Hank Williams Grave

By Kate Brumback 

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — More than half a century after his death, fans are still paying homage to country music icon Hank Williams. His boyhood home, a museum in Montgomery and the cemetery where he and his wife are buried attract a steady stream of fans, including visitors from England, Japan and other places around the world. A new brochure is due out Nov. 1 listing these and other sites on what the Alabama Bureau of Tourism & Travel calls the "Hank Williams Trail?'

"I enjoy all country western music and Hank is one of the best," said Guyla Hornsby, who visited Williams' grave last summer with her husband, Preston. "I didn't know what to expect, but it's pretty neat." Williams' driver found him dead at age 29 on Jan. 1, 1953, in the backseat of his Cadillac en route to a gig in Ohio. While the cause of death is still a subject of controversy, his short career had been marred by heavy drinking and use of painkillers for a back condition. Williams' hits included a dozen singles at No. 1 and many more in the country top 10. Among them were "Your Cheatin' Heart," "I'm So Lone-some I Could Cry," "Cold, Cold Heart," "Hey Good Lookin,"' "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)," "Move It On Over" and "Lovesick Blues." Many of the songs remain well-known both as country songs and as popular standards, with artists from Linda Ronstadt to Norah Jones recording covers. Williams' son, Hank Williams Jr., is a successful country-rock musician as well. Williams is buried in the Oakwood Cemetery Annex, about a mile from the Hank Williams Museum in downtown Montgomery.

The gravesite features two white and gray marble monuments, one to Hank and one to his wife, Audrey. Marble slabs with their names and the years they were born and died mark the burial sites. There's also a marble replica of Williams' cowboy hat. A low marble curb pens in the artificial-grass-carpeted area around the monument, and two marble benches provide a resting spot for weary visitors. While folks come year-round to pay their respects, ceremonies are held at the cemetery twice a year, on the Jan. 1 anniversary of Williams' death, and on his Sept. 17 birthday. The New Year's Day event "is the best time of year to come," said Lee Sentell, director of Alabama Tourism. Fans gather at the museum in downtown Montgomery, and singers, both professional and amateurs, per-form impromptu covers of his songs. Guests at the events have included elderly members of Williams' old band, the Drifting Cowboys, along with Charles Carr, the driver who found Williams dead.

More than 25,000 people came to Montgomery for Williams' funeral, a record crowd for the city that has never been surpassed. The funeral was held in City Hall, which is also on the Hank Williams Trail, and broadcast to the crowds outside. The statue of Williams stands across the street. The Hank Williams Museum gets about 35,000 visitors a year. The museum was founded in 1999 by Cecil Jackson, who fell in love with Williams' music at age 8, before Williams had started recording. He was popular locally and Jackson heard him on the radio. Jackson's daughter, Beth Birtley, manages the museum today and describes herself as a life-long fan. "I was raised knowing who Hank Williams was," she said. "I'm very proud to have had my father teach me who Hank Williams was and how to appreciate him and his music. And I'm proud to be a part of the family that helps keep his memory alive." Museum exhibits include the convertible Williams was riding in when he died.

Williams' fans may also want to pay a visit to Lincoln Cemetery, where a 9-foot-tall white marble stone notes that Williams' mentor, Rufus "Tee-Tot" Payne, is buried there. The exact location of his unmarked grave is not known. Payne, a black street musician, taught Williams to play guitar in the 1930s. Sentell, the tourism director, says fans often make nocturnal visits to Williams' grave in Oak-wood, and they sometimes leave an unusual offering. "Because of Alan Jackson's song, 'Midnight in Montgomery,' fans of Hank's, as well as country music in general, will frequently go up there to have a beer," Sentell said. He said he went up to the grave one Sunday to take photos in the early morning light and found several empty beer cans, as well as a full one — seemingly left for Hank. Cemetery custodians have told Sentell it is not uncommon to find beer cans both empty and full — by the site in the morning. "Somebody during the night," said Sentell, "shared a brew with Hank." 

Motor City Ain't Burnin No More

By Laurel Hughes - Clarion-Ledger - 1986 

Mississippi has, of all 50 states, been one of the half dozen leading contributors to the main currents of American music. The blues of African Americans "embraces several side streams boogie-woogie, stomps, ragtime, gospel, spirituals, rock and roll, and barrelhouse, but it may be broadly categorized as blues."  The music depicts black America, and most masters of the rhythm are blacks or are devotees of the "black sound," a powerful channel of musical expression. The "rhythm and blues" label for years applied to a musical underground that was spoken of, scornfully by some, as "race music," but its insistent beat broke out in the late 40s and early 50s, taking the air waves by storm.

TWIN BREAKOUT

The public as a whole curiously enough, became aware of the blues about the same time that country music surged into the national consciousness: and both have deeply influenced the popular music of the last two decades. In the mid-50s, they met and produced a hybrid called rock and roll which charged American music with an electricity it had not previously known. While Elvis Presley represented the white side of the fashion, two Mississippi natives named Bo Diddley and John Lee Hooker embodied the black side. Other names prominent in the advance of the blues are such Mississippi born or reared artists as Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, Mississippi John Hurt, Fred McDowell, B.B. King, Sonny Boy Williamson, Joe Turner, Bill Walter Horton, Mississippi Joe Callicott, Johnny Young, Furry Lewis, Booker T. Washington White (who performed as Bukka White), Son House, Skip James, Ike Turner, and still more.

