Monthly Archive for November, 2008

Mack Vickery Live at the Alabama Women’s Prison

I tell you what. We’ve played for bigger audiences,
but we’ve never played for any greater audience, I guarantee it.

 – Mack Vickery, Live! At the Alabama Women’s Prison

Johnny Cash started it with Folsom Prison. Playing prisons had been an important part of what Cash did, but Columbia, his record company, had at first been cold to his idea of recording one of those concerts as an album. Cash’s instincts prevailed, and the record became a defining moment—for many fans, the defining moment—of his career. It enjoyed a lengthy ride on the Billboard pop and country charts alike, it won the Grammy for Best Country Album of the Year, and it inspired a follow-up, Johnny Cash at San Quentin, another classic, the next year. And it would make possible too a new, if tiny, recording genre: the prison album.

Folsom came out in 1968 and San Quentin followed in ‘69. A former Folsom inmate, Glen Sherley, recorded Live at Vacaville, California, in 1971, with Cash’s encouragement. (Cash had performed Sherley’s song, “Greystone Chapel” for the Folsom record, with Sherley in the audience; by ‘71 Sherley was an inmate at Vacaville and MCA arranged with the prison authorities for him to perform.) Also in 1971, B.B. King released his Live at the Cook County Jail, proving beyond any doubt that the prison album was not the sole property of Cash’s circle or of country music.

In the midst of all this arrived, mostly unnoticed, what was certainly the strangest entry in the prison-album catalogue. Its performer, his name unknown on any public scale, had in recent years become a successful songwriter for other artists and had himself been a sporadic recording artist for a little over a decade, often releasing his singles under names other than his own. Recorded in 1970 at the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka, Alabama, and released on the Mega label, Live! At the Alabama Women’s Prison was the first full-length album by Mack Vickery. It was an unlikely debut, and the only full album Vickery would ever record.

Now, almost 40 years later, and again mostly unnoticed, it has made it to CD, among the latest offerings of Bear Family Records.

Inasmuch as this album has been remembered at all, it has been for its cover: tasteless, campy, and absurd, it was a highlight of Paul Kingsbury’s 2003 book, Vinyl Hayride, a coffe-table collection of country album covers both celebrated and obscure, and it turns up periodically on websites devoted to bad album art. Wearing black boots and a black vest, billowy silk sleeves and a scarf, his guitar slung over his back, his lower body packed tightly into his pants and his golden pompadour suggesting a blonde Elvis, the beef-cakey Vickery poses cockily in front of a dreary prison cell. Three female prisoners (models) sit or stand posed around the cell, barefoot in their regulation-blue above-the-knee skirts, cigarettes dangling between their lips or fingertips, their hair piled in various degrees of beehive and their vacant stares suggesting the hardened sexiness of a purity lost. A fourth prisoner stands at the bars, seductively eyeing Vickery as he writes what we assume is his autograph, or possibly his phone number; the inmate’s fingers (close inspection reveals a wedding ring) touch, provocatively, the iron bar near Vickery’s face. Colorful, go-go-style letters announce: Mack Vickery Live! The rest of the title, AT THE ALABAMA WOMEN’S PRISON, follows in an institutional, white block font.

It is a cover which seems to abandon the very thing that has made the better-known prison albums so successful: that is, the deep and obvious respect with which the performers approached their audiences. Here Vickery’s prisoners are crudely sexualized, the objects of male fantasies about women behind bars—this was, after all, the era of women-in-prison exploitation films, and the album’s go-go lettering, prison bars, and sexual innuendo evoke a certain cage-dancing vibe. The cover is self-indulgent and condescending, even as it pokes fun at the prison-album genre itself. It is difficult to tell whether the whole thing is genuine or a joke or, somehow, both. On the cover and in the album Vickery seems to be at once putting us on and in dead earnest.

That ambiguous mix of pranksterism and sincerity was a hallmark of Mack Vickery’s career.

 *   *

Mack Vickery was born in Town Creek, Alabama, in 1938. His mother died when he was three and he spent most of his childhood moving from state to state with his father. When he was nineteen he auditioned for Sam Philips at Memphis’ Sun Records, but Philips declined to record him further. In 1958 he recorded his first single for Princeton Records, a tune called “High School Blues,” backed by “We’re Not Engaged Anymore.” Throughout the sixties and seventies Vickery recorded for a variety of labels (Gone Records, Jamie, Playboy) and under a variety of pseudonyms (Vic Vickers, Mac Vickery (more a typo than pseudonym), Atlanta James), but he never achieved any success as a recording artist. Success did come, however, as a songwriter for other performers: in 1968 Faron Young took “She Went a Little Bit Farther,” a song Vickery had co-written with Merle Kilgore, to #14, and Vickery’s songs soon became a staple among the giants of the country business. Hank Williams, Jr., Sammi Smith, and Vickery’s childhood idol Ernest Tubb also recorded covers of “Farther.” Tanya Tucker had a #5 hit with “Jamestown Ferry,” and Johnny Paycheck took two Vickery compositions to #8, “You Gotta Be Puttin’ Me On,” and “I’m the Only Hell (Mama Ever Raised).” Other Vickery songs were recorded by Lefty Frizell, Willie Nelson, Vern Gosdin, and Bill Anderson, and both Hank, Jr., and Waylon Jennings dipped frequently into the Vickery repertoire. Vickery’s songwriting successes continued into the 1980s, most notably with George Strait’s recording of “The Fireman,” and in the nineties country stalwarts George Jones and Johnny Cash took stabs at Vickery compositions, the Jimmy Buffetty “I’ll Give You Something to Drink About” and “God Bless Robert E. Lee,” respectively. All in all, Vickery scored hits in each consecutive decade from the sixties through the nineties, a rare feat for any songwriter.

The names alone of lesser-known Vickery offerings provide a sense of the songwriter’s sensibility and collectively evoke a poetry of their own: “Bad Girls,” “Cheating Our Way to Heaven,” “Don’t Touch My Yum-Yum,” “Falling Out Shelter,” “Paper Prison,” “Three Proverbial Rodents with Defective Vision,” “Boston’s Busiest Peeping Tom,” “Jones on the Jukebox,” “Send Me a Box of Kleenex,” “She’s Up to My Old Tricks,” “Salesman for Jesus,” “I Knew We Could All Get Along When an Indian Sings a Cowboy Song,” “Perverted,” “Love Held the Gun, Hate Pulled the Trigger.” Vickery’s specialty was the smutty, cocky, double-entendre song, best exemplified by his best-known composition, “Meat Man” (more on this in a moment) and its more sanitized descendent, Strait’s “Fireman.” As a songwriter, Vickery had a quick sense of humor and a penchant for wordplay and innuendo, but he was also adept at slowly sensual, tear-in-beer ballads such as Waylon Jennings’ “I Can’t Take My Hands Off of You.”

