams' obvious talents as a singer and songwriter was an increasing dependence on alcohol, which he'd started abusing in order to relieve his sometimes excruciating back pain. As a result, he was not considered a reliable performer.
The cause of his death, at the age of twenty-nine, was a heart attack, which probably resulted from a combination of alcohol, narcotics, and months of sleeplessness. The physical and emotional torments that destroyed Williams unquestionably gave his songs their overpowering appeal and ineluctable sincerity.
Quotes from others about the person
“When you hear him talk on these fifteen-minute radio shows, and you hear him go into the commercial scripts for Mothers’ Best, but when you hear him go off-script, you absolutely hear his personality. You hear him laugh, and this is a happy guy on these recordings. So often, people want to paint him as forlorn, lonely, troubled, and drinking. And, here he is early in the morning, and he sounds pretty chipper. It also shows his craftsmanship as far as being an emcee.” - Jett Williams
Interests
Politicians
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Music & Bands
Rufus Payne
Connections
In 1943 Williams met Audrey Sheppard on a medicine show in Banks, Alabama. Williams and Sheppard lived and worked together in Mobile, Sheppard later told Williams that she wanted to move to Montgomery with him and start a band together and help him regain his radio show.
The couple was married in 1944 in a Texaco Station in Andalusia, Alabama, by a justice of the peace. The marriage was declared illegal, since Sheppard's divorce from her previous husband did not comply with the legally required sixty-day trial reconciliation.
Audrey, whom he had married in 1944, divorced him in July 1952, and in August he was dismissed from the Grand Ole Opry.
Lawsuits continued into the late 1986 between Hank Williams, Jr., and the "lost daughter" of Hank Williams, Sr. , who was conceived during a short affair Williams had after his first wife threw him out of the house.
Apparently, to spite Audrey, in October 1952 he married Billie Jean Jones, the daughter of the Bossier City, Louisiana, a police chief. The marriage ceremony was performed twice in the city auditorium of New Orleans in order to accommodate the crowds.