HITTING THE HANK WILLIAMS TRAIL Museums in Alabama
“I’ve never seen a night so long
“When time goes crawling by
“The moon just went behind the clouds
“To hide its face and cry”
— Hank Williams, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”
The homespun poetry of songs such as “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and many others that have come to define “classic country” earned Alabama-born singer-songwriter Hank Williams the nickname “the Hillbilly Shakespeare.” His death on New Year’s Day in 1953 at age 29, in the midst of a string of hits, makes the life story of Williams, one of American popular music’s most prolific and successful artists, almost unbearably poignant.
Accompanied by a friend – like me, a Northern-born fan – who had retired to Eufaula, Alabama, I set off on a Hillbilly Shakespeare pilgrimage.
The timing was keyed to the 43rd annual Hank Williams Festival in Georgiana, where Hank (given name: Hiram, pronounced “Harm”) lived from age 7 to 11. For those planning their own pilgrimages, note that next year will mark the centennial of the country music legend’s birth, and the state is already gearing up to celebrate. Montgomery will host its centennial festivities Sept. 15-17, 2023.
The city’s Hank Williams Museum houses an extensive public display of Williams memorabilia, a wondrous warren of framed vinyl and gold records (he had 11 No. 1 singles on Billboard’s country charts), photos, press clippings, songbooks, sheet music, royalty statements and hotel bills. Hank’s hits streamed from speakers and clips from his televised performances looped in a small, curtained theater.
A steady stream of Williams pilgrims paused to read the detailed labels and admire various tributes, including a largerthan-life statue of a Native American donated by the Alabama National Fair.
On a sunny mid-June afternoon with a tickling breeze, dozens of brown pelicans soared overhead like an avian Cirque du Soleil. Some birds carried nesting material in their comically long bills; others scanned the light chop for a meal. On shore, expectant parents tended to their eggs, standing as still as statues. While the performers swirled around him, Wes Bradshaw remembered a time when there were no pelicans on the Chesapeake Bay, a period that covered about threequarters of the waterman’s life on Smith Island, Maryland.
“I had seen pictures of them, but I didn’t see my first one till 24, 25 years ago,” the 77-year-old retired crabber said from inside the skiff he uses to transport guests to the island’s pelican rookery. “Now, I enjoy looking for them and seeing what they’re up to.”
The arrival of nesting East Coast brown pelicans on the Chesapeake Bay, the northernmost point in their spring migration, is an uplifting chapter in the often bleak tale of climate change and declining wildlife diversity. Though pelicans – and their deep throat pouches – have existed for at least 30 million years, they do not appear in the Eastern Shore’s historical records. Neither the region’s Native Americans nor English explorer John Smith, who mapped out the waterway in 1608, mention the prehistoric-looking bird.
“It’s a recent thing,” said Jim Rapp, an avid birder and conservationist who leads pelican tours on Smith Island with Delmarva Birding Weekends. “In 20 years, this place could look like Florida, bird-wise.”
Previously, brown pelicans summered on North Carolina’s
Most visitors seemed to instantly recognize this imposing figure, on which three woodcarvers spent 559 hours, as Kaw-Liga
(the “Liga” pronounced like the “lijah” in Elijah), the subject of a posthumous Williams hit that director Wes Anderson used in “Moonrise Kingdom.”
Tall glass-fronted cases displayed clothing, musical instruments and personal items of individual band and family members – including Hank’s first wife, Audrey; Lycrecia, Audrey’s daughter from a brief earlier marriage; and Jett Williams, Hank’s out-of-wedlock daughter. Audrey, who wrenched control of her husband’s career from his mother and probably inspired several rocky-marriage songs (“Why Don’t You Love Me” and “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” to name two) loomed large.
Protected by a steel railing was “Audrey’s Dream”: the Chinese red-lacquer dining room set she bought for their Franklin Road home in Nashville, a house later owned by Tammy Wynette, “the first lady of country music.”
The museum’s main
Outer Banks. However, Rapp said disruptive storms may have forced the birds to relocate their breeding grounds about 130 miles up the East Coast. Nesting brown pelicans, the smallest of the eight species, were first documented on Chincoteague Bay, near Assateague Island, in 1987. Since then, the once-endangered birds (DDT, the draw is “Hiram’s Ragtop,” a baby-blue 1952 “Golden Anniversary” Cadillac convertible, in the back seat of which Williams — having been given morphine for his lifelong back pain, made worse on the road — died, somewhere between Knoxville, Tennessee’s Andrew Johnson toxic insecticide banned in 1972, was a culprit) have formed robust colonies in the central and lower sections of the bay. Their numbers have rocketed, from about 60 pairs in the early 1990s to more than 2,500 couples today.
