Hank Williams' Death Car and Hank's Last Ride

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Hank Williams, 1923-1953.

The Cadillac parked in front of Hank Williams' home.

Hank's last stop.

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Hank Williams' Death Car ~

Cadillac where country's first big star was found dead.

Montgomery, Alabama, By Nick Jackson

The death of Hank Williams, country music's first huge superstar, is still a bit of a mystery. The exact cause of death will never be known and what played out over Williams' final 48 hours is also foggy at best.

What we do know is that Williams died when he was just 29 years old. On December 30, 1952, Williams was driving around in his 1952 Cadillac with his stage suits, guitar, and other items he thought would be needed on a short tour through Ohio and West Virginia. Williams picked up Charles Carr, a college freshman Williams had hired to chauffeur him on the tour, and the two drove around Montgomery, Alabama.

During the tour, soon after the two drove across the West Virginia state line, Carr stopped at a gas station to fill the Cadillac's tank. At that time, Carr noticed that Williams was passed out in the back seat. When he checked on him, Williams' body was unresponsive and becoming rigid; he was dead. It's unclear what killed Williams, but we do know that he drank often on the tour and had asked his doctor to give him a shot of morphine to help with his back pain. Much has been made of these habits, but it's unclear if they contributed to his demise or not.

The Cadillac in which Williams' body was found, the car he used on that final tour, is now preserved at the Hank Williams Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. It is the centerpiece of the museum, which is also filled with memorabilia and portraits and more.

The Cadillac is on display at the Hank Williams Museum in Montgomery, Alabama.

Know Before You Go

Hank Williams' death car is located in downtown Montgomery on the east side of Commerce St. just north of Bibb St. It's three blocks west of city hall, or seven blocks east of I-65 exit 172.

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From:

Hank Williams Death Car ~

Field review by the editors.

Hank Williams was country music's first megastar. The prolific musician and performer wrote songs such as "Your Cheatin' Heart," drank too much whiskey, had family problems. He died in the back seat of his Cadillac while being driven to a gig on New Year's Day 1953. Heart failure and hard living did him in. He was only 29.

The Death Car -- its back seat off-limits to everyone -- is the centerpiece of the Hank Williams Museum in his home town of Montgomery. Manager Beth Petty is as protective of the exhibits as she is of Hank's legacy. Most of the displays, memorabilia, and portraits can never be photographed, per the wishes of those who loaned these items to the museum. "We have cameras everywhere," Beth told us. She meant surveillance cameras, ready to spot any smitten Hank fan trying to sneak a shot with a smartphone.

On February 8, 1999, the Death Car returned to Montgomery with the opening of the Hank Williams Museum, delighting its founder, Cecil Jackson, who as a teenager had rotated the tires on the vehicle a week before Hank's death. Cecil (who passed away in 2010) commissioned an oil painting of Hank's last departure from Montgomery -- his 17-year-old driver, the Cadillac, and Hank -- which hangs next to the Death Car.

Some friendly advice to visitors who may not grasp all the nuance of country music history: don't mention Hank and Elvis Presley in the same breath. Hank was being driven around in his eggshell blue Cadillac in 1952, long before Elvis purchased his first Pink Cadillac in early 1955. And years before The King, Hank had a pair of blue suede shoes (they're also on display). When we mentioned Elvis to Beth Petty, she quickly put things in perspective. Hank, she said, recorded 225 songs in his brief five year career, a pace that would have blown away Elvis had Hank not died so young. And although Elvis received songwriting credit on several of his hits, Beth was adamant that "Elvis never wrote any of his own music" (Colonel Tom Parker was known to demand that Elvis get cowriting credit in exchange for recording a song).

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From:

Skyline Drive-In: Hank's Last Stop ~

Field review by the editors.

Hilltop, West Virginia

About 6:30 AM on New Years Day, 1953, a Cadillac wheeled into the Skyline Drive-In after driving about two hours from Bluefield, at the Virginia state line. Its driver got out, stretched his legs, used the restroom. When he returned he noticed that his back seat passenger, country music superstar Hank Williams, was stiff and cold. He was, in fact, dead -- having died some time since he was last seen alive in Bristol, Virginia, probably from an accidental overdose of painkillers and alcohol.

Although no monument or memorial marks the site, the Skyline Drive-In still stands. Beneath the letters on its hand-painted sign, its owners have added, "Hank's Last Stop."

Skyline Drive-In: Hank's Last Stop ~

Address: 6329 Legends Hwy, Hilltop, WV

Directions: On the west side of Hwy 16/Legends Hwy, two miles south of Oak Hill. The Drive-In is a small, white, cinderblock building with its name on a sign above the door.