It was Jerry Lee Lewis, though, who became the most apt and most active translator of Vickery’s compositions. Throughout the ‘70s the Killer found a kindred spirit in Vickery, and many of Jerry Lee’s rawest, freest recordings of that decade were Vickery covers. As Lewis biographer Jimmy Guterman notes, Vickery’s “Rockin’ My Life Away” “immediately became Jerry Lee’s statement of purpose and all-purpose theme song.” In addition to this song, Lewis recorded Vickery’s “Honky Tonk Wine,” “Ivory Tears,” “I Sure Miss the Good Old Times,” “That Old Bourbon Street Church,” and the profoundly raunchy “Meat Man.” “Been down to Macon, ate the furs off a Georgia peach,” Lewis bragged in that song:

I plucked a chicken in Memphis, mama
Still got feathers in my teeth
I ate a pound of pork in Huntsville
From a fine Alabama hog
Ate a charcoal steak in Dallas
And fed the bone to a Louisiana dog
I’m the meat man
You oughta see me eat, man—

And so on. By the end of the song Jerry Lee is worked into an unholy frenzy and as the music stops he screams—belligerently, intoxicatedly—“Meat man, you mutha!”

In 1973, Vickery became part of a historic, bacchanalian Jerry Lee Lewis session which resulted in the single “Meat Man” and the larger album Southern Roots: Back Home in Memphis. While it has been critically applauded in retrospect as a landmark moment in Jerry Lee’s career, a peak in his post-Sun creativity, Southern Roots proved a commercial flop at the time of its release, certainly not the comeback vehicle which Lewis ongoingly, desperately, drunkenly sought. Its only single—a song designed perhaps for cult status but certainly not for radio airplay—failed to go places. Still, for fans at least, there is an uncanny power to both that single and to the overall album, and the power is most effective where the visions of Lewis and Vickery come together. The Vickery material here provides both the album’s frame and its spiritual core, and it stands as the high point of the fruitful Lewis-Vickery collaboration. Vickery’s songs found their natural expression in Jerry Lee’s performance, and they captured better than any other material Lewis tackled in that era the essence, or competing essences, of the Killer. Jimmy Guterman, again: “the Vickery numbers that opened and closed the album defined the two Jerry Lees. In ‘Meat Man’ he was a raving, cocksure stud; by ‘The Old Bourbon Street Church’ he was vanquished, drunk, nearly crying, begging for forgiveness. In Vickery, a fan as well as a professional, Jerry Lee had found someone who could articulate his troubles better than he himself could.” The trade-off was mutually beneficial: in Jerry Lee Lewis, Vickery found a performer who could inhabit his songs in ways he himself could not.

*   * 

The basic elements of a Vickery composition had been in place since at least 1957, when Vickery had walked into the Sun Records studio—the studio which had given the world its first tastes of Lewis, Elvis, B.B. King, Johnny Cash, and other like-minded punks—with hopes of getting his own record deal. Among the demos cut that day was “Drive In,” essentially a raunchy rockabilly reworking of the Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up, Little Suzie” story, in which an embarrassed teenage couple discovers at 4 a.m. that they’ve fallen asleep in a movie theater. This innocent mistake, the couple worries, will ruin their reputations, and they wonder how they’ll explain to parents and friends their late return home. “Ooo-la-la,” friends will say; but the truth is, they’ll insist in all honesty, they didn’t do anything.

Vickery cut his Sun demos in 1957, the year that “Wake Up Little Suzie” became a hit, and, although the two songs are quite different musically, the connections between “Suzie” and “Drive In,” are obvious. Vickery’s heroine is “Sister Suzie,” who stays out at the movies until “almost four o’clock” with her boyfriend Joe and whose “goose is cooked” (a phrase straight out of the Everly song) when she comes home. But Vickery would never in his career indulge in the kind of Beaver-Cleaver bubble-gum innocence which forms the premise of the Everlys’ napping alibi; rockabilly itself would never straight-facedly pass off on its listeners such nonsense. The most telling change to the story is the use of the drive-in theater as the setting, placing rockabilly’s most potent, sexually charged symbol—the car—at the heart of the song; the tune is named, after all, for the drive-in and not for Suzie herself. Against the beat of a thumping piano, Vickery growls unashamed in the chorus that Sue and Joe were “making love in the drive-in, in the very last row,” and that they “never, never watched the show.” Ooo-la-la wake up, nothing.

Vickery from the get-go had one thing on his mind.

*   *

Some years after the fact, songwriter Merle Kilgore recalled the making of Vickery’s only solo album: “He went down and got buddy-buddy with the warden,” Kilgore remembered. “It was a female warden. They had a few drinks together, and he talked her into letting him come down there. He came out onstage like Elvis—shaking—and them women went wild.”

Waylon Jennings wrote the liner notes and in them described his reaction to the album: “Man, I’m not hearing it, I’m living it! Great! Just great! It’s real! If I don’t get to write the liner, I’ll burn your house down! At least that way I feel like I’ve had some small part in the album—okay, Mack?”

There is something special about any prison album, a quality of live-ness that outdoes other live albums. Johnny Cash knew, in pioneering this new genre, that the prison concert, at least one that successfully translated into a meaningful prison album, was not simply a concert performed at a prison; the idea was not merely to run through the hits for the incarcerated crowd as you might any other audience, but to give the prison listeners something unique to their situation. Though his Folsom Prison show did include a few obvious hits, the bulk of the performance and of the subsequent album was made up of songs about iron bars and death row, about crime and murder and regret, or lack of regret, about revenge and about redemption. Songs were even tailored to the specific audience: “Folsom Prison Blues,” an early Cash hit, received new life when performed from the Folsom stage; for the San Quentin album, Cash wrote a new song, “San Quentin,” a throwaway but pointed composition which the appreciative audience demanded he play twice in a row. In addition to building the right set-list, Cash would interact with his audience in ways unique to the prison-concert situation, egging on the guards and assuming his most anti-authoritarian poses. As Cash clearly understood, the rapport established between the performer and the crowd is what makes the prison album powerful.

This truth is evident on the Cash records and on B.B. King’s, and on Glen Sherley’s Vacaville; Alabama Women’s Prison is, in some ways, no different.But here there is something else going on, too. As the title suggests and the cover makes explicit, Alabama Women’s Prison attempted a twist on the exclusively male world of the prison album. In other hands these records were characterized by the macho male swagger that exuded from both sides of the mic: think of Cash and the prisoners alike ogling June Carter (”I love to watch you talk,” he says on Folsom; “I’m talking with my mouth,” she responds, “it’s up here!”) or King rationalizing to his baby (and to enthusiastic applause) that when he cheated on her he was high and therefore not to blame. The Tutwiler album abandons that exaggerated male bond between audience and artist for a similarly exaggerated sexualized interplay. Vickery winks and swaggers and oozes innuendo and his audience plays its part to perfection, shrieking and swooning from start to finish.

