From Azaleas to Zydeco: My 4,600-Mile Journey through the South

Hank, Biscuits, and Green Roofs

Hank, Biscuits, and Green Roofs Montgomery is the capital of the Black Belt, Alabama’s cottongrowing area. In his 1901 autobiography Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington wrote of the Black Belt: The term was first used to designate a part of the country which was distinguished by the colour of the soil. The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil was, of course, the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable, and consequently , they were taken there in the largest numbers. Later and especially since the war, the term seems to be used wholly in a political sense, that is, to designate the counties where the black people outnumber the white. The city’s history centers largely on this racial divide. It was the first capital of the Confederate States of America. Later it became a central theater in the battle for African-American civil rights, with the Montgomery Bus Boycott and as the terminus of the Selma-toMontgomery freedom marches. Montgomery is also the capital of Alabama and a small-sized southern city very much like Little Rock and Jackson. Montgomery is big enough to have some art, theater, and other niceties of larger cities. But it’s still small enough that people on the street look at passersby to see if they might know them. It’s also friendly enough that they smile and acknowledge strangers. 315 I arrived in Montgomery on the day of Michael Jackson’s memorial service. Throughout the day, cable channel commentators breathlessly described every aspect of the fallen King of Pop’s life. They speculated on whether he had overdosed, who had given him the injection, and the overall strangeness of his life. The news networks later showed crowds gathering all over the world to pay tribute to Jackson. Montgomery is the hometown of Hank Williams, the great country and western singer. My hotel was only two doors down from the Hank Williams Museum. The parallels between these two musicians are eerie. One of Hank’s biographers, Paul Hemphill, describes him in Lovesick Blues: Hank Williams had come to us from out of nowhere—sprouting like a wild dandelion in the dank forests of south Alabama, some primordial beast who had been let loose on the land, a specimen heretofore undiscovered —and by this summer of ’49 nobody seemed to know exactly what to make of him. Only two months after his debut on the Opry with “Lovesick Blues,” a startling performance raucously received at old Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville,…he had suddenly become the best of the best in the best of all times. Born sickly, half-educated, an alcoholic by his teen years, untutored musically, unlucky in love at every turn, he had somehow emerged as a tortured genius, a raw poet, the “hillbilly Shakespeare,” a Vincent van Gogh of the southern outback. The more traumatic his personal life got, the better he became as a songwriter. To some, it was like looking at a bad wreck. If he wasn’t America’s greatest songwriter then certainly he was its most enigmatic. Three and a half years later, he was dead. On January 1, 1953, Williams was the King of Country music, whose personal life could only be described as an unholy mess—divorce, alcohol, drugs, paternity issues. Hank was due to play in Canton, Ohio, but he was unable to fly because of the weather. He hired a driver to take him and his Cadillac from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Ohio. Before leaving, Hank received a shot of vitamin B-12 and morphine to perk him up. Once on the road, he went to sleep. When his driver tried to wake him somewhere in Ohio, Hank was unresponsive. He rushed Hank to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. He was twenty-nine years old. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Cecil Jackson, founder of the Hank Williams Memorial Foundation, contended in an interview that 316 the star died of a heart attack in the Cadillac that night. “I feel that Hank was a 75-year-old man at age 29,” Jackson said. “He was wore out.” Three days after Williams’ death, a memorial service was held at the Municipal Coliseum in Montgomery. The coliseum’s capacity was 2,500. Ten times that number showed up. Twenty thousand stood outside and listened to the service over loudspeakers. Tourists still...