“There’s no better real estate on the Chesapeake than on this estuary.
There are no
Hotel and Oak Hill,
West Virginia. (It’s a long and contested story.)
The restored death car, used in Hank’s funeral procession, is on loan from Williams’ son, the country musician Hank Williams Jr. Now 73, Hank land predators and loads of fish,” said Rapp, who once assisted scientists in banding 1,600 pelicans in an afternoon. “The Chesapeake has become a pelican factory.”
During winters down south, brown pelicans have as many responsibilities as Florida springbreakers. However, for their roughly six months in the Mid-Atlantic, the birds are all business: mating, building nests, laying and incubating eggs, teaching their offspring life skills, securing the future of their species. The bulk of these activities take place in rookeries that are often inaccessible to the flightless or boatless.
On a Thursday morning, our group boarded the Barbara Ann II from Crisfield. Our primary motive was to see the brown pelicans, but we still jumped up – or at least cocked our heads – whenever Rapp pointed out a flying object.
“There’s a glossy ibis,” he exclaimed,
Jr. was born Randall Hank Williams and nicknamed Bocephus, after a Grand Ole Opry ventriloquist’s followed by a tricolored heron, a night heron, another glossy ibis, a snowy egret, two bald eagles, an osprey and a great black-backed gull, the largest member of the gull family. “Pelican behind us!” Rapp called out excitedly.
I came late to the party – I was deep in the Audubon Bird Guide app trying to learn the difference between egrets and herons – but looked up in time to see a little splash marking the pelican’s entrance to the live fish market. Seconds later, it burst through the waves, a winged jester among graceful acrobats. “They have a massive beak and a slow wing beat,” Rapp said, “but they turn into a torpedo in the water.”
The pelican sightings became more frequent as we neared Ewell, the largest of Smith Island’s three villages. The Barbara Ann chugged past a
dummy, by his dad, who died when he was 3. Also on display are copies of Williams’ death certificate (cause of death: ”Acute rt. ventricular dilation“) and the $418 funeral invoice.
After browsing in the well-stocked shop, we drove up to the Williams gravesite, a large, AstroTurfed plot in Montgomery’s Oakwood Annex Cemetery, where devotees gather every Jan. 1. Another landmark, still in business on Dexter Avenue, is Chris’ Hot Dogs, frequented by Hank, Elvis and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who served as pastor of the nearby Dexter Avenue Baptist Church (now the Dexter King Memorial Baptist Church) from 1954 to 1960.
Once (briefly) the capital of the Confederacy, Montgomery is now a top civil rights destination. The Rosa Parks Museum is located on the site of the Empire Theater, where the 14-year-old Williams, the “Singing Kid,” won $15 in a talent show. Next to the Hank Williams Museum on Commerce Street, in a former slave trade warehouse, is the Equal Justice Initiative, the organization behind the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum.
On to the Hank Williams Festival – Hankfest, for short. This year’s festival kicked off on the afternoon of June 3 at the Hank Williams Music Park in Georgiana, about an hour southwest of Montgomery.
Adjacent to the Hank Williams Sr. Boyhood Home & Museum, the stage extended from Thigpen’s Log Cabin, a salvaged slice of a honkytonk where Williams often performed. A bring-yourown-lawn-chairs, alcoholfree event, Hankfest is meant to recall the smalltown shows of the singer’s early years.
The family spent just four years in Georgiana before moving to Greenville, but they were formative. As a boy in Georgiana, one learns, Williams met Black street musician Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne. Sitting in an old car seat under the house, on a guitar bought for $3.50, he practiced the chords
Payne taught him, paying for the lessons in coins earned shining shoes and selling peanuts and newspapers.
Mixing the blues absorbed from Payne with church music (“My mother was an organist at Mount Olive, Alabama, and my earliest memory is sittin’ on that organ stool by her and hollerin,’ ” he told an interviewer in 1952), his own “hillbilly” sound and the jazzy style called western swing, Hank hit the sweet spot that raised country music’s postwar profile. A plaque on a bench at the Boyhood Home & Museum reads: “Standing on this bench in about the year 1927, Hank Williams performed for the first time, accompanied on the organ by his mother.”
It may be that something of that young boy persisted in the man who became a star of Shreveport’s “Louisiana Hayride,” then of Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry, though Williams, just divorced, was fired in 1952 for missing shows. (Alcoholism was a constant problem.) In a case at the Montgomery museum are issues of “Heart Throbs” and “Complete Love” — essentially romance comic books — from that troubled last year of a life tragically cut short.
Accompanying text reveals Williams’ answer when he was asked why he read all those “sissy” magazines. “Sissy? … Heck boy, they’re not sissy. Where do you think I get most of my ideas from?”