The album opens with “Life Turned Her That Way,” a weepy Harlan Howard ballad popularized by Mel Tillis, which urges its listener not to put down but instead to pity the woman-gone-wrong, whose fall was not the result of her own actions but of her victimization by men. If there is a central figure in the songs Vickery performs here, it is this fallen woman, and if there is a central message of the album, it is this song’s refrain: “Don’t be quick to condemn her for the things she might say. Don’t blame her, life turned her that way.” “Life Turned Her” becomes a running motif of the album: a Greek chorus of female singers revisits the single line, “Don’t blame her, life turned her that way,” several times between songs. (At other transitional moments, the melancholy chorus sings a refrain of “Bars, lonely bars; how I hate these lonely bars.”)

The woman-gone-wrong appears again in the album’s second track, “A Woman Who Walks on the Wild Side,” an up-tempo Vickery composition which explains that the woman of the title “is just following in the steps of a man.” Vickery belts it, his singing bloated and swaggering, then launches into the Joe South soul-rocker (probably best known from Elvis’ cover; Vickery’s performance smacks throughout of Elvis), “Walk a Mile in My Shoes.” The first side of the record concludes with a comedy monologue and medley called “Down at John Wayne’s Ranch.”

This is where things really get strange.

Certainly humor was a big part of Mack Vickery’s overall thing. Most of his best-known tunes turn on some kind of wordplay (usually risque); Vickery had also been prominently featured on the 1960s “triple-X-rated” adult comedy LP, Elmer Fudpucker Live at the Nudist Colony: Lettin’ it All Hang Out. (That album, released on the Vulgar label, went gold, and is really Vickery’s album more than it is Fudpucker’s; among other songs, Vickery co-wrote “Big Bad Bruce,” a spoof of Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John,” in which the hero is not a burly coal-miner but a swishy-stereotyped gay hairdresser who dies trying to rescue his purse from a hair-drier fire.) Supposedly a tape exists of Vickery telling jokes to an audience of ducks, who quack at all the punchlines. The comedy routine had long been a staple of live country shows and figured also into Elvis’ Vegas act; a common kind of schtick has been the impersonation of popular singers singing their biggest hits (check out the live albums of Merle Haggard or Buck Owens for examples). Heard today, these routines, even in the hands of a Haggard or Owens, usually come off as variously corny, dull, or embarrassing—but even within the tradition of bad country comedy, awkward one-liners, and mediocre celebrity impressions, Vickery’s eight-minute “Down at John Wayne’s Ranch” is an unusually uncomfortable listen.

The bit is bizarre and convoluted—it features, among other things, Vickery’s impression of Porky Pig doing an impression of Mel Tillis—and is at most moments painfully unfunny, but it does give Vickery a chance to interact with his audience, and that interaction, as on any prison album, is what gives the record its charm and even (this is not a joke) its emotional impact. However corny or surreal the material may get, the response of the audience is genuine and infectious. When Vickery, impersonating John Wayne, introduces his friend Porky Pig to the audience, an African American inmate shouts out: “Okay, soul brother!” In his best John Wayne drawl Vickery responds, “Well, thank you, sister,” and the crowd goes wild. When Vickery launches into his Elvis impersonation, that crowd—apparently oblivious to the fact that much of the show already has been a kind of Elvis impersonation—responds as if the King himself has just walked onstage. He hits “Heartbreak Hotel” and unleashes screams. And something happens here: Vickery and the audience alike are transformed by the communal act of make-believe. In this moment, black and white, the incarcerated and the free, the woman-gone-wrong and the male seductor himself, gyrating hypnotically onstage, are all, mysteriously, united—it is an unusually transcendent moment for so patently unfunny a comedy routine.

Side one ends.

The second side of the record opens with “Alabama Women’s Prison Blues,” which Vickery, under the pseudonym Atlanta James, would release also as a single. This song is the highlight of the album, better even than the collectors’-item cover. “Well, they caught her in Montgomery,” Vickery sings, “carrying that hooch, hoochie-coo.”

Yeah, they caught her in Montgomery, for carrying that hooch-ie, hoochie-coo.
Now they got her in Wetumpka, cryin’ the Alabama Women’s Prison blues.

The crowd cheers. The band is rocking.

“She was wearing high-heeled sneakers,” Vickery continues in the song’s only other verse, “and a low-cut mini, too.”

She was wearing high-heeled sneakers, and a low-cut mini, too.
Now they got her in Wetumpka, wearing them Julia Tut-wiler clothes and shoes.

The song ends too soon. He doesn’t play it twice. Band and singers immediately switch gears back into the slow refrain of “Life Turned Her That Way” before Vickery introduces the next number:

“This song,” he solemnly informs the audience, “was inspired by the contents of a woman’s purse.” The song—his own composition, “The Purse,” almost certainly composed with this very moment in mind—traces the life-cycle of the good-woman-gone-wrong through the changing contents of her purse: from, on the girl’s fifth birthday, the purse’s dum-dum sucker, bobby pins, and souvenir sea-shells; to the rat-tail comb and drive-in ticket stub the purse carried on graduation day; to—after a tell-tale key change—”a pearl-handled pistol, six silver shells,” and (the finishing touch) “a roll of papers from a woman’s prison.” Also in this last incarnation of the purse are a quarter and a dime which the woman will spend on a bottle of wine, so that she can dream of the dum-dum suckers, bobby pins, and rat-tail combs of her innocence.

(It is hard but to notice that drive-in stub among the contents of the pivotal second purse: perhaps if Sister Suzie had not gone with Atlanta James to the drive-in, or perhaps if she’d only watched the show, she would never have taken that turn for the worse, following in the steps of a man. Vickery may as well be indicting himself. Maybe he is.)

“Sing it!” someone shrieks, more than once, during the song. And he sings it.

The band cranks it up again for another Joe South cover, a catchy “Games People Play.” There’s another country weeper and the album ends with a trio of religious tunes, including Sunday-school sing-a-longs of “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” and “Old Time Religion.”

The album fades out over frenzied cheers.

At the Julia Tutwiler, Mack Vickery is a star.

 *   *

Notes & postscript:
 Jimmy Guterman quotations are from Chapter 7 of his book, Rockin’ My Life Away: Listening to Jerry Lee Lewis (the title comes from a Vickery song), published by Nashville’s Rutledge Hill Press in 1991, out of print now but available in its entirety online. The circumstances of the Merle Kilgore quote (”He came onstage like Elvis…”) are unknown to this author; the quote appears on a handful of websites containing brief mentions of the Women’s Prison record and appears also in the liner notes to the album’s recent reissue.

Mack Vickery died of a heart attack at the age of 66, on December 21, 2004. His friends remembered him unanimously as a hell-raiser and a good time. His only album, Live! At the Alabama Women’s Prison, was released on CD for the first time in 2008, by Bear Family Records. The reissue includes the full LP, plus two bonus tracks, including Vickery’s own recording of “Meat Man.”

May he rest in peace.

W.C. Rice’s Miracle Cross Garden

In a world full of sinners, hypocrites, whoremongers, and thieves, William Carlton (W.C.) Rice saw himself as a modern-day Noah: ordained by God to prophesy destruction, to call the unsaved and endangered to salvation, and to build with his own hands a vessel for his and for others’ deliverance. He was the spiritual inheritor of the Old Testament hero, his warnings not of the flood but of the fire next time, his Ark not a boat but a Garden.

“Remember,” Rice would say, “Noah built the Ark and God borned the spirit in Noah’s flesh like he has in mine.”

In the Biblical account of the flood, God speaks the dimensions of His Ark to Noah, naming in detail the materials and layout of the construction, its width, breadth, and height. And in similar fashion so did God speak to W.C. Rice—every day, for close to three decades—the blueprints of His Garden. “The best way I can describe it to you,” Rice once explained, “it’s like a puzzle. You got to put every piece together, to make it come out right. So that’s what God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost did with me. See, they built it. I built it, but they built it through me. Just like a puzzle. And we’re still building it. I will be as long as I live.”

*   *

The Miracle Cross Garden still sneaks up on you as you curve around the bend of Autauga County Road 86 near Prattville, Alabama. A few wooden crosses pointing in all directions, growing from the ground or nailed to trees and posts, evolve around the corner into hundreds. Words painted in red and black across weather-beaten boards warn the driver that “YOU WILL DIE”; to “REPENT”; that “HELL IS HOT.” A graveyard of broken appliances covered in more painted words preaches the sins of sex, the fires of hell, and the possibility of salvation from both through Jesus; other planks of wood and appliance carcasses boast cryptic strings of numbers. Looming over the nearly three acres of roadside evangelism are three enormous crosses, standing in remembrance of the crucifixion scene at Calvary. On the other side of the street, surrounded by still more crosses and crowned with an air conditioner fan, a hollowed mound of wood and dirt reconstructs Jesus’ empty tomb. A rusted blue car, overgrown with vines and perched on the edge of one of the landscape’s natural bluffs, proclaims in huge letters: “THE DEVIL WILL PUT YOUR SOUL IN HELL, BURN IT FOREVER.”

Many visitors have come to Prattville from across the U.S. and beyond, having seen the Cross Garden in a book or magazine or on the internet. Some visitors have told Rice that they first stumbled as unsuspecting drivers onto the Cross Garden, were moved by the scene, and accepted Jesus as a result. But to many, the Cross Garden is an eerie, even frightening, stretch of land, offering a grotesque vision of Christianity: crooked crosses sprouting chipped and splintered from dry red dirt; crosses wrapped in barbed wire or covered with the repeated word “HELL” in sprawling black paint; jagged pieces of metal rusted to an orange-brown, the words “REPENT YOU WILL DIE” printed over a faded “READ YOUR BIBLE”; the appliances and automobiles which form so much of the Garden broken and wrecked, Rice’s creation springing out of rust and decay. It is without doubt a strange landscape, complete with its own language the outsider must struggle to understand—a language made largely of numbers, of truncated sentences and loose associations, overflowing with commas and repetitions, full of contradictions. In the Cross Garden, threats of damnation are juxtaposed against images of salvation: a cluster of thin, white crosses angle upwards out of the dirt, the single word “HELL” painted across each. Sin and Salvation, Jesus and Satan, Heaven and Hell, the Flesh and the Spirit come together in a kind of perpetual battle; the violence of their coexistence is wrought into the broken and beaten landscape of the Garden. Mixed among the description of Hell’s fiery fury are calls to redemption and glory, signs which insist and beg, perhaps even soothe, signs which offer the only way out of the Cross Garden’s nightmare: “JESUS WILL HELP YOU”; “JESUS SAVES”; “JESUS DON’T LIE.” “WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH JESUS?”

In the midst of all this sits the home of W.C. and Marzell Rice. A van is parked in the driveway, the image of Jesus carrying His cross painted against its side; there’s also a pickup in the garage around back, a five- or six-foot cross extended upward out of its bed. “DON’T BRING THE DEVIL IN THIS HOUSE,” signs at the front and back doors implore the visitor: “LEAVE THE DEVIL OUTSIDE.”

In the last years of his life, W.C. Rice found himself increasingly confined, by diabetes, to a wheelchair. Up until his death he continued to add to the Garden, just not as much as he liked. When he could not do the work himself he would give the instructions to his wife Marzell, instructions given first to him by God. Rice died on January 18 of 2004, his body giving out finally to pneumonia. He was 73 years old, and surrounded by family.

In reporting his death, local papers anticipated public questions about the fate of the garden. “Garden remains tourist attraction,” a paper from nearby Montgomery proclaimed; “Widow vows to maintain husband’s cross garden,” another headline assured (and, so far, she has). As always—Rice and his crosses had long appeared in area papers as recurring local-color items—headlines were more concerned with the Garden itself, an item of curiosity and local weirdness, than with its message. In his later years, Rice had become celebrated as a “folk artist,” his front yard likened to other home-made revelatory spaces like Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden. But unlike Finster, who created from it a cottage industry, Rice rejected the “folk-art” label. “I don’t know anything about art,” he insisted.

He was up to something else entirely.

*   *

W.C. Rice was born on February 20, 1930. He was saved on April 24, 1960—”in a house trailer, down in Fort Rucker. Sunday morning, about two o’clock.” That night, God healed Rice of an ulcerated stomach that had troubled him for some fifteen years. “Next thing I know, I come up out of the chair, and I spit tobacco all over that refrigerator, and I started preaching.” Rice never had another taste of tobacco, and was never bothered by ulcers again. “God borned the spirit in my flesh-body when He saved me that Sunday morning,” he explains. Ever since, Rice has been listening to God, talking to God, and preaching God’s word—from the makeshift pulpits of his pick-up truck and living-room recliner, in his occasional writings for local newspapers, and, above all, through his Garden.

Rice’s first congregation, early that April Sunday morning, was his wife Marzell; with her husband’s help she, too, “came to the Lord” later that morning, around nine o’clock. Eventually Rice also helped bring his mother and father, both of them death-bed repentants, into the fold. “I won their souls to Jesus,” he told me a few years before his own death, and added an important distinction: “I didn’t save them. Can’t nobody save a person. You can pray for them and the Lord does that. He’s the one that does the saving.”

