I love a great song, man. Oh yeah.
—Larry Brown
I’d rather be in a deep, dark grave
And know that my poor soul was saved
Than to live in this world in a house of gold
—Hank Williams
I never met Chip.
“Oh, you’ve got to meet Chip!” The beaming young woman behind the check-in desk wears straight blonde hair and wire-rim glasses. “He was a good friend of his. He went fishing with him right before he died, I think. He’ll be excited that you’re here. I think he’s working the third-floor bar tonight.” My wife and I are in Oxford, Mississippi, where I’ve tracked down the late fiction writer Larry Brown’s unfinished, unpublished screenplay of the life of Hank Williams, something that I hadn’t known existed until I came across a casual mention of it in an interview. I’ve driven 650 miles to read the screenplay.
. . .
“I’ve always been a big fan. We always had Hank Williams records in our house when I was a kid. I can remember my daddy singing ‘My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It.’”
That’s Larry Brown talking, near the end of his life. He died of a heart attack on Thanksgiving Day in 2004 at his home in the Mississippi community of Yocona, a dozen or so miles southeast of Oxford. He was fifty-three years old, husband to Mary Annie and father to sons Billy Ray and Shane and daughter LeAnne. He’d smoked heavily for decades. He’d battled the bottle for much of his adult life, climbing on and off the wagon, enduring benders, more than once having been admitted to the hospital suffering variously from alcohol poisoning, stomach pains, and high blood pressure. He once overturned his truck on a rural road. He was always urging “just one more” to himself or his buddies at the bar, some of whom were his dear friends, some of whom were strangers, the latter usually young fans besotted with his art and his reputation.
Brown published nine books in his lifetime: two collections of stories—Facing the Music (1988) and Big Bad Love (1990); five novels— Dirty Work (1989), Joe (1991), Father and Son (1996), Fay (2000), and The Rabbit Factory (2001); and two essay collections—On Fire (1994) and Billy Ray’s Farm: Essays from a Place Called Tula (2001); his sprawling, unfinished novel A Miracle of Catfish appeared three years after his death with posthumous edits by his longtime editor Shannon Ravenel and Brown’s own speculative notes as to his characters’ and story’s denouement. He wrote with deep affection and sympathy about marginalized characters, exclusively Southern, mostly blue-collar, the men and women you see leaving Wal-Mart or a low-rent liquor store or a 7-Eleven, who look the worse for wear, generally scrubby, gnawed by shitty decisions and the clock. He invested in these struggling, often overlooked adults and their innocent, wayward children, and provided them with rich interior lives, the fecund north Mississippi landscape a kind of rough corollary to human wild and animal instinct. I’ve loved Brown’s work ever since I found Big Bad Love in a library sale more than a dozen years ago. His spare, elemental naturalism is at once pitiless and compassionate. Brown loves his characters, many of whom live in borderline poverty under low ceilings of possibility, who collide with the worst aspects of themselves in a world that’s indifferent to their suffering yet which, in its beauty, provides those characters respite and restoration.
Famously, Brown was a self-taught writer. Following a stint in the Marines during the Vietnam War, he worked various jobs, including laboring at a stove company, a convenience store, and Sears, sacking groceries, mending fences, cleaning carpets, installing chainlink fences, hauling hay, deadening timber, constructing homes. In 1977 he joined the Oxford Fire Department, and during his seventeen years there, Brown, a lifelong reader, began writing fiction. He’d taken one creative writing class at the University of Mississippi, with novelist Ellen Douglas, but his long and solitary apprenticeship mostly involved studious, affectionate reading of Cormac McCarthy, William Faulkner, Harry Crews, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, and many others, and the unwavering labor of writing dozens of lousy stories and several poor novels, one of which he, despairing yet grimly sensible, tossed into a fire in his backyard. At the fire department on quiet evenings, and at home at the kitchen counter while his family slept, Brown sat at his wife’s electric typewriter and wrote for hours and hours, forging a realistic outlook on the fates of his rural characters, honing in on a style of simple lyric declaration of personal chaos and the land’s gorgeousness, and patient, sympathetic characterization.
