Hank Williams: Country's king

Hank Williams died 50 years ago today. He was just 29. In his brief, pain-racked life the Alabama hillbilly changed country music for ever and, with the intensity and energy of his songs, made rock'n'roll possible, says Andy Kershaw

It was around 5am on New Year's day 1953 when an 18-year-old chauffeur, Charles Carr, pulled up on Main Street in Oak Hill, a small town in West Virginia, to ask for directions north. Already he had been driving for 24 hours from Montgomery, Alabama, and still had a long way to go before reaching Canton, Ohio – a total distance of 900 miles on twisting two-lane highways. His passenger, sprawled on the back seat of the powder-blue Cadillac convertible, was motionless under a blanket. He'd barely spoken to Carr since they'd left Knoxville, Tennessee, the night before, where the passenger had received two shots of morphine for the back pain that was crippling him.

Carr felt the man's hand. It was cold. He ran across the street to Glen Burdette's 24-hour Pure Oil Service Station to get help. Burdette called the police. Patrolman Howard Jamey arrived on the scene, took one look at the occupant of the back seat and escorted the Cadillac to Oak Hill Hospital. The passenger was pronounced Dead on Arrival.

Hank Williams, one of America's greatest songwriters, a man who had changed the course of country music forever, a performer who made rock'n'roll possible, had, after a short life of trouble, died aged just 29. He looked 50. Hank had been born Hiram Williams in a wooden shack on a chicken-scratch smallholding in Mount Olive, Alabama. His parents were Lonnie Williams, an alcoholic, part-Choctaw, shell-shocked First World War veteran (who left the family when Hank was seven), and Lillie Skipper Williams, a formidable woman who would dominate her physically frail and morally feeble son for all of his brief existence. Lillie stood 6ft tall and weighed 16 stone. She gave birth to Hank all on her own in the shack on 17 September 1923. The child was born with a congenital spine defect that was never properly treated. He was in agony for much of his life.

Hank's childhood coincided with the boom in radio. His enthusiasm for music was fired by listening to stations such as the 50,000-watt WSM, out of Nashville, whose Saturday-night live broadcast – the Grand Ole Opry – featured the biggest names in hillbilly music and could be heard from Canada to the Mexican border. Twelve-year-old Hank also formed an unlikely friendship with a black street singer called Tee-Tot, who taught Hank to play the guitar, to engage with an audience ("Look'em directly in the eye, especially the women...") – and to drink. With Tee-Tot he visited the black neighbourhoods of Montgomery, Greenville and Georgiana. He was blown away by the intensity of the soul-baring blues he heard there, which were to stay with him forever and shape his own confessional songs of despair and desolation.

Like most ill-educated, dirt-poor Southerners in the Depression, Lillie, Hank, and his elder sister Irene, sought meaning in fundamentalist religion. Little Hank sang in the choir of the local Baptist church, where he couldn't escape the message of the hellfire and brimstone preachers: the wage of sin is eternal damnation. It is clear from Hank's gospel recordings, years later (as Luke the Drifter), that this sense of terror and spiritual unrest never ceased to torment him.

In 1936, Lillie moved the family to the big city, Montgomery, where she opened a rooming house. Hank formed his first band at just 14 and, bunking off school, began to get bookings in beer halls and on the local radio. Lillie was scornful of Hank's musical ambitions until she noticed that he was earning more from his music than from shining shoes and selling peanuts, jobs that she had pushed him on to the streets to do after school. Suddenly, she took an interest and assumed the roles of Hank's manager, driver and bodyguard. The patrons of the honky-tonks and beer halls were notoriously drunk and violent. After one particularly brutal evening, Hank announced: "There ain't nobody in this here world that I'd rather have standing next to me in a beer-joint brawl than my Maw with a broken bottle in her hand."

The kid was getting noticed, not always for the right reasons. Before he was 20 he had carved out a reputation for unreliability and hard drinking, both of which kept him off the major radio shows, notably the Opry, until promoters and programmers could no longer ignore overwhelming public demand. But he was also building up a reputation for songwriting and for his on-stage performances. Exempt from military service, due to his spinal problems, Hank worked ferociously, driving huge distances with his band to beer joints across Alabama, returning – often barely sober – in time to perform on a morning radio show on WSFA, Montgomery, the next day.

And still he didn't even have a record deal. That breakthrough came after he met his first wife, Audrey, in 1943. (They were to marry twice. And divorce twice.) Audrey was a woman of insatiable ambition and expensive, if questionable, taste. She saw beyond the honky-tonk treadmill and, with her eye on the main chance, she set up a meeting with the venerable music publisher and accomplished songwriter Fred Rose, in Nashville. No one was better connected in the burgeoning country-music industry than Fred. He gave Hank a publishing contract and secured him a record deal. Rose recognised the young hick's potential. He liked Hank, and the two were to form an unbeatable partnership, often together around the piano, polishing the raw material of a song that Hank had brought to Rose's Nashville office.

Hank's first recording session, with Rose supervising, took place in Nashville on 12 December 1946. The musicians hired to back him laughed at Hank's backwoods accent, mannerisms and clothes. Nevertheless, they cut four songs. The sophisticated smartasses of Nashville may have thought he talked funny. Very soon they would see that this awkward hillbilly spoke to, and was understood by, just about everyone in the United States – black and white – who lived west of New York. And within less than a year, Hank would be the one who was laughing. He scored the first of his 42 hits with "Move It On Over" the following August. The deluge was coming. The real money wasn't far behind. Neither were the problems it brought along.

Audrey and Lillie made no secret of their loathing for each other. Their often open warfare to control Hank and his soaring income left Hank with little control over his own life. Both women regularly beat him up over one or other of his many weaknesses, usually his excessive drinking. Neither was above emptying his pockets when he was out cold. Audrey's ability to spend as quickly as Hank earned, forced him into increasingly punishing schedules. Benzedrine kept him pumped up to perform shows. Quack doctors prescribed him chloral hydrate and morphine to ease the back pain. Booze brought him down so that he could sleep.

Audrey filed for divorce (the first one) in April 1948. The heartbreak over Audrey was not without its benefits.Some of Hank's best songs came to him when he was at his most distraught. "You Win Again", "Why Should We Try Anymore?", "I Can't Help It If I'm Still In Love With You", "Your Cheatin' Heart" and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" were not assembled from off-the-shelf Tin Pan Alley platitudes. Hank wrote them as he lived them – simple, everyday problems of heartache and infidelity, of utter desolation and events beyond his control. They were written sparingly – not a word wasted – and recorded with equally compelling simplicity, enduring conviction and a sincerity that seldom strayed into the maudlin. Today, they hit the listener in the guts just as hard as they did more than 50 years ago.

Hank's songs connected with his audience like no country singer's before or since. Fans recognised in them the tussle between the impulses of Saturday night and the remorse of Sunday morning. In Hank, they saw a man who didn't bother to disguise his failings and weaknesses, and made no secret of his personal problems. Sure, Hank was a drunk with a stormy marriage. So were many of his fans. He wrote into songs the kind of things they talked about, in the bar or the hairdresser's. And no matter how rich and famous he became, he never, in the parlance of the South, got above his raisin'. Hank was simply one of them.

And his fans were the only people that Hank truly trusted. On stage was where he felt comfortable, where he thrived on an intimacy with several thousand people that he couldn't find in a personal relationship. His stage presence was electrifying. None of his country-music predecessors had sex appeal, nor anything close to it. Hank had it in bulk. The recordings of his Grand Ole Opry debut reveal something extraordinary: the crowd is whooping and yelling at seemingly inappropriate moments in the songs, not, as one would expect, after fiddle or guitar breaks. To view tapes of Hank's two surviving TV appearances suggests an explanation. Hank had a swinging pelvis five years before Elvis – and an aura of total authority and cockiness that was pure rock'n'roll – to which he riveted his audience with eyes like two black bullets.

The immensity of Hank Williams's contribution to popular music is all the more astonishing for the speed, brevity and intensity of his life. His were the first country songs to cross over into the mainstream and they continue to do so today. He composed a body of work that has become so deeply cemented into popular culture that many of his songs are simply regarded as standards. Artists as diverse and incongruous as Louis Armstrong and the Bee Gees, Elvis Costello and Perry Como, the Grateful Dead and Henry Mancini have covered Hank's compositions, each finding in them some common appeal, some universal offerings on the human condition. Yet his own professional recording career lasted little more than five years. And the bugger was already dead nine months short of his 30th birthday.

Even in death, Hank wasn't safe from predators. As he lay on the slab at Oak Hill Hospital, souvenir-hunters looted his car. The owner of the gas station at which his corpse was discovered, grabbed Hank's hat and wore it shamelessly for years. A cursory autopsy at Oak Hill put the cause of death down to heart failure and noted that Hank had recently been in a fight. Alcohol was found in his blood, but no attempt was made to look for drugs.

Bruised, battered, boozed-up, drug-dependent, divorced again by Audrey, incontinent and impotent, and recently sacked from the Opry for unreliability, perhaps Hank knew what was coming: the record he had in the charts that lonely New Year's morning of 1953 in Nowheresville, West Virginia, was, "I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive".

Andy Kershaw's BBC Radio 3 programme is broadcast every Friday at 10.15pm