To commemorate his parents’ salvation, Rice tacked three small cards above his kitchen door, each professionally printed in black and white and picturing a cross alongside printed text. The first card also bore a strip of black cloth, “in remembrance of God’s son,” and included a quotation from Scripture. The other cards included the dates of his parents’ births and deaths and read, “I thank the Lord for saving my MAMA and DADDY.” Then the Lord spoke to Rice, and told him to move his crosses outside.

“You see, from the three cards how big it is now.” We were sitting in his living room, Rice talking and talking; I visited Rice several times before his death and he would talk each time for as long as I would listen. Confined by diabetes and other health problems to a fat recliner, Rice gestured to the world beyond the living-room walls. “And it ain’t come to an end yet.”

The three little cards grew into Rice’s Miracle Cross Garden, a landscape of revelation that has attracted visitors from all over the world. With the advent of the internet word traveled far and visitors would come from Germany or Japan to the United States, just to visit Prattville and Rice and the Garden. Some visitors kept a distance from the man inside (when I was a teenager in Montgomery most people I knew were afraid of the Garden’s unseen creator); others knocked on Rice’s door to meet the man behind the crosses, to sign his guest book, even to give him more crosses or to listen to him preach. For all the hellfire of his Garden, Rice’s demeanor was always inviting and warm. He welcomed the attention as a means for spreading the Gospel. Rice insisted that he would not argue or force religion, but would welcome the questions of the curious as invitations to witness. Once that door was opened, he said, you would probably have to stand up and leave before he would stop talking.

This was essentially true.

*   *

The inside of the Rices’ house is as elaborately designed an environment as the Garden outside. Wooden, plastic, stone, and metal crosses—bought from stores, ordered from catalogues, or received as gifts—cover the living room walls and dangle in heavy bunches from the ceiling. Hangings depict Jesus in velvet, bearing His cross and walking on water. A tapestry reproduces the Last Supper. The face of Jesus, his scalp bleeding beneath a crown of thorns, looks through the peeling paint of an ancient plywood canvas. Photographs of Rice, his family, his dog and his truck are tacked to walls and ceiling amidst scores of newspaper clippings, strings of numbers, a few small rebel flags, and more crosses.

“I got a lot of Catholic stuff in here,” Rice told me. “But I don’t know nothing about it, all I know is a cross. The reason I got it is because I like the crosses and they like crosses. A lot of this stuff comes from Roman, Inc., in Chicago, Illinois. You see, they put that stuff on sale every once in a while, and I ordered me one of em and I liked it, so I ordered some more of em. I wound up getting nineteen. See, it’s just like making cars, all this stuff—every year they come out with a different model.”

He leaned further back in his recliner. His activities were largely confined by now to that chair. Unable to add to the Cross Garden as much as he would have liked, he still managed to spend time outside in his wheelchair, but less and less time. Marzell had begun helping him with the Garden’s upkeep and new additions.

“I don’t have no enemies,” Rice said. “You know, a lot of people tote enemies in a sack. Some of these people, you can’t talk to them, the Bible says just shake the dust off of your feet and go on and leave them alone. So that’s why I say I don’t carry none of them, I don’t carry none of them devils on me. Them peoples don’t like me, about the Cross Garden and all this stuff. Oh yeah, I get persecuted; my wife does, too. Yeah, it’s a hard, hard, straight line to walk.”

On another occasion Rice indicated pictures, taped to his wall, of him and his old Labrador retriever, Mac. “He was a praying dog,” Rice said proudly. “I got a pulpit over there. I’d call him–‘Come on boy, we got to go pray.’ He’d come around on that side, I got a stand about that high, he’d walk around that side and put his feet up there on that stand; I’d come around this-a-way, I’d bow my head and pray, he’d stand right there like he’s a-praying.

“People, people, people used to come by here. They’d bring people, people out here to see that dog, praying dog. So God works through all kinds of things, see. And I believe some people got saved by seeing that dog.”

*   *

“I can back up every piece of the stuff out there,” Rice says on another occasion, as if offering a challenge. “I don’t care which one you ask about, I can give you a Bible answer for it.” Sure enough, he is impossible to stump. I ask him at one point how many crosses are in the garden, a question he says he gets all the time. For the answer, he says, count all the crosses outside, inside, and on all the papers throughout and around the house. Then count all the words in the King James Bible. The numbers will be the same. “I’ve never counted all the words in the Bible,” he admits, also noting that he can’t walk well enough anymore to count the crosses outside. “But, it can be done. It’s a little long a job to do, but it’s not impossible.”

*   *

Rice described the Cross Garden as a “warning station.” “That’s what them signs is about down there. I warn people.” Signs marked “YOU WILL DIE” are not threats, but facts, intended less to scare than to explain: warnings that we all must die, that we know not the hour, and that if we are not born again, then we are bound for the fires of Hell. “The biggest part of the people that’s gone on and died, their soul’s in Hell,” he would say, and plead of his visitors: “Don’t, when you die, go to hell-fire. And want water, cause you ain’t going to get none. There’s no water down there. There’s no air conditioners down there. They’re wailing,” he sayid of the damned, “and gnashing of teeth. They’re mad. They’re on fire. Never get out of there. Be down there forever.”

Thus, a cinder block on the ground outside warns the visitor with a single word: “HELL.” A toilet seat lying in a patch of dead grass elaborates: “HELL IS HOT.” Discarded air conditioning units, refrigerators, Coke machines, and ovens add cryptically to the messages of a burning eternity with no ice water:

TOO LATE

IN HELL

FIRE

WATER

 

ALL KIND’S

IN, HELL

FIRE WONT

WATER

 

SIN SOUL

HYPOCRITES

IN HELL

WONTS

WATER

DRY

 

RICH

MAN

HELP ME

CRYING

IN HELL

WATER

REPENT

 

SEX

USED

WRONG

WAY

IN

HELL

 

SEX

SIN

HELL

FIRE

 

HELL IS HOT, HOT, HOT

The messages distill Rice’s imagery of Hell into a few frantic words. The messages of the Garden comprise Rice’s Bible, stripped to hits most fundamental bones and emotional core, constellations of meaning exploded down into a few words, a single word, a chain of numbers, even a single number. A sign on one cross bears the inscription “JESUS SAVES”; beneath it is a second sign: “HELL SEX.” Other signs say simply “JESUS” or present the numbers 8 or 26 or 7 in bold red or green, offering no instructions for their interpretation.

Rice’s religion was rooted firmly in a language of numbers, and Rice would claim an “understanding of numbers” given by God. “He works with me in numbers. That’s part of my calling. He works with numbers in the flesh-body. If you start paying attention to it, you’ll see things, different numbers.” And so Rice would tell stories: of the ten virgins, of the two thieves, of the three men thrown in the furnace, of the eight saved in the flood. He spoke of seven, “God’s perfect number,” and of twenty-seven, “my mother’s number” (Annie Mae Rice was born on April 27, 1905; she was born again on April 27, 1976, the say she died). The numbers are reflections of spiritual realities, embodying layers of meaning so thick that Rice, who admittedly loved to talk, would say, “I can’t get into all that—I won’t get through talking.”

