Hank Williams: Recalling the Last Ride

"I don’t write ‘em. I just hang onto the pen and God sends ‘em through.”

– Hank Williams

Hiram “Hank” Williams ranks among the most powerfully iconic figures in American music. As Williams became one of America's first country music stars, he set the bar for contemporary country songcraft. No one has eclipsed his great influence in the genre, and it's likely no one ever will. 

Williams composed thirty-one of the singles he released during his six-year career; as well as posthumous work including: singles, compilation albums, and previously unreleased material. During his lifetime, he placed thirty songs on Billboard's Top C&W Records, while he had seven number one hits. Almost 100 of his songs came into national prominence.

Of Williams' many songs, these are just ten of the more memorable works:

"I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry"
"I Saw the Light"
"Your Cheatin' Heart"
"Ramblin' Man"
"Moanin' the Blues"
"Kaw-Liga"
"Move It On Over"
"Cold, Cold Heart"
“I Can't Help It (If I'm Still in Love With You)”
“Lovesick Blues”

The incredible simplicity and stark emotional impact of Hank's music has been long noted as the alchemy of a musical genius. Andrew Romano, senior writer for Newsweek and The Daily Beast wrote ...

“His (William's) work was a perfect storm of sorts. Individually, every element of a Williams record – his lyrics, his music, his voice – was memorable. But it's the way those parts combined into a seemingly inevitable whole – the way they reflected and amplified each other – that made him great, rather than merely good.

“Hank's music—a blend of the blues he learned from a local busker and the Appalachian hill songs he heard at home—served as a kind of musical onomatopoeia for heartbreak; his lyrics put that feeling into words. They locked together like puzzle pieces: note by note, syllable by syllable.

And then there was Williams's voice: a seismic instrument that registered every shockwave of sadness or rage as it reverberated outward from somewhere inside him. He wasn't just singing about heartbreak; he actually sounded heartbroken. That's why "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" seems indivisible: like all the best pop records, it convinces the listener that only this voice could sing those words over that melody. It couldn't exist in any other form.”

(Andrew Romano. “The Ghostwriter.” GQ. October 3, 2011.)

With an $8 guitar and a melancholy voice, Williams, a poor Alabama country boy, set out on his meteoric rise to fame and fortune. Reflecting his own troubled experiences, most his songs portrayed the love and loss of sad and lonesome souls. Although he left an incredible body of songs, it is notable that upon departing his brief life, he left no in-depth interviews and just a few letters. According to songwriter Danny Dill, Hank held a fascination for the dark side of life.

“Did you ever see a robin weep
When leaves began to die?
Like me, he's lost the will to live
I'm so lonesome I could cry”

“I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry” Hank Williams

In 1952 alone, despite physical deterioration, he recorded 89 songs. In the same year, his public drunkenness led the Grand Ole Opry to fire him. Williams had missed an appearance two days earlier, and it wasn’t the first time. A heavy drinker caught up in a barely-understood addiction to painkillers, the singer’s behavior had becoming increasingly erratic – something especially troubling to the music establishment.

“I can settle down and be doin' just fine
Til' I hear an old train rollin' down the line
Then I hurry straight home and pack
And if I didn't go, I believe I'd blow my stack”

“Ramblin' Man” Hank Williams

The Opry has always said they never intended Williams’ removal to be permanent. The Mother Church of Country Music claimed it was meant as a wake-up call for the troubled artist. A psychiatrist once described Hank "as the most lonesome, the saddest, most tortured and frustrated of individuals."

Hank’s life was a series of contradictions. Rush Evans writes in Goldmine …

“He was an alcoholic who could undergo long periods of sobriety. He sang songs of the wild life and songs of faith. He was a reckless playboy and a devoted family man. He was an upbeat guy with mean old miseries in his soul. He was an uneducated hillbilly and a creative genius. And most of all, he was a man with a carefree attitude about life who also had a remarkable ability to articulate any human feeling with depth and despair at the Shakespearean level.”

“When you are sad and lonely and have no place to go
Call me up, sweet baby, and bring along some dough
And we'll go Honky Tonkin', Honky Tonkin'
Honky Tonkin', Honey Baby
We'll go Honky Tonkin' 'round this town.”

