Hank Williams put fifty-five singles in country’s top ten
Alabama-born Hiram “Hank” Williams (1923–1953) helped invent modern country songwriting. He learned guitar from bluesman Rufus Payne, absorbed Roy Acuff, and before dying at twenty-nine had stacked fifty-five Billboard Country top-ten singles—twelve of them number ones.
Hiram Williams was born in Mount Olive, a rural corner of Butler County, Alabama, the third child of Lillie and Lon Williams; the first had died as a newborn. His birth certificate, filled out when he was ten, misspelled his name as Hiriam. He was born with spina bifida occulta, a hidden spinal defect that caused him pain all his life. When he was seven, his father developed facial paralysis, was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm and spent most of the next decade in a veterans' hospital in Louisiana, leaving Lillie to run the household.
He picked up basic chords from an aunt, then lessons from Rufus Payne, a street bluesman. In 1937, after the family opened a boarding house in Montgomery, he started calling himself Hank and won a $15 first prize at the Empire Theater with his own WPA Blues. He never learned to read music, building songs from stories and his own life instead. Busking outside the WSFA radio studio won him on-air spots, and he put together the Drifting Cowboys with a guitarist, a fiddler and a bass-playing comedian.
The Second World War brought hard times. A back injury from a rodeo fall kept him out of the military, his bandmates were drafted, replacements left over his drinking, and by August 1942 his chronic drinking had cost him his WSFA job. He married Audrey Sheppard in 1944, who fought his mother for control of his career. Records for Sterling led to an MGM contract, and in 1948 his version of Lovesick Blues shot to the top of the Billboard chart.
He died on New Year's Day 1953, aged 29, of heart failure while riding in the rear of a car close to Oak Hill in West Virginia, on the way to a show in Canton, Ohio. Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley were among the musicians he influenced.
Source: Hank Williams
