Hank Williams Comes to Town

In nineteen thirty-seven, a woman named Lillie Williams moved with her teenage son from rural Butler County to Montgomery. She opened a boarding house. The son, Hiram, was thirteen years old and had been playing guitar since he was eight. He had learned the instrument partly from a Black itinerant blues musician named Rufus Payne, who went by the nickname Tee-Tot, and who played street corners in Greenville for tips and spare food. Hiram gave Payne food in exchange for lessons. He later told the Montgomery Advertiser, in nineteen fifty-one, that Tee-Tot had given him all the music training he ever had.

In Montgomery, the boy renamed himself Hank and started playing on the radio. His mother's boarding house happened to be next to radio station WSFA. By age fourteen he was performing on the station after winning a local talent show. He started a band. He played honky-tonks. He was fired from jobs for drinking. He was hired back for the music.

He failed his first Grand Ole Opry audition. His song Move It On Over got him onto the Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport in nineteen forty-eight. On June eleventh, nineteen forty-nine, he finally performed at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and received six encores. He was added to the Opry roster the same night.

Over the next three and a half years, Hank Williams became the most popular country entertainer in the United States, recording Lovesick Blues, Your Cheatin' Heart, I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, and dozens of other songs that defined the genre. He was fired from the Opry in August nineteen fifty-two for chronic unreliability. He died of heart failure on January first, nineteen fifty-three, in the back seat of a Cadillac on a highway in West Virginia. He was twenty-nine.

Nearly twenty-eight thousand people attended his funeral in Montgomery.