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From:

Hank Williams' last ride: Driver recalls lonesome end ~

At 17, Charles Carr was the only witness when a legend died, and myths were born.

By Jim Tharpe, July 2, 2013

Editor's Note: This article first appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Dec. 30, 2002.

Montgomery --- Just before sunrise on New Year's Day 50 years ago, a sleek baby-blue Cadillac roared up to the rural Oak Hill, W.Va., hospital in the cold Appalachian darkness. The driver was just 17, exhausted and scared. The passenger was barely 29 and dead.

At the wheel was Charles Carr, a college freshman on Christmas break from Auburn. The man in the back seat was singer-songwriter Hank Williams.

"I ran in and explained my situation to the two interns who were in the hospital, " said Carr, now a 67-year-old Montgomery businessman. "They came out and looked at Hank and said, 'He's dead.'

"I asked 'em, 'Can't you do something to revive him?' One of them looked at me and said, 'No, he's just dead.' "

It was a last ride that would help define American music and pop culture for decades to come.

Long before there was Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix or Kurt Cobain --- self-destructive stars who flamed out at their zenith --- there was Hiram "Hank" Williams, a hard-drinking, rough-around-the-edges Alabama country boy who wrote simple, heart-tugging songs about loneliness and then, still young, died alone in the back seat of his car.

The last hours of his troubled life long ago passed from reality to myth. Biographers have breathlessly speculated about what really happened. Officials have issued sketchy reports that only increased the mystery. Songwriters and playwrights still rhapsodize about it. An off-Broadway play, "Hank Williams: Lost Highway" is currently running in New York. A Web site dedicated to Williams estimates that more than 700 songs have been written about the singer, whose own recording career lasted only five years.

But only Carr knows the truth about those final hours. For years, he avoided most requests for interviews. But in recent years, he has begun to talk, trying to set the record straight.

He thinks Williams died --- the official cause was heart failure --- somewhere between Bristol, Tenn., and Oak Hill on the way to a New Year's Day 1953 show in Canton, Ohio.

"I'm certainly not an authority on Hank Williams," said Carr. "But I'm the only authority on Hank Williams' death."

Some biographies have speculated that Williams died at a Knoxville hotel and that porters unwittingly placed his corpse in his car for the trip north. Still others have him dying on the road with an unfinished song in his hands, bedroom slippers on his feet and a pint of vodka in his coat pocket.

All bunk, retorts Carr, who maintains Williams was very much alive and wearing white cowboy boots, a stylish blue overcoat and a white fedora when he left Knoxville at 10:45 p.m. New Year's Eve en route to a concert 500 snowy miles north.

"The story seems to get better as every year goes by," said Carr. "But Hank's life doesn't need to have anything added to it. It was sensational enough as it was."

Charles Carr as a grown man.

But by the time Carr got behind the wheel of Williams' ragtop Cadillac on Dec. 30, 1952, the troubadour's life was in a full-tilt meltdown. He was divorced from his first wife, Audrey. Though remarried, he was staying at his mother's downtown Montgomery boardinghouse, having been demoted from the Grand Ole Opry to the Louisiana Hayride, the farm team of country music. He was taking morphine shots for constant back pain after major surgery the year before (he suffered from spina bifida), ingesting a dangerous sedative, chloral hydrate, to sleep and playing the same backwater clubs he'd escaped just a few years earlier.

Williams knew Carr's father, who ran a Montgomery taxi service, and the teenager was asked to drive an obviously ailing Williams to gigs in Charleston, W.Va., and Canton, Ohio, major concert dates that Williams hoped would be the start of a comeback.

"Dad was a friend of Hank's and tried to look out after him in the tough times, " Carr said. "He was there talking with dad and Hank asked me if I'd be interested in making the trip."

It was a journey that seemed doomed from the start.

By the time Carr helped Williams load his guitars and stage suits into the car trunk, the weather across much of the South was deteriorating. Rain was turning to ice and snow.

Hank Williams with his prized Cadillac.

Carr recalls the 6'2" Williams was sick and frail at the time, weighing perhaps 130 pounds, but disputes reports that the singer, long a heavy drinker, was guzzling booze most of the trip.

"He had a very low tolerance for alcohol at that point, " Carr said. "We bought a six-pack of Falstaff [beer] in Montgomery before we left, and there were several cans left when he died."

A rudimentary autopsy found Williams had traces of alcohol in his blood when he died, but it found no drugs, although it's unclear if pathologists tested for them.

Carr remembers Williams being in good spirits as the trip began. They told jokes, sang songs and traded tales as they navigated the two-lane highways of the pre-interstate South.