Off and on over the years, Rice would buy out the back page of the local Prattville Times and Centerville Press newspapers, and fill these pages with written sermons, plain black crosses, and significant numbers arranged into patterns. His writings for the paper (dictated to Marzell, who typed them out) contain long and tangled discourses on, among other things, the meaning of various numbers, relying heavily on stream-of-conscious Biblical associations and rendered more or less indecipherable to readers unfamiliar with Rice’s language:

Today is the 30th day of March! Yesterday was the 29th day of March! My daddy died on the 29th day of January, 1977, two sevens, two thieves on the cross. One asked Jesus, one did not. On Saturday the 29th, when I got to the Nursing Home, my daddy had just passed away around four o’clock. There was one furnace and there were three men put in that furnace, they looked in there and saw the fourth man, His name was Jesus. So my daddy went to be with the fourth man, just like Lazarus, Jesus. No. one, Lazarus, no. one My daddy, No. one, makes three persons or three spirits.

In the same essay, God Himself becomes a number—the number three, indicating the trinity. “I am,” Rice writes, “No. 3’s servant.” “There is no other person on earth who can stop the No. 3’s. Man can destroy the body but man cannot destroy the soul and spirit. Hallelujah, Praise the No. 3’s. What a miracle, miracle, miracle.”

As Rice writes, the numbers pile quickly upon one another, simultaneously referencing multiple points—dates, events, Bible verses—and spinning convoluted webs of spiritual meaning. He continues:

The No. 3 gave me another No. 3 tonight over at the little church praying and meditating with the No. 3. There were four teenage boys who came in to visit me at the church. I talked to them about Jesus. Then there were four more—two boys and two girls which makes a No. 8. There were eight souls saved during the flood. Then four more came in, a man and a woman, boy and girl. They all signed my register book. I gave them a set of papers which makes two more numbers, 3 fours and 3 fours makes twelve disciples.  

*   *

“When I die,” Rice once said to me, “put my old body in the ground; my spirit’s going up there to live with all them spirits up there, Jesus and God and all of em, all them people that’s done gone on to Heaven. I’m looking forward to it,” he said, but added: “I want to stay here as long as I can. The Lord knows all that. Just like me talking to you today. You see, when I’m dead and gone in the grave, I can’t talk to more people. I’ll have a spiritual body, I’ll be living over there. So they get more good out of me as long as I stay on this earth. Like I’m talking to you today, see. But according to age and time, you know, flesh-body wears out.”

“He ain’t coming back to get these crosses and all here. No, He ain’t coming back. Ain’t coming back after no church building on this earth. He ain’t coming back. The people is the church. The ones that’s been born and saved and are living for Him, that’s the church; that’s the ones he’s coming back after. He ain’t taking no church building, no building, that’s all going to be burnt up.”

“I’m in a lot of books. Magazines. All these things going throughout the world. On the internet. I’m on there three times, and you can’t tell how many more times I’ll be on there after I’m dead and gone. They’ll still be putting me on that internet system, circulating around the world. So this Cross Garden will never die. The wood will rot down, signs will rust down, but it’s been planted in people’s hearts, just like Jesus Christ. I ain’t calling myself no Jesus, cause there wasn’t but one—that another one,” he points out, always on the lookout for numbers—”but it’s been planted in people’s eyes, it’s going throughout the world all kinds of ways.”

“So,” one of Rice’s Centerville Press writings reads, “I’m warning you sinners and hypocrites just like Noah, warned the people in the other world, and did what God told him to do, he built an Ark, told the people it was going to rain. They didn’t believe him. It’s a sad thing that there was not one soul outside Noah’s family saved. 8 souls saved.”

“And,” Rice would say, leaning back in his chair, repeating a favorite phrase: “on and on it goes.”

Help Me Understand: Hank Williams as Luke the Drifter

 

Roy Orbison had a line in a song called “My Best Friend.” It was a line that says, “A diamond is a diamond and a stone is a stone. But man is part good and part bad.” You know, I recognize the fact that I’m part good and part bad…
-Johnny Cash, 60 Minutes interview, 1982

 

I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me…
I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.
What blurt is this about virtue and about vice?
Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me…
-Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

 

“Oh, who was that brave girl so sweet?”
I covered the crushed, broken body and said:
“The bad girl who lived down the street.”
-Luke the Drifter, “Be Careful of the Stones That You Throw”

 

Sometime in the hours between New Year’s Eve, 1952, and New Year’s Day, 1953, en route to a show in Canton, West Virginia, Hank Williams passed away in the back seat of his Cadillac, 29 years old, his body full of morphine and whiskey. His recent recording, “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive,” endowed now for his fans with a sudden, mystical relevance, immediately went to number one on the country charts; other releases, including “Kaw-Liga” and “You’re Cheatin’ Heart,” also became major posthumous hits in the new year. Hank’s record label, MGM, followed the death of its biggest country star (the biggest country star) by quickly issuing and reissuing as much of Hank’s material as it could. One of the label’s releases in the coming months was a box-set of 78-rpm recordings by Luke the Drifter, Williams’s homily-spinning alter-ego. The new package of previously released recordings presented Hank Williams for the first time as Luke the Drifter, the two names printed side by side—though the identity of the man behind the pseudonym had never been much of a mystery, during Hank’s lifetime the Drifter records never bore the singer’s real name. In death, though, Hank and Luke were finally, formally united.

The Luke the Drifter records were, for the most part, spoken recitations, interspersed with occasional singing, featuring religious and moral themes. The alternate persona Williams created through Luke the Drifter provided an escape from, and a balance against, the image of Hank as sinner—an image hinted at by his more raucous songs, with their celebration of the honky-tonk lifestyle, and reinforced dramatically by reports of his drinking and marital infidelities, his expulsion from the Grand Ole Opry, and, finally, the circumstances of his death. In the wake of that death, the timely reminder of Hank’s work as Luke the Drifter served as a sentimental memorial and an assurance, to those fans who might have been concerned, that Hank Williams was above all a good man, a mama’s boy and a Christian, however flawed, and that, despite anything else, he had surely made it through the Pearly Gates.