"Honky Tonkin'” Hank Williams

Williams was born with a mild undiagnosed case of spina bifida occulta, a disorder of the spinal column, which gave him lifelong pain – a factor in his later abuse of alcohol and other drugs. To make matters worse, in 1951 Williams fell during a hunting trip in Tennessee, reactivating his old back pains and causing him to be dependent on alcohol and prescription drugs.

By the end of 1952, Williams had started to suffer heart problems. He met Horace Raphol "Toby" Marshall in Oklahoma City, who claimed to be a doctor. Marshall had been previously convicted for forgery, and had been paroled and released from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in 1951. Among other fake titles he claimed to be a Doctor of Science. He purchased the DSC title for $35 from the "Chicago School of Applied Science.” Under the name of Dr. C. W. Lemon he prescribed Williams with amphetamines, Seconal, chloral hydrate, and morphine.

“I was just a lad, nearly twenty two
Neither good nor bad, just a kid like you
And now I'm lost, too late to pray
Lord I paid a cost on the lost highway”

“Lost Highway” Hank Williams

One of Hank’s band members, Tommy Hill, described the daily routine as they toured the country playing one-nighters:

“Me and a bunch of the pickers talked about how [Hank’s manager] Clyde Perdue and Toby Marshall were just in it for what they could get out of Hank cause he was making pretty fair money. But Hank never saw any of it. You see, if Hank took one shot of whiskey, he was drunk, so they’d get a six-pack and allot him so many beers after he woke up until the time of the show and that kept Hank happy. Then the doctor would give him a shot so he’d lose all his beer, throw it all up, then they’d put black coffee down him, let him do the show, then give him a six-pack and put him to bed. Same thing every day. I said, ‘They’re killing him.’ The booker and the doctor.”

(Robert A. Waters. “Last Ride down the Lost Highway.” November 12, 2011.)

The story of Williams' tragic death at age 29 has been the subject of a multitude of books, songs, and personal accounts. Lore began growing around the event from day one. H.B. Teeter, newspaperman for the Nashville Tennessean, published an article one day after Williams' death claiming Williams had told him months before in an interview – “I will never live long enough for you to write a story about me.”

“If it was rainin' gold I wouldn't stand a chance
I wouldn't have a pocket in my patched up pants
No matter how I struggle and strive
I'll never get out of this world alive”

"I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive" Hank Williams

The Last Journey of Hank Williams

Note: Much of the evidence for the report of Hank Williams' last days here are excerpted and paraphrased from Hank: The Short Life and Long Country Road of Hank Williams (2017) by Mark Ribowsky.

Ironically Williams' single, “I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive,” was scaling the top-ten at the time of his demise. On Monday, December 29, 1952, Hank is reported to have made a rare and unexpected visit to church, St. Jude’s Hospital chapel, to pray with the nuns. “Ol’ Hank needs to straighten up some things with the Man,” his wife Billie Jean said he told her. It was his last full day in Montgomery.

“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”

"I Saw The Light" Hank Williams

Williams was booked to play two venues – one in Charleston, West Virginia, and one in Canton, Ohio. Before he left, Williams came into his cousin Marie McNeil’s room and handed her forty dollars, which he wanted used to help pay the doctor who would deliver Bobbie Jett’s baby. As he left the room, Marie said, Hank told her, “Ol’ Hank’s not gonna be with you another Christmas. I’m closer to the Lord than I’ve ever been in my life.”

Note – Bobbie Jett had a brief relationship with Hank Williams between his two marriages. Their baby, Antha Belle Jett (Jett Williams) was born on January 6, 1953, in Montgomery, Alabama, five days after her father's death on January 1.

Jett was adopted by Hank's mother Lillie Stone. But when Stone died herself just two years later, Jett was put into foster care. After a lengthy court battle in the 1980s, she was ruled to be one of her father's legal heirs and due to half of the family fortune. In 1990, Jett told her story in the memoir Ain't Nothin' as Sweet as My Baby.

The next morning, December 30, Hank's travel plans still in limbo, he chartered a flight to Charleston for early afternoon. But because of the horrendous weather – a snow-storm had blanketed Montgomery, one of the few to ever hit the city – he had hired a driver days before. Because of his reputation for missing shows he couldn’t afford more bad publicity.