"Hank's song 'Jambalaya' was just out on the radio and he asked me what I thought of it, " Carr recalled. "I told him I didn't care for it, that it didn't make a bit of sense to me. Hank laughed and said, 'You son of a bitch, you just understand the French like I do.'

"We were just a couple of young guys on a car trip having fun."

They spent the night at a hotel in Birmingham and got an early start on New Year's Eve as the weather continued to worsen. Carr remembers Williams buying a pint of bonded bourbon in Fort Payne, Ala. He also made one waiter very happy.

Final hours ~

It was snowing by the time they reached Chattanooga, and Williams decided to try to catch a flight from Knoxville to make the Charleston show on time. The flight took off at 3:30 p.m., but was turned back due to the bad weather, so they found themselves stuck in Knoxville for the night. The Charleston show was a bust, but they still hoped to make Canton.

Carr got them a room at the 17-story Andrew Johnson Hotel and they checked in about 7 p.m. to wait out the storm.

"We talked a while and ordered dinner up in the room, " Carr said. "As I remember, Hank didn't eat much of anything. He had the hiccups real bad."

Carr called a doctor, who came and gave Williams two injections --- later determined to be morphine mixed with vitamin B12.

"He calmed down after that, but looking back, maybe the hiccups or the indigestion could have been the beginning of a coronary, " Carr said.

Williams dozed off fully clothed, but about 10:30 p.m., Carr got a call from the concert promoter telling him they had to leave right away and drive through the night to make the Canton show.

"There was some kind of penalty clause in his contract . . . so we had to be there for the New Year's Day concert or else, " Carr said.

"When we left the room, they sent a wheelchair, " Carr said. "They rolled him down to the car and Hank got in on his own. I clearly remember that."

Carr said there was little traffic as they pulled out of Knoxville.

"What traffic you did see was moving at a slow pace because the roads were so bad, " Carr said. "We were trying to push it but we didn't have much luck."

Carr got a ticket about an hour later in Blaine, Tenn., when he almost ran into a patrolman while trying to pass another car. He paid a fine and got back behind the wheel with Williams asleep in the back. It was after midnight by this time --- already New Year's Day --- and Carr had been behind the wheel since early that morning.

The teenager stopped in a small town to gas up and get a bite to eat. Carr said it could have been Bristol, Tenn., about 120 miles northeast of Knoxville, or it could have been Bluefield, a town in West Virginia. It was dark and he was bone-tired in unfamiliar territory. He specifically remembers a service station on one side of the highway and a diner and a cab stand on the other. He pulled in to gas up.

"I remember Hank got out to stretch his legs and I asked him if he wanted a sandwich or something, " Carr said. "And he said, 'No, I just want to get some sleep.'

"I don't know if that's the last thing he said. But it's the last thing I remember him telling me."

At the cab stand, Carr picked up a relief driver who helped him drive for a few hours before getting out somewhere in rural West Virginia.

Carr drove on, but became increasingly concerned about the eerie silence in the back seat. He pulled off the road to check on Williams, who was lying with his head toward the passenger seat and had his left hand across his chest.

"He had his blue overcoat on and had a blanket over him that had fallen off, " Carr said. "I reached back to put the blanket back over him and I felt a little unnatural resistance from his arm."

Carr pulled into the next service station he saw and told the owner he needed to get to a hospital fast. The man pointed the way, and Carr remembers seeing a road sign for Oak Hill, six miles away.

Revisiting the scene ~

On a bright December day a few weeks ago, Carr strolled through the Hank Williams Museum in downtown Montgomery. He sat for a few minutes in the driver's seat of the Cadillac he drove that night.

At the Hank Williams Museum, Charles got the chance to sit in the driver's seat of Hank's Cadillac many decades after he had sat there on that final trip.

Hank Williams used this shoeshine box to earn money when he was a kid.

The overcoat that Williams was wearing is in a glass case nearby, as is one of his pearl-handled pistols and the shoeshine kit he used as a boy to help support his family.

Carr moved on after that long-ago brush with fame. He went back to Auburn University, got a degree, served in the military, got married, had kids and became a successful businessman. He now has a home in Montgomery and a weekend lake house.

He has a framed poster for the concert that he and Williams never got to, and he keeps a pair of cowhide gloves the singer gave him on that final trip.

He'll attend a New Year's Day memorial service for Williams at his much-visited grave in Montgomery's Oakwood Cemetery annex. A few surviving members of Williams' "Drifting Cowboys" band will be there as well, if they are able to make it. They are old men now, some in their 80s.