It would be nothing new to point out the double personality of country music, or of American roots music in general, that Saturday-night/Sunday-morning split that allowed even as staid an outfit as the Carter Family to move back and forth from Jesus to the jailhouse without pause or apology. For much of the twentieth century, the African-American blues musician turned his or her back on the church by choosing instead to play the devil’s music, while the churchgoer likewise made a conscious decision to reject the blues outright; at the dawning of rock and roll, Jerry Lee Lewis, one of American music’s essential personalities and most divided souls, bemoaned the fact that he was dragging his audience with him to Hell—but, like a thing possessed, kept right on playing. You can’t have it both ways, the strict sin/salvation dichotomy behind the music exhorts, but our greatest performers have flamboyantly bucked such an assumption, ingrained in their upbringings but contested in their lived experience. Country music, rising from the same wellsprings as the blues and rock and roll, has likewise always saved room for its opposite impulses of downhome values and downhome revelry, even if at times that schizophrenia has been tricky for the artists or their fans to negotiate.

With the invention of Luke the Drifter, Hank Williams provided the ultimate metaphor for country music’s divided soul.

 *   *

As Luke the Drifter, Hank Williams sings and speaks religious songs and sermons you can, and possibly should, drink beer to: sadly, reverently, slowly. The Drifter recordings are the flipside to Hank’s gayer, good-timing numbers, songs like “Honky Tonk Blues” or “Settin’ the Woods on Fire”; but like so many of Hank’s secular classics—”I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Take These Chains from My Heart”—the Drifter recordings carry the heavy sorrow of human endeavor and failure, the same sense of loneliness, desperation, fallibility, and rootlessness—the same sadness, in short, that Hank made almost synonymous with country music. The Drifter sides feature broken hearts, broken homes, suicidal girls, dead mothers, and weary sinners, set against country bass lines and fiddle strains reminiscent of “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” An organ often underscores the midnight-radio-preacher feel of the monologues. Tunes that are not overtly religious are at least moralizing and typically heavy with sentimentality. All are spoken from a familiarity with “life’s other side,” born out of an intimacy with sin and sorrow. The Drifter himself is both an outcast and a preacher, outlaw and revelator, spinning his teary, beer-drenched philosophies from a barstool pulpit against the quiet hum of a country jukebox choir. As Luke the Drifter, Hank does not renounce the wilder side of life; he confesses it and tries, through tears, to understand it. He repents, but not with the finality which pretends that he will never do it again. The Drifter sermons are above all a grappling at understanding, at meaning, and at peace; they are a plea for both divine and human compassion.

Just a picture from life’s other side: someone has fell by the way
A life has gone out with the tide, that might have been happy some day
There’s a poor old mother at home; she’s watching and waiting alone
Just longing to hear from a loved one so dear; just a picture from life’s other side

Though he became a master of the genre, Hank did not invent the morally driven recitation record; such records were already part of a healthy country music tradition by the late ‘40s, T. Texas Tyler in particular making a name for himself in this field with his 1948 narration, “A Deck of Cards,” and later follow-ups. Hank wrote some of the Drifter songs himself, often in collaboration with songwriter/publisher/producer Fred Rose, but he drew from other sources as well for his narrations: “A Picture from Life’s Other Side,” for example, was a late nineteenth-century parlor song, recorded first in 1926 and several times since before it got to Hank and Luke. Williams had a liking for this type of song and pushed to get the records made, despite the initial reluctance of Rose and MGM.

When Hank’s recitations were first released as singles, the “Drifter” pseudonym had developed out of simple market considerations. Hank records were popular commodities, but

Hank’s name on a recitation record would cause jukebox operators to rebel. As biographer Colin Escott puts it: “Virtually all of the operators serviced bars, and the last thing they needed was for someone to punch up a Hank Williams record and get a sermon.” Hank records were meant to be played in honky-tonks; Luke records were meant to be played at home—by the so-called “take-home” crowd. Although the pseudonym didn’t, and wasn’t meant to, fool anybody about the owner of that too-familiar voice, it did allow listeners to know what they were getting into before they spun the record, and, if they liked, to keep the two spheres—honky-tonk and hearth—separate.

One metaphor country music offers for this classic separation is the brother duet, a tradition best embodied by the Louvin Brothers, Charlie and Ira. Originally pigeon-holed as a religious act, the Louvins also proved their mettle with their many secular successes—”When I Stop Dreaming,” “The Knoxville Girl,” “Cash on the Barrelhead”—and finally managed a delicate balancing act, moving back and forth throughout their career between the non-religious and the gospel. When the Louvins had first branched away from their gospel beginnings, they risked losing their fanbase and their label, but, on the strength of the performances, they kept both while gaining also a much wider audience. The brothers continued to break up their secular work with classic gospel singles and albums. Their 1958 LP Satan is Real remains one of the Louvins’ best-known works, in part because of its cover, which pictures the white-suited Louvins singing with outstretched arms from a rocky, burning Hell; a towering plywood cutout of a buck-toothed Satan, designed by Ira himself, looms behind the brothers. Though kitschy cover art has helped the album remain a solid seller into the 21st century, a quick listen to the music inside, or to any of the brothers’ religious cuts, testifies loudly to the fact that the Louvins could sing the hell out of a sacred song.

But the personal life of the Louvins—that of Ira, anyway—was considerably less pious than the religious tracks would suggest. Biographers tend to portray the brothers as polar opposites, the embodied halves, in fact, of country schizophrenia: Charlie, the virtuous teetotaler, vs. the alcoholic and sometimes-violent Ira, notorious for drunkenly smashing his own mandolins on-stage and on one occasion shot three times in the back by his third wife (he had attempted to strangle her with a telephone cord; both survived the incident). An eerie precursor to Jerry Lee Lewis, Ira was despite his unholy reputation nothing if not God-fearing, guilt-ridden by his avoidance of an internal call to preach and tormented by his inability to do right. Fed up with his brother’s transgressions, Charlie Louvin finally quit the duo in 1963 and launched a respectable, if forgettable, solo career; Ira, along with his fourth wife, died in a car wreck two years later.

Hank Williams, meanwhile, at once country music’s damnedest sinner and holiest saint, was Charlie and Ira Louvin bound into one man, a poet of goodness and a poet of wickedness also who, in Whitman’s terms, was genuinely propelled both by evil and by reform of evil—but he created the pseudonym to keep his two halves symbolically, however superficially, separated. “Here’s one by my half brother,” he sometimes announced before doing a Luke the Drifter tune over the radio, winking obviously at Nashville’s worst-kept secret and transforming himself with the offhand quip into a one-man brother act. The line between the two personas (the Williams Brothers, if Luke had been the type for last names) was drawn, but fuzzily.

For his doppelganger, Williams chose the image of the Drifter, the classic Western hero, grounded in the still-older tradition of the wandering, sermonizing champion of the New Testament. And, like that Original Drifter, he befriended in song and sermon the “social enemies” of his own time and place—the lipsticked lady of the night, the bad girl down the street, the shame-faced dying gambler, the broken-hearted living dead, and all the other “outcast[s] whom no one will save.” Even “The Funeral,” whose grotesque representation of African Americans comes off today as more than offensive, attempts to demonstrate the humanity and power of what the Drifter calls, oblivious to the condescension beneath his good intentions, “a crushed, undying race.” One of the Drifter’s favorite themes is “Judge not lest ye be judged,” and again and again he warns against casting stones, insisting that there is another side to the story. As anyone familiar with the old westerns knows, it is a fine line that separates the lawman from the outlaw, the “good guy” from the “bad guy,” and it is the arbitrary, flimsy, even reversible nature of this line with which the Drifter is interested.

The trick of the pseudonym, of the doubling of the self, was of course an old trick in popular music, indeed in many areas of our culture. In the 19th century, Soren Kierkegaard had written under, or through, a variety of pseudonyms, each of his various-named “writers” representing a different mode of belief; the use of the pseudonyms allowed Kierkegaard a distance from the often-contradictory views his writers expressed, allowing for dialogue rather than a single, overarching philosophical structure within his work. One of these fictitious authors, Anti-Climacus, was Kierkegaard’s ideal Christian, capable of voicing ideas which Kierkegaard—himself an ordinary sinner—would be unable to effectively express. Luke the Drifter serves a similar function, allowing for the expression of ideas which may have seemed at odds with the public persona of Hank as Hank, and what Williams creates through this character is indeed a kind of dialogue between his two selves. But, again, the line between Luke and Hank is blurry, and even Luke—unlike Anti-Climacus—is not a “perfect” Christian. If there is any one moral to the Luke the Drifter recordings, after all, it is that no one is perfect, that the notion of a perfect Christian itself is by definition a sham—that the best we can do is to recognize that we all are simply human, and that this shared humanity is, if we choose to recognize it, God’s greatest gift to us.

That Luke is a Drifter—like Hank, like the rest of us—is what makes his sermons work.

Hank’s Drifter is a descendent of the Biblical Job, who knows hardship, temptation, and tribulation, but retains faith in a mysterious God who must know what He’s doing, who believes with Jimmy Carter that “life is not fair” and that that knowledge makes its unfairness bearable. Neither Luke’s past nor his present are spotless, and even his future is uncertain; he is a wanderer, aimless, in the wilderness, kin to the protagonist of Charles Brown’s 1945 “Drifting Blues,” “drifting like a ship out on the sea” and crying, “I ain’t got nobody to care for me,” familiar too with the spiritual danger forewarned by Bill Monroe in his classic bluegrass exhortation, “Drifting Too Far From the Shore.” It is characteristic that in the opening line of “Men with Broken Hearts,” Luke the Drifter includes himself among the fallen: “You’ll meet many just like me,” he begins, “upon life’s busy street.”

With shoulders stooped and heads bowed low, and eyes that stare in defeat
Poor souls that live within the past, where sorrow plays all parts
For a living death is all that’s left, for men with broken hearts.

This is not the uplifting, bouncy gospel of, say, “I Saw the Light,” Williams’ best-known religious song (a song recorded under his own name, not Luke’s, and lacking the sermon that is hallmark of the Drifter recordings). But “Men with Broken Hearts” was a song Hank was proud of, his own composition, and it’s a typical expression of Luke the Drifter’s dreary brand of gospel. The narration continues, underscoring the typical judge-not theme with typical despondency:

You have no right to be the judge, to criticize and condemn
Just think, but for the grace of God, it would be you instead of him
One careless step, a thoughtless deed, and then the misery starts
And to those who weep, death comes cheap; these men with broken hearts

“Isn’t that the awfullest, morbidest song you ever heard in your life?” Hank once beamed after playing the tune for a Montgomery reporter. He played the song again, and this time remarked, more soberly: “Don’t know why I happened to of wrote that thing. Except somebody that’s fell, he’s the same man ain’t he? So how can he be such a nice guy when he’s got it and such a bad guy when he ain’t got nothin’?”

 *   *

The life of Hank Williams ended abruptly, his career at its peak. The scramble to make sense of that life—to explain it, rationalize it, deify it, or lay claim to it—began as soon as Hank’s body was cold, and for many that struggle to define Hank Williams has been waged on a moral scale: in the final judgment, the question arises, does Hank the sinner outweigh Hank the saint, or vice versa? Certainly, today, the sinner story gets more press. Hank’s own son, Hank, Jr. (who once upon a time, between 1969 and 1970, released three albums as Luke the Drifter, Jr.), has spent most of his career embracing the “rowdy” side of his father’s legacy, rationalizing in his daddy’s name that “If I get stoned and sing all night long, it’s a family tradition.” Indeed, this side has appealed to many of Hank’s country music inheritors, his extended, self-proclaimed “family.” A line from alt-country iconoclast Robby Fulks wryly nods to the image of Hank-as-demon, commenting on the birthday of Bloodshot Records, the Chicago home of “insurgent country,” that “somewhere down below, Ol’ Hank is sweetly smiling.” But other fans, less comfortable with the hell-raising or hell-bound legacy, have held up Hank’s religious records in defense of his wilder, destructive side; beneath the good times, the women, and the drinking, they can assure themselves, was the more profound faith of a Christian whose religion embraced above all else the ideals of Mother and of God. Luke the Drifter, they argue, pointing at “Beyond the Sunset” or “I Dreamed About Mama Last Night”: that was the real Hank Williams.

Of course, any view that ignores or underplays either side presents an inaccurate portrayal of Hank. Indeed, the very phrase “either side” already creates a false simplicity, as if the duality of the two repertoires and two names could after all represent two neatly divisible halves. Luke the Drifter may have worked as a useful marketing tool, and may help neatly personify country music’s warring impulses, but, as the Drifter himself insisted, virtue and vice are not so easily delineated.

Hank Williams is buried in Montgomery, Alabama, beneath an astro-turfed, tourist-frequented gravesite. Inscribed prominently on his tombstone are the words “Praise the Lord—I Saw the Light,” underscored with musical notes. The line is familiar to any Williams fan and is, on a tombstone, comforting—but it is somehow unsatisfying, too much of a disconnect, perhaps, or too narrow a view, and therefore rings false. (Minnie Pearl, after all, reported that towards the end of his life Hank refused to sing his beloved song with her: “There ain’t no light,” she recalls his bleak protest. “It’s all dark.”) More appropriate, if less familiar, might be a line from a Luke the Drifter record; the little girl praying in the Drifter’s “Help Me Understand” may sum up Hank’s, and our, spiritual strivings best. Bewildered by her parents’ senseless divorce, taught to feel shame at the mention of her father’s name, floundering for answers in a physical world and a spiritual world that are equally confusing, she is left only with a humble prayer:

Take me and keep me, and hold to my hand
Oh, Heavenly Father, help me understand

That, in the end, may be Hank’s—and Luke’s— most fitting, and most powerful, epitaph.