But it's the Lost Highway I want to talk about. Hank Williams was born in a double-pen log house on a hill in rural country, southwest of Georgiana, Alabama. He attended services with his mother at the Mount Olive Baptist Church nearby, belting out the old gospel songs sitting on the bench next to her as she played the organ. His love of spirituals and gospel music stayed with Hank throughout his life (as it did with Elvis Presley), and was the inspiration for his Luke the Drifter recordings for MGM records.
I visited Hank's boyhood home at 127 Rose Street in Georgiana, Alabama, where he lived from 1930-1934. It was at the Georgiana train station that Hank as a nine-year old shoe-shine boy who sold peanuts and newspapers on the street, met the itinerant black street troubadour Rufus “Tee Tot” Payne. Tee-Tot, so called because he mixed a tot of whiskey in with his tea, often stole a ride on the train down from Greenville nearby where he lived, and played and sang his heart out at the Georgiana station, trying to make a living by busking.
Georgiana at that time had a population of about 300 to 400 I was told, mostly comprised of “nigras” as Afro-Americans were often insultingly called in the deep South at the time. The Blacks worked as labourers, servants, domestics, yard boys and farm hands for members of the minority white population, in the vegetable, tobacco and peanut patches around.
Hank, like Elvis, was “poor white” - a double “indignity” in the segregated South. Incidentally, I felt the same way growing up in New Amsterdam in colonial British Guiana in the 1950's.
At 127 Rose Street in Georgiana where Hank lived from 1930 to 1934, Hank's mother Lillie ran a boarding house for the white owner. As a result, she got free lodging for herself, Hank and his older sister Irene. Hank's father had been institutionalized as a “shell shock” victim of World War I leaving Lillie the responsibility of raising the children. The town of Georgiana later purchased the house and opened it as Hank Williams' Boyhood Home and Museum in 1992.
Lillie gave Hank his first guitar at that home. Hank started teaching himself to play the guitar under that house in a kind of crawl space. In between the arrival of trains, he asked Tee-Tot to teach him some chords. They retreated underneath the house which is located close to the station and the train tracks. There Tee-Tot taught Hank how to play the guitar, although at that time, Hank reportedly wanted to play more “blues” type music than country.
Today, Georgiana has a population of about 1600 I was told, the vast majority being black. The curator of the museum in Georgiana, a white Southerner, is very informative about Hank. Her husband, a former truck driver sits in a chair nearby. We got to talking and he informed me that he had driven to Canada a couple of times, crossing the border at Buffalo. “You don't have many Blacks in Canada?” he asked me. “No” I replied and continued, “We are a multicultural country and have people from all over the world.”
“We have lots of Blacks here in Georgiana” he said. “They sit around, doing nothing, waiting for their Government cheques”.
“Hush!” his wife said to him sternly.
A few miles from Georgiana, I attempted to find Hank Williams' birth place without success. The landscape and rural surroundings look poor, depressed, and abandoned. I can just imagine what it was like in the 1930's when Hank was born.
From there, it was on to Montgomery, Alabama, about an hour's drive north on the Hank Williams Memorial Lost Highway, where Hank's mother moved her family in 1937 when Hank was 14. She operated a succession of boarding houses there with some of her boarders being reportedly men and women of “dubious” character.
One boarding house was close to the Jefferson Davis Hotel which housed the radio station WSFA, whose nighttime beacon would later inspire Hank's song “I Saw the Light”. Hank's mother placed him strategically outside the station to sing and it wasn't long before one of the station executives saw and heard him and put him on the air.
Hank dropped out of Sidney Lanier High School in the 10th grade at 16, to concentrate on his band, the "Drifting Cowboy", and his music career. Reportedly he read a lot of comic books, romance and dime novels rather than the classics which gave him ideas and inspiration for some of his songs.
A visit to Hank Williams Museum in Montgomery, Alabama is a must for those interested in his life and career. There you can see lots of Hank Williams memorabilia including the powder blue Cadillac in which the singer died in the early morning hours of January 1, 1953. Hank Williams Junior continued to drive the car to his high school, after his father died.
At the museum I stood next to Kawliga the wooden Indian - “poor old Kawaliga, he never got a kiss” - the inspiration for one of his most famous songs. Incidentally, that song and "Your Cheating Heart" were composed in the summer of 1952 at Kowaliga on Lake Martin at a cabin where guests were greeted by a carved statue of an Indian. Hank sometimes went there on weekends with a girlfriend called Bobbie Jett. A daughter, Jett Williams, was born two days after Hank died. The original Kawaliga statue was chipped away to nothingness by souvenir hunters over the years. The cabin is still there today and is a tourist attraction.
On Sunday January 4, 1953, Hank's body was carried to the Municipal Auditorium in Montgomery after his premature death at the age of 29. Thousands crowded inside for the service while tens of thousands stood outside in the cold. A life-sized statue of Hank now faces the Auditorium.
Hank and his wife Audrey are buried not far away at the Oakwood Cemetery Annex at the crest of a slight sloping hill – a grave site visited by folks from around the world daily. There I met the supervisor who with his group of workers, including prisoners, take care of the site. He has stories to tell of visitors including a Welshman who had come from the British Isles and spent three weeks singing and playing his guitar at the grave, day and night!
I visited the site and heard the lonesome whistle of a train going through Montgomery, Alabama, just as Hank must have done over 60 years ago when he wrote his famous song - "I'm so Lonesome I could Cry".
The circle is now complete for me – from Guyana to Alabama. I have walked in the footsteps of one of the masters. If you ever want to walk that lonesome road, take the Hank Williams Memorial Highway – take the Lost Highway. Do some Honky-Tonking along the way as I did. If the creeks don't rise and the sun still shines I'll be talking to you.