Hank Williams story reminds me I’ve always wanted to be a star

By David McElroy · February 23, 2020

Hank Williams is an unlikely choice as a potential role model for me.

He was a singer and songwriter, but I’ve never had the least bit of musical talent. He was closely identified with country music, which I grew up hating. He was a hard-drinking man who was closely identified with the honky-tonks that I’ve always found distasteful.

I grew up hearing about Williams and his music, though. My father used to sing some of Williams’ old songs and I was struck by how emotional and authentic they sounded. (Williams had been popular when my father was in high school and college.) That didn’t seem like country music to me. It just seemed like the music of loneliness and heartbreak and redemption.

I haven’t given much thought to Williams and his music over the years, but I’ve been watching the Ken Burns documentary “Country Music” in the last few days. As I’ve come to understand more about this Alabama musician who’s been called the Hillbilly Shakespeare, it stirred something in my soul that I rarely allow myself to look at anymore.

And I couldn’t help admitting — quietly, where no one could hear — that I still want to be a star.

Hank Williams was raised by his mother after his father was sent to a veterans home to live because of issues related to shell-shock that he suffered fighting in World War I. They moved around south Alabama and ended up in Montgomery, where he would spend most of his short life.

Williams learned music from a black street musician, but he never had formal training. That didn’t stop him from getting early music gigs in local clubs and on Montgomery’s WSFA radio. His mother was his manager, but his early drinking problems made it unlikely that he would ever amount to anything.

Then he met Audrey Sheppard, a young woman who had a daughter and was still married when she met Williams. But they quickly became a couple and they married as soon as she could get a divorce. At first, they worked menial jobs — including a stint at a ship yard on the Alabama Gulf Coast — but Audrey became his manager and she drove him to make use of his dormant talent.

With Hank’s stage presence and ability to connect with audiences through deeply meaningful music — combined with Audrey’s ambition and guidance — Williams became a star, first for a radio station in Shreveport, La., and then for the biggest country music stage of them all — the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.

For awhile, Williams stayed away from alcohol, but he ended up under its influence again. He and Audrey split after eight years, but he was a huge star by then. He was on his way to a concert date in Ohio one cold New Year’s Day when he died in the back seat of his car — he had a driver — under the heavy influence of alcohol and prescription drugs.

I have no desire to sing and I have no talent for writing songs. There aren’t that many things about Williams’ life which look like my own. But there’s something about his need for stardom — and his desire to connect to people emotionally through the confessional art he made — which somehow feel familiar to me.

When I was a child, I wanted to be a star in the worst possible way. At different times, I saw myself as a courtroom lawyer, a politician, an actor and probably a dozen other roles. But in every role I imagined for myself, I was a star. I wasn’t just a lawyer or actor or politician. I was a renowned star.

When I was a teen-ager, I used to perform on stage from time to time. I had some acting roles at church, but I mostly found myself doing stage oratory. I can still quote much of Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” speech, which I performed at a volume that could wake the dead. I won a regional speech contest in high school and I constantly seemed to find ways to be on stage.

I liked being a star. I liked people treating me as though I had special talent.

Over the years, I’ve suppressed most of that. I’m not quite sure why. I guess it seemed as though those were the fantasy dreams of youth — and I needed to be practical. But there are times — even now — when I know I still want to be a star in some way.

It’s mostly when the night is dark and quiet, in the wee hours of the morning. When there’s no one around to disturb the silence — that’s the time when I have the most clear picture of all that I want in the world and of all that I still want to be.

In the light of day and with other people all around, it’s easy for me to get sidetracked with either fears or with the things others tell me I have to be.

But when everything else is cleared away and there seems to be so little to fear, I feel that I can still do anything I need to do — that I can still be the star of my own little personal show — and just have faith that some people want what I need to make, even if they don’t know it until I find a way to give it to them.

There’s still something in me that wants to be a star. I try to suppress it. I try to deny it. But it’s still there.

I want to be a star.

I don’t know how to manage it, but I know I can still do great things — things that people will pay for and which they will love — in a way that will make the teen-age version of me beam with pride one day.

I know that’s still possible, even if I don’t know how to get there.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts