A Life of Music and Pain

In the 1920s, a kid named Hiram was born in rural Alabama. His life was framed, if not defined, by physical setbacks and bodily pain from the start, as he was born with spina bifida occulta. It is the least serious variant of that particular defect, meaning a section of his vertebrae never fully fused around his spinal cord, but has been found to compound other injuries to the back. 

During WWI, his father had fallen from a truck, breaking his collarbone and striking his head. When Hiram was seven years old, his father experienced facial paralysis and was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm which hospitalized him for eight years, leaving Hiram's mother to raise him and his sister Irene.

The family moved to Georgia, and at ten, Hiram traded places with his cousin Opal back in Alabama, so she could attend school out of state. His aunt taught him basic guitar chords and he began playing at dances and church services.

Hiram moved to his mother's new boarding house in Alabama the next year, which she propped up during the Great Depression with a variety of side jobs, including nursing and a job in a cannery. When that house burned down, they moved to another, eventually converting it into a boarding house as well.

At some point, despite their poverty, Hiram got a guitar of his own, and a Black blues musician named Rufus "Tee-Tot" Payne, taught him to play in exchange for meals at his mother's house. Hiram blended Payne's style with country music he had heard, like that of Roy Acuff, but eventually lost touch with Payne when his family moved again.

The next boarding house was in Montgomery, Alabama, and after changing his name (more on that later), Hiram won a talent show prize of $15 for a song whose lyrics he had grafted onto another tune. Performing on the street in front of a local radio station got him on the air a handful of times, and there were so many requests for him that he was given his own 15-minute show to host twice a week - not bad for a 14-year-old. 

Hiram, aged 15

Hiram formed a band and started playing dates around Alabama, dropping out of school at 16 to do so full-time. He and his band began playing around Alabama and eventually around the South. Somewhere along the way, he got talked into bull-riding while at a rodeo in Texas, and injured his back falling from the animal. Starting out at public gatherings and at clubs, gigs at honky-tonks were a mixed bag though, as so much of his revenues went into drinking. 

When the U.S. entered WWII, Hiram's injury prevented him from serving, but all his bandmates were drafted. His drinking worsened, which led many of his replacement musicians to quit, and the radio station eventually fired him for "habitual drunkenness." He ended up working in a shipyard in Mobile for much of the war.

He met his future wife Audrey in Mobile, and after getting married in 1944 at a Texaco station, she helped Hiram get back on the radio, and he also began publishing his own songs, gaining a reputation as a skilled songwriter.

In 1946, Hiram's audition failed to get him on the Grand Ole Opry, but auditioning for a publisher in between ping-pong games got him a six-song contract. When those songs charted, he moved to a larger record company, and in 1947, got his first hit and a spot on Louisiana Hayride. Covers and original songs kept charting until he finally got on to the legendary Grand Ole Opry in 1949, getting an unprecedented six encores in his first performance.

More chart-toppers, bigger tours, and even television appearances kept Hiram's fame star on the rise, but his alcoholism worsened and he entered a sanitarium for treatment. On a hunting trip that same year, he fell and re-injured his back, and he turned to morphine as well as alcohol for the pain. 

Over the next two years, he had an affair with a dancer, became divorced, began seeing someone in Shreveport, and missed enough shows because of that and his drinking that he was fired from the Grand Ole Opry.

In 1952 Hiram married his Shreveport sweetheart but began experiencing heart problems. He came into the orbit of a quack doctor who prescribed a number of drugs, including amphetamines and morphine, which exacerbated his cardiac issues.

On December 30, 1952, he hired a college student to drive him from Knoxville, Tennessee to a show Charleston, West Virginia on New Year's Day. Hiram was out of sorts, in part due to having been beaten up and kicked in the groin during a bar fight a few days prior. His doctor injected him with a B12 shot that also included morphine - Hiram needed to be carried to the car by porters because his coughing and hiccupping left him unable to walk.

Shortly after midnight, the student, who had been driving for 20 hours, stopped in Bristol, Virginia and got a local taxi driver to spell him off. That driver took them to Oak Hill, West Virginia, where they stopped to refill and grab some coffee.

It was only when they stopped that they discovered that Hiram was dead, and had been so for long enough for rigor mortis to have set in.

The man so many people had come to know as the legendary Hank Williams, had died before seeing his 30th birthday.

Despite his poverty, his pain, his questionable judgment, and his many misadventures, in his three decades of life, Williams had 11 number-one country hits and had an astonishing 55 singles hit the top 10. Without question, he can be considered one of the most influential singer-songwriters to have ever lived. 

It can even be argued that his first hit, "Move It On Over," helped pave the way for what would eventually become rock and roll. His influence on the rockabilly movement cannot be denied, with artists like Gene Vincent, Carl Perkins, and Elvis Presley covering many of Williams' songs.

The link between blues music and rock is well documented, but knowing that such an influential figurehead in country and western music, at one of its most formative stages, learned some of his craft from a virtually unknown person of colour, is certainly food for thought.