Williams hired 17-year-old Charles Carr, son of Dan Carr, owner of Lee Street Taxi, to drive him on the four-day, two show, round trip. Although Billie Jean expressed her desire to go with him, Hank left alone. According to Billie Jean, Hank had spent a restless night in bed with excruciating back pain. She feared something more was wrong.

Around 11:30 a.m. Hank and Carr loaded up his baby blue ’52 Cadillac convertible. He had Carr buzz the airport to check on a plane before they left, but all flights were canceled well into the day. Hank settled in, his back already hurting, for what would be hours on the road.

“Oh, the blues come around
Oh the blues come around
Lawd, the blues come around
Ev'ry evenin' when the sun goes down”

“The Blues Come Around” Hank Williams

Before they left, Williams also had the driver stop by a doctor, identified in one account only as a man named “Black,” who shot him up with morphine. After buying some sandwiches, coffee, and a six pack of Falstaff beer at the Hollywood Drive-in Diner, Hank headed north on Highway 31.

“I'll gas up my hot rod stoker we'll get hotter than a poker
You'll be broke but I'll be broker tonight we're settin' the woods on fire
We'll sit close to one another up one street and down the other
We'll have us a time oh brother settin' the woods on fire
We'll put aside a little time to fix a flat or two
My tires and tubes are doin' fine but the air is showin' through
You clap hands and I'll start bowin' we'll do all the laws allowin'
Tomorrow I'll be right back plowin' settin' the woods on fire”

“Settin' the Woods on Fire” Hank Williams

The itinerary covered nearly a thousand miles, from Montgomery to Charleston to Canton. Because Hank had gotten out of Montgomery late, he decided to stay the night in Birmingham, where they got a decent night's sleep at the Redmont Hotel. They were off early the next morning, New Year's Eve day, and they made a stop in Fort Payne, where Hank bought a bottle of bourbon. The duo made it to Chattanooga by lunchtime and ate in a diner.

By 1:00 p.m. they were in Knoxville, still three hundred miles from Charleston. In Knoxville, Williams found his way to St. Mary’s Hospital, where, in mysterious circumstances Carr never explained, he was able to have a doctor give him another morphine shot.

By then, as Carr learned when he phoned Lillie, Hank's mother, the two Charleston shows had been canceled due to the storm. Meanwhile, stuck back in Knoxville, Carr and a dog-tired Hank checked into the Andrew Johnson Hotel. Hank, who had drained the bourbon, could barely stand, and two porters all but carried him to his room.

“Well I stopped into every place in town
This city life has really got me down
I got the honky tonk blues,
Yeah the honky tonk blues
Well Lord I got em,
got the ho-on-ky tonk blues.”

“Honky Tonk Blues” Hank Willliams

At the hotel, Hank was laid out on his bed, but was kept awake by nagging hiccups that seemed to approach convulsions. Carr notified the front desk to summon a doctor. Minutes later, Dr. Paul Cardwell rushed to the hotel and, possibly having conferred by phone with Marshall, injected Williams with two more morphine shots along with vitamin B-12.

Williams dozed off fully clothed, but about 10:30 p.m., Carr got a call from the concert promoter telling him they had to leave right away and drive through the night to make the Canton show.

The show’s promoter, A.V. “Bam” Bamford, was particularly peeved, knowing he’d be refunding two sellout houses of 4,000 people if Hank didn't show. Bam instructed all of them to get going to Canton for the next night’s shows. One other interested party had made it to Charleston as well – Toby Marshall, who called Lillie for his marching orders.

Note: Reportedly at the request of Hank Williams’ mother, Jessie Lillybelle Skipper Williams, Toby Marshall had flown to Charleston to look after Hank and to accompany him back to Montgomery following the Canton show. Marshall had been supplying Williams with the powerful sedative chloral hydrate, and appeared to have gained the trust of both Hank and his mother.

(John Lilly. “Hank Williams’ Lost Charleston Show.” Native Ground.)

"There was some kind of penalty clause in his contract . . . so we had to be there for the New Year's Day concert or else, " Charles Carr remembered.

"When we left the room, they sent a wheelchair, " Carr said. "They rolled him (Williams) down to the car and Hank got in on his own. I clearly remember that."

(Jim Tharpe. “At 17, Charles Carr was the only witness when a legend died, and myths were born.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. December 30, 2002.)