"But I'm not going to make a day of it, " Carr said. "I just want to honor Hank."

A visitor observes that Carr has survived the years about as well as the old Cadillac, which has been immaculately restored. Carr laughs at the suggestion.

"No, no, " he said. "I'm an old man. But Hank Williams never had to worry about that. He'll always be young to me."

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From:

Charles Carr Dies at 79. Was Hank Williams’ Driver The Night Hank Died! ~

Charles Carr was just a young Auburn University student when legendary country singer Hank Williams hired him to chauffeur him to two concerts in the winter of 1952. Carr drove through horrific blizzard conditions. He was driving Williams' classic 1952 powder blue Cadillac.

Somewhere along the ride Carr discovered Hank Williams dead in the back seat. Although there has been much controversy over the exact cause of death of the superstar, young Carr was never implicated in foul play of any kind. Hank Williams was known to abuse alcohol and medications.

Carr with Williams' widow.

Hank Williams was pronounced dead on January 1, 1953. Carr, the young man behind the wheel on the "Death Ride of Hank Williams," passed away on Monday, July 1, 2013 at the age of 79. The photo above, one of the only known photos of the young student from 1952, shows him consoling Hank Williams' widow.

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From:

BOB JOHNSON, Associated Press

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Charles Carr, who was just a college freshman when he drove country music legend Hank Williams on his final, lonesome journey six decades ago, has died.

The director of the Hank Williams Museum in Montgomery, Beth Petty, said Carr, a retired investor, died Monday after a brief illness. He was 79.

Carr's son, Charles Lands Carr, said his father didn't talk much about being Williams' driver on that final trip, until late in his life.

Williams died at the age of 29 just before or on Jan. 1, 1953. He died during the night in the back of his 1952 blue Cadillac near Bluefield, W.Va., while he and Carr were on their way to a show in Canton, Ohio.

According to The Tennessean newspaper, which examined Williams' death in 2003, the country singer had taken a shot of morphine to ease his back pain on Dec. 30 and was carrying chloral hydrate, a sleep aid. Williams consumed alcohol the following day at a Knoxville, Tenn., hotel, where he also summoned a doctor and received two more morphine shots along with some vitamin B12, the newspaper reported.

Carr told The Tennessean that he spoke to Williams on a couple of occasions after they set off again, and that when they were pulled over by a police officer, Williams was sleeping. At some point in the drive, Carr learned that Williams had died and took him to a hospital.

Heart failure was listed as the cause of death.

"I called my dad and told him what happened, and then Hank's mother called me at the hospital," Carr told the newspaper. "One of the parting things she said was: 'Don't let anything happen to the car.'"

The Cadillac is on display in the Hank Williams Museum in Montgomery.

Carr began to speak more about Williams' last ride after he became involved with the museum.

"When he was younger he didn't have an interest in being defined by that moment in his life," Lands Carr said. In later years, Lands Carr said the museum "embraced" his father, who became more comfortable talking about that trip with Williams.

"If they invited him, he made a point of being there," Lands Carr said of the museum.

Petty described Carr as a friend of the Hank Williams museum and as a man who "was always kind to fans of Hank." Petty said Carr never tried to profit from the fact that he was driving the country music singer on that last trip.

Carr was a friend of the Williams' family when the country singer asked Carr to drive him from Montgomery to a show in Charleston, W.Va., on Dec. 31, and a New Year's Day concert in Canton, Ohio. They made it to Knoxville and attempted to fly to Charleston, but had to return to Knoxville because of bad weather, according to the Tennessean account. That's when they set out by car for Canton.

Carr's father owned a Montgomery cab company at the time.

"My father drove for them from time to time," Lands Carr said.

A funeral service for Carr will be at 3 p.m. Saturday at Leak Memory Chapel in Montgomery, with the burial following in Greenwood Cemetery. Visitation will be from 1 to 3 p.m. at Leak Memory Chapel.

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Hank with wife, Audrey.

Audrey Mae Williams.

Hank with his wife and children.

Hank with his son.

Hank and Audrey Williams performed together.

The Cadillac parked in front of Hank Williams' home.

Hank's wife and son with the Cadillac at home.

Hank in the driver's seat with his family in front of their home.

The Cadillac today.

The car is now on display at the Hank Williams Museum.

Hank Williams Jr. with the car that his father died in.

Hank's death certificate.

Hank with Audrey and his band members.

Hank's body in casket at his mother's boarding house.

The coffin containing the body of country singer Hank Williams is taken from his Mother's boarding house on South Perry Street to his funeral service on January 4, 1953 in Montgomery, Alabama.