DELTA FOUNTAINHEAD

Several of the artists came from the Mississippi Delta which has led to the claim by some blues buffs that within a 50-mile radius of Cleveland came more blues stars than from the remainder of the United States. While this has not been specifically reunited, the record does show that a number came from other sections of the state. A most prominent artist, John Lee Hooker came from the Delta. John Lee Hooker was the son of' sharecroppers, an occupation that prized children as an economic boon in unpaid labor.  There were 13 children in Hooker's family. Hooker's stepfather was William Moore. a blues guitarist himself and widely known in the Delta region. It was from him that John Lee learned the guitar.

BLURRED BY TALES

Hooker's personal history is blurred by the legends and stories that grow around noted individuals, particularly those with a past that lends itself to romanticism. Hooker's first attempts at music were characterized by two stories — one concerns Hooker's grandfather teaching him to pick melodies on strips of inner tube nailed to the barn door at various tensions and one about his own homemade instrument made under the direction of his father. Whatever were his first encounters with music, Hooker developed his own rhythmic complexity countered by simple harmony.

At 14, John Lee began playing for country suppers and fish fries. Hooker ran away to Memphis and the famous Beale Street where he obtained a job selling candy at a theatre. His concerned parents soon found him and took him home; Hooker made frequent escapes, however, and was soon allowed to reside in Memphis.

GOSPEL STRAIN

Coming from a religious background. he sang gospel with a Baptist group in Memphis and worked in a factory. From the time he left Memphis to escape the deeply engrained and resilient forms of racism prevalent in the Jim Crow South, Hooker was a drifter, working in various factories during World War II. The new friends he found in Detroit encouraged him to pursue his musical career again and soon local clubs began featuring him at after-hours sessions. Some clubs gave him work on a regular basis, which opened the door for him to make his first recordings.

Delta Blues Fest 1978

Original 1978 Delta Blues Festival Poster

Remembering Furry Lewis in 1981

 Ernest Herndon - September 21, 1981

[Editor's note: In this personal recollection, Ernest Herndon pays tribute to pioneer blues guitarist and singer Furry Lewis of Memphis.] 

MEMPHIS — Furry Lewis died this month, and the tradition of the blues has lost a major force. Furry was up in years, in poor health, with a wooden leg, and he died after lapsing into a coma following a heart attack. But he was well-known among Memphians and among aficionados of the blues as one of the founding fathers of the Beale Street sound. Furry started out, he used to say, with a cigar box and broom handle for a guitar. By the time he was in his 80s, which was when I knew him, he played an old six-string with frequent use of the bottleneck, which he developed to a high art. A so-called bottleneck is actually a steel cylinder which fits around a finger and is slid up and down the strings for a whining, haunting effect. When used poorly it has been said to resemble cats fighting. But I never heard Furry use it poorly.

HE LIVED in a small house in one of the poorer parts of town, not far from downtown Memphis. Despite the fact that he made a number of albums and even had a part in a Burt Reynolds movie, Furry, like most master bluesmen, never accumulated much money. I have heard tales that such a state resulted from greedy and dishonest managers who gobbled much of the profits — but I really can't say. [Then let me chime in. The truth is often obscured by the impetus to ignore racial segregation, it's pernicious effects that continues to linger into the late twentieth century, and the benefits of white privilege. By disavowing white privilege, white America can view itself as the victim of such initiatives to bring about equality as affirmative action. The same can be said about the "greedy and dishonest manager." By placing the onus on one unknown and evil individual, blues pilgrims blinded themselves to the larger problems of white society and it's long-term effects on the financial status of African Americans. Editor's note]

We used to go to Furry's house on cold winter evenings. I would carry my guitar in hopes of learning a few techniques from a master of that instrument. The tradition was to bring Furry a quart of beer or pint of whiskey — he liked Jack Daniels. He'd say, "Go get us some glasses in there in the kitchen and pour us a little." Furry would be propped up in bed, his wooden leg leaning against a chair. I would hand him the whiskey and then, after chatting a few minutes, he'd ask for his guitar.

CHANCES ARE, if Furry were alive now he wouldn't remember me. I suspect I was one of many pilgrims who came irregularly to see this master of the blues, to sit at his feet, as it were, and listen to him strum and sing "John Henry," "Going to Brownsville," and "My Dog Blue."  His version of "St. Louis Blues" remains perhaps the most chillingly beautiful versions of that classic I have ever heard. He played it slow, sliding out the graceful notes with his bottleneck.

Summer 1983

"I hate to see that rising sun go down," he would sing. I'd sit in the chair across from his bed and listen, maybe strumming an uncertain backup to his lilting bottleneck licks. Then he might ask me to play. I watched his bottleneck style closely, and I practiced it myself at home until I could match the notes on some of his easier songs. Then one day he gave me a great honor when he said, "Say, that boy's pretty good."

OLD FURRY had a lot of friends. He was soft-spoken in a gentle manner. He knew the blues. And he knew how to sing them and play them.  I read that at his funeral several hundred persons attended. I didn't make it, but maybe tonight sit down and play the "St. Louis" blues and think about him for a while.

Sid Selvidge and Arne Brogger were two of the contributors and music lovers who funded both the upright marker and the smaller footer in the summer of 1983. The marker remains atop his grave. In 2016, the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund marked another grave inside the cemetery and straightened the thick marker of Furry Lewis.