The roads were bad due to the weather and the traffic was slow. Carr got a ticket about an hour later in Blaine, Tennessee, when he almost ran into a patrolman while trying to pass another car. He paid a fine and got back behind the wheel with Williams asleep in the back. It was after midnight by this time – already New Year's Day – and Carr had been behind the wheel since early that morning.

“Like a bird that's lost its mate in flight
I'm alone and oh, so blue tonight
Like a piece of driftwood on the sea
May you never be alone like me”

"May You Never Be Alone" Hank Williams

The tired teenager stopped in a small town in the dead of night – maybe Bristol or Bluefield as Carr remembers – to gas up and get a bite to eat. He specifically remembers a service station on one side of the highway and a diner and a cab stand on the other.

"I remember Hank got out to stretch his legs and I asked him if he wanted a sandwich or something, " Carr said. "And he said, 'No, I just want to get some sleep.'

"I don't know if that's the last thing he said. But it's the last thing I remember him telling me."

At the cab stand, Carr picked up a relief driver who helped him drive for a few hours before getting out somewhere in rural West Virginia.

Carr drove on, but became increasingly concerned about the eerie silence in the back seat. He pulled off the road to check on Williams, who was lying with his head toward the passenger seat and had his left hand across his chest.

“Won't you redeem; your poor wicked soul
You can't pay your way; with Silver and Gold
If you're not saved; you'll be lost in the night
When the Pale Horse and his rider goes by?”

“The Pale Horse and His Rider” Hank Williams

From this point on, mysteries abound that have never been solved, mysteries with plenty of clues but a lot of doubt.

Carr would later say Williams had spent time writing songs and chugging some beer, and noted that the last song they sang was Red Foley’s “Midnight,” a song that may have matched the mood he was in as he sang for the last time:

“Midnight, oh what a lonely time to weep, I ought to know
Midnight, I should have been fast asleep hours ago …”

"He had his blue overcoat on and had a blanket over him that had fallen off, " Carr said. "I reached back to put the blanket back over him and I felt a little unnatural resistance from his arm."

Panicking, Carr rushed into the restaurant it’s unknown whether Surface and came back out with an older man who took a look at Hank Williams and summed up the situation with classic understatement.

“I think you got a problem,” he said.

Police reports would indicate that Carr, knowing they had a famous corpse in the back and needing to get it to a hospital, asked for directions to one at Burdette’s Pure Oil gas station. Carr asked the owner, Peter Burdette, to call the local police station and tell them a dead man had been driven into his place. Within minutes, a police car arrived, and Officer Orris Stamey confirmed Hank was dead.

The official cause of death, which was declared at Oak Hill Hospital, has also been reported several ways, both accurate, with the death certificate saying that the cause of death was “acute rt. ventricular dilation” and a later coroner’s jury declaring that he “died of a severe heart condition and hemorrhage.”

Because of the uncertainty about where Hank died and the fact that the West Virginia coroner ruled his death a heart attack, charges against Toby Marshall were never filed.

Defending his position, Marshall claimed that Williams possibly committed suicide. Marshall stated that Williams told him that he had decided to "destroy the Hank Williams that was making the money they were getting". He attributed the decision to Williams' declining career:

"Most of his bookings were of the honky-tonk beer joint variety that he simply hated. If he came to this conclusion (of suicide), he still had enough prestige left as a star to make a first-class production of it … whereas, six months from now, unless he pulled himself back up into some high-class bookings, he might have been playing for nickels and dimes on skid row."

A scrap of paper found on the floor of the car that carried Hank Williams to his death on New Year's Day, 1953, is reported to have read …

“We met we lived
And dear we loved
Then came that fatal day
The love that
Felt so dear fades far
Away
Tonight we both
Are all alone and here’s
All that I can say
I love you still and
Always will
But that’s the price
We have to pay”

Fifty-seven years after his death, Hank Williams received a special Pulitzer Prize citation for lifetime achievement in music. The Pulitzer board praised him as “a songwriter who expressed universal feelings with poignant simplicity.” Of his own life, Hank once told a reporter that the “people who has been raised something like the way the hillbilly has, knows what he is singing about and appreciates it.”

Whether you call him “Hillbilly Shakespeare” or “Luke the Drifter,” Hank Williams left an incredible body of brutally honest songs about his life in the language of the common man – he brought country music into the modern era, and his influence spilled over into the folk and rock arenas as well.