He published his first story in 1982 in Easyriders magazine; over the next several years he wrote steadily, published haltingly, and fought raging fires at double-wide trailers and homes and campus buildings, witnessing harrowing images of ruin and destruction. He achieved success with his first collection of stories and landed at Algonquin Books under the enthusiastic and sympathetic championing of editor Shannon Ravenel. He wrote. He smoked. He drank and climbed into his pickup truck during many dusks, a cooler of iced-down Budweisers in the back and maybe a fifth of peppermint schnapps on the seat next to him, and he drove to the Oxford bars or aimlessly through the gloam of northern Mississippi on county routes 234, 445, 434, 331...Mindful of his speed, indulging the soundtrack of darkening forests and cotton fields, the bright eyes of the deer and wild dogs appraising him from the edges of the woods, he considered his own demons, sang along to cassettes of country and blues, and drank.
At the age of twenty-nine, Larry Brown started writing fiction in earnest. At the age of twenty-nine, Hank Williams drank himself to death.
Williams died in the backseat of a car sometime on New Year’s Day in 1953, somewhere between Nashville, Tennessee, and Oak Hill, West Virginia. His death surprised no one who was close to him. His drinking and prescription drug abuse had increased sharply during the final two years of his life, pacing the awful chronic pain in his back and the woes of his vexed relationships with his first wife, Audrey, and second, Billie Jean. His misery was as much public opera as private tragedy: his reputation as an alcoholic preceded him at every gig, from one-room schoolhouse to auditorium, and in August of 1952 he was kicked out of the storied Grand Ole Opry for habitual drunkenness. His no-shows escalated; when he did arrive for a gig late in his career, he’d often have to be carried onstage and propped up to perform.
His suffering was at odds with his success: during his brief six-year recording career Williams scored twenty-two Top 10 Billboard Country hits, all of them released on MGM Records, so many of them standard-bearers for the genre and timeless upon hearing that they seemed to have been plucked from ancient air, as if Hank was tuned to something eternal above the rest of our heads, even when he was cutting versions of other artists’ songs. “Move It On Over,” “Honky Tonkin’,” “I Saw the Light,” “A Mansion on the Hill,” “Lovesick Blues,” “Moanin’ the Blues,” “Hey Good Lookin’,” “(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle,” “Jambalaya (On the Bayou),” “Settin’ the Woods on Fire,” “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive,” “Lost Highway,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” “You Win Again”: a jukebox of stark, unambiguous standards supported by the sturdy and unadorned backing of the Drifting Cowboys, sung by a man from a small town in south-central Alabama. Hank Williams’s legacy was assured early.
Before he was in the ground he was myth, and his posthumous career was marked by reverence and capitalism. Much like Elvis Presley’s, Williams’s records have been reissued countless times in countless editions since his death, the early, cash-in releases marred by haphazard packaging and the application of saccharine strings and full backing bands, the more recent releases aided by scrupulous liner notes and respectful attention paid to the recording masters. Arguably, Hank Williams is the greatest country singer-songwriter who ever lived; among even casual fans his songs are biblical in stature, and his early death only underscored the darkness, pain, and complexity behind the seeming simplicity of those songs, giving them additional gravitas, though they hardly needed it. “We have relied on Hank Williams,” writer Lee Smith contends, to tell us “who we are and how we feel and what we hope for.” There’s nobody more gifted than Hank, she feels, “at capturing those essential elements of the human spirit: the anguish of lost love, the frustrations of love gone wrong, the hell of loneliness, the complexity of our feelings, the fragility of our relationships, our fear of death and belief in life hereafter.”
Larry Brown was an ardent fan of country music and, thus, of Hank—lay a Hank song over a Brown story or novel and the correspondences reveal a thematic kinship. In stark, graphic ways, both men wrote about heartbreak, excesses, and the wearying struggle to live right. In a 1997 lecture at the Lafayette County–Oxford Library, Brown spoke about the head-lifting moments that books had always vouchsafed him, of “their ability to transport you to other times and other places through a journey of the mind,” adding, “I’ve been able to share in these adventures through the power of the written word, and through the dedication of men and women who sit down at a typewriter, or a computer screen, or even a pad of paper and a pencil to try and render a piece of history or a shared experience in what it is to be human.” Brown could well have been talking about the songs of Hank Williams.
. . .
“I knew Larry when I lived in Oxford during the 1990s. I didn’t know him real well, but we always spoke when we ran into each other, and he’d seen me play, so we usually talked about music.” This is Tim Lee, a Knoxville, Tennessee–based musician raised in Mississippi who, with Bobby Sutliff, formed and played in the jangly roots-pop band the Windbreakers in the 1980s and early 1990s, before embarking on a solo career. “One of the first times I ran into him after we met, he was sitting in the cab of his little truck in a parking lot across from the Hoka Theater, listening to a cassette. I asked him what he was doing, and he started telling me about this band he was listening to. The way he talked about them and the times he saw them play, you could just tell this guy loved music. He felt it in a way not many people do.” Lee adds: “Larry was just so fascinated by music, musicians, and especially songs. I loved listening to him talk about songs. The look on his face would change, as if he was in complete awe of the craft of songwriting. So it’s only natural that he would gravitate toward the music of Williams. It was deceptively simple and straightforward, much like Larry’s writing.”
Lee happened to have been visiting in Mississippi for Thanksgiving when Brown died. He drove up to Oxford to attend the visitation. “Larry’s pals had put together a soundtrack CD that the funeral home piped in that included a lot of Larry’s favorites: Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, Dylan, John Prine,” he recalls. “His beloved Gibson acoustic guitar sat on a stand next to his coffin.” Driving home the next day, Lee was inspired to produce a compilation of songs in honor of Brown’s work, “because not only was Larry a big music fan, musicians were big fans of his. His was a mutual admiration society that included dozens of great players, singers, and songwriters.” Lee envisioned the tribute album as “a mix tape of sorts, the type of thing that Larry would have enjoyed listening to as he drove his little truck into the ‘gloam’ with a cooler full of beer and an ass pocket of something that burns a little bit on the way down.” Just One More: A Musical Tribute to Larry Brown was released on Bloodshot Records in 2007, featuring Lee, Bo Ramsey, Alejandro Escovedo, Robert Earl Keen, Jr., Ben Weaver, Vic Chesnutt, North Mississippi Allstars, Jim Dickinson and others, some of whom were friends of Brown’s, some who knew him only through the characters he brought to life on his pages. “Larry absolutely loved music,” Brown’s wife Mary Annie commented at the album’s release. “I think he wished sometimes that he had the talent to do music for a living. He always played his guitar every night. If he had to skip playing, he would always say he felt like the day was wasted.”
North Carolinian filmmaker Gary Hawkins directed the documentary The Rough South of Larry Brown and was a close friend of Brown’s and his family, and he often played guitar with Brown when he’d visit Oxford, happy to have discovered another left-handed player who strung his guitar correctly. “After a few visits, Larry took to setting up the ideal playing conditions, just to be hospitable,” Hawkins remembers. “We played music, and played other folks’ music, and talked music, and went to see bands at Proud Larry’s and other spots in Oxford. It seemed like everything sorta revolved around music one way or another.” He concurs with Mary Annie about her husband’s aspirations: “Sometimes, the thing you really want to be is not the thing you’re good at, so you’re stuck in an in-between place, and forced to choose, to sacrifice, and you feel for life that you’ve ignored something important, even if it was never there for you,” he told me. “You’re stuck with your aptitude, which isn’t necessarily your passion. Maybe that’s somewhat true of Larry, who wanted to sing and play but had no real gift for music. He was amazed by music, by its power, but he couldn’t produce it. Not the way he could produce words.”
Lee recalls seeing Brown one night at the bar at the Harvest Café and Bakery in Oxford, where Lee and some friends often played on Tuesday nights. Brown had seen the Oxford alt-country band Blue Mountain recently, “and he instantly loved them. So he asked me to introduce him to them, which I did. I was always struck by the fact that, here was this rising author with a particularly high profile around town, who was humble enough not to feel like he could walk up to this young band and say, ‘Hi, I’m Larry Brown.’ He wanted a secondary introduction.
“That impressed me, and it showed his deep respect for musicians.”
. . .
“You ask what makes our kind of music successful. I’ll tell you. It can be explained in just one word: sincerity. When a hillbilly sings a crazy song, he feels crazy. When he sings, ‘I Laid My Mother Away,’ he sees her a-laying right there in the coffin. He sings more sincere than most entertainers, because the hillbilly was raised tougher than most entertainers. You got to know a lot about hard work. You got to have smelt a lot of mule manure before you can sing like a hillbilly. The people who has been raised something like the way the hillbilly has, knows what he is singing about and appreciates it. For what he is singing, is the hopes, and prayers, and dreams and experiences of what some call the ‘common people.’ I call them the ‘best people,’ because they are the ones that the world is made up most of. They’re really the ones who make things tick, wherever they are in this country, or in other country.... There ain’t nothing at all queer about them Europeans liking our kind of singing. It’s liable to teach them more about what everyday Americans are really like than anything else.” Hank Williams, 1953.
Sometime near the end of his life, Brown had a business card printed up that he handed out to friends and associates. Above his address and phone number it read:
LARRY BROWN
HUMAN BEING
. . .
. . .
“Are you Chip?” I ask the well-dressed bartender at The Coop, the candlelit bar on the fourth floor of our hotel. He smiles. “I am not Chip, no. I think he’s around, though, hold on.”
With that he leaves his post behind the bar and makes a quick stroll out onto the patio deck and back. “Nope, not here, thought he was. Sorry. Pretty sure he’s working at City Grocery tomorrow night, that’s where he usually is.” We console ourselves by taking our beers outside on the patio and enjoying a modestly sweet view of Oxford Square. The mid-March evening is cool and pleasant, and above yellow lights and darkened storefronts and a few people in shirtsleeves strolling the sidewalks, with the Confederate flag flying across the street in front of a municipal building, we drink.
“Are you Chip?” I ask the next night, doubtfully, to a young, clean-cut guy behind the upstairs bar at City Grocery. “Uh, nope, I’m not.” I’m starting to wonder. We console ourselves by retiring to a small table against the wall, sipping one of the most wonderful bourbons we’d sipped in ages, a locally brewed spirit. Moments later, after pausing to admire Lamar Sorrento’s fabulous primitivist paintings of Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash, and Hank Williams, we gaze out the large front window onto the dusky Square, and I wonder about Chip.
Earlier that day, we’d eaten lunch at Ajax Diner, enjoying catfish and fries, red beans and rice, and steamed broccoli and coleslaw, plus a couple of Larry Brown Ales, a special beer made by Yalobusha Brewing Company in Water Valley, Mississippi, in honor of Oxford’s late hero. I’d heard that Brown had often taken his young family to Ajax, that their regular table was located near the back, on the right, against the wall. That section of the restaurant was closed when we were there, but the waitress kindly allowed me to search for the table. I knew I’d found the table when I spotted above it a poster for the film adaptation of Big Bad Love, released in 2001. As I composed a photo of the poster with my phone, a different waitress paused to let me take the snap. “Are you a fan?” she asked me. I told her yes, and why I was in town. She gazed toward the empty table and gushed, “Oh, they came in here all the time!” I thanked her and let her go back to work. I looked at the little black-table red-seat booth, smiled, and conjured a woman, a man, three kids.
“Have you seen Chip yet?” the woman behind the desk asks us hopefully when we return. We shrug apologetically.
. . .
A few months earlier, Jean W. Cash, who wrote Larry Brown: A Writer’s Life, told me in an e-mail that Larry Brown’s son Shane was blogging. I’d been trying to track him down without luck, and I was grateful for her tip. I’d wanted to ask Shane if I could arrange to read and write about his father’s unfinished screenplay.
By way of unseen machinations in faraway Hollywood, Brown had found himself with an opportunity that he’d never considered. One afternoon in the early 2000s, film producer Ben Myron (Cheaper By The Dozen, One False Move) opened his mailbox to find Brown’s novel Joe; a friend in the music business had gifted Myron with a subscription to a monthly Southern-themed book club, which included Brown’s fourth book. “That’s how I first came across Larry,” Myron told me. He read the novel, and thoroughly loved it. His friend and associate, the actor, director, and musician Billy Bob Thornton, had been casting around for film ideas. “I gave that to Billy Bob and he thought, Yeah, this guy’s got a real voice.” Thornton had long wanted to play Hank Williams in a biopic; over lunch, he and Myron agreed that they’d found the guy to write it. Thornton and Myron self-financed the screenplay and pitched the idea to Brown through his agent. “What they asked me to do,” Brown said in 2003, “was take it from 1937 when [Williams] was fourteen to the first few days of ’53 when he was dead and buried, and everything in between.” Once terms were arranged, a contract and a commission secured, Brown agreed to write the screenplay. On January 6, 2003, he sat in front of his computer in a narrow room filled with books and CDs on the opposite side of his home’s breezeway that he’d made over into his writing study, and he began to work.
He was a bit at sea. With limited experience writing screenplays, and on the hunt for inspiration, he turned to esteemed roots-music writer Colin Escott, whose 1994 Hank Williams: The Biography, written with the assistance of George Merritt and William MacEwen, had earned a sterling reputation within the checkered tradition of Hank biographies. Brown had consulted other biographical sources, but “Colin’s was the main novel. His had a whole lot of direct quotes, things that were actually said, and I was able to go to some of those CDs and hear exactly what was said at the mike at the Grand Ole Opry, say, on September 22, 1951, between Red Foley and Hank. In some cases I had to just make it up. I didn’t know what all was said between him and Lefty Frizzell or between him and Audrey. I didn’t know a lot of things that went on, so I just had to try to make it all up for them.”
Escott has been besotted with Williams since his teen years. “I was a blues fan then, and responded to Hank as a blues singer,” he told me. In the 1980s, while working at PolyGram Records where Williams’s MGM recordings were housed, Escott persuaded the label to release what was at the time a complete edition of Williams’s work on eight double LPs, a high-water mark in Williams’s discography. Subsequent exchanges and conversations among collectors, industry people, and musicians who’d known Williams sparked Escott’s native archivist instincts: Hank’s story needs to be told, respectfully and accurately, and it needs to happen soon. “Unlike jazz and classical, country music was considered unworthy of documentation during the few years that Williams was alive,” Escott points out. “If you aggregated all the interviews with him they’d fill less than a page. Strip away the public relations aspect of those interviews and it amounts to very little. So his story was bound up in the memories of men and women who were, sadly but inevitably, fewer in number every year. I wanted to get the story down while I still could.” He adds: “As of today, from among fifty or sixty band members, I believe just two are still living, perhaps three. And one has Alzheimer’s. Hank revealed little of himself in anything but song. It wasn’t the tell-all age. So it really all hinged on those who knew him and a few court documents and depositions.”
Williams’s brief life was particularly cinematic, Escott feels, “because it was so short and had such a natural dramatic arc. It had sex and drugs and rock and roll. It was a story of self-redemption: a man from a desperately poor background rising to the top of his profession and writing songs that are still performed.” Buoyed by the biography, Brown contacted the writer and drove from Oxford to Escott’s home in Hendersonville, Tennessee, to Talk Hank and listen to and marvel at the then-unissued tapes of Williams on the Mother’s Best Flour Company radio shows, broadcast in the early-1950s on Nashville’s WSM radio station. (The 72 shows, containing over 140 songs, were issued on fourteen CDs by Time Life in 2010; Escott provided the liner notes.) “They’re Williams’s most revealing recordings because he talks about himself and sings songs that influenced him,” Escott says. “So I played those for Larry, and we talked about what we’d heard and about Williams’s life and art. He went outside to smoke several times. We drank a few beers. He talked about working for the fire department.”
Back in Oxford, Brown hunkered down, and began to obsess. Gary Hawkins remembers that “Larry got more into Hank the more he read about him. I remember his intense fascination with Hank’s mother, who was a big strong woman who constantly beat up her son. Larry was fascinated with this brutal woman’s effect, and he kept bringing it up.” He adds: “I know Larry did a lot of research and for a while it was eating him up,” and once Brown signed on to write the screenplay, “he became obsessed with Williams and the whole thing took another direction.”
That direction led down a thorny road that Brown didn’t particularly want to visit. A conventional screenplay runs to roughly 120 pages, or a minute or so of screen time per page; early on, Brown realized that he was in trouble. “If I only devote ten pages to each year for sixteen years, that’s 160 minimum,” he complained in an interview in 2003. By February of that year, the screenplay sat at 120 pages and 142 scenes, and counting; agonizingly, Brown lost those pages on his computer to a corrupt file, and he had to start over. The reset didn’t temper his ambition, however, and the screenplay quickly swelled again. “I thought I was going to get it done in ninety days, so I set aside ninety days. But the ninety days went by, and I wasn’t halfway through.” 2003 evolved into the Year of Hank: Brown worked on the screenplay virtually every night for eight months, between home and family duties and the odd writing assignment. “It was the most intensive period of work that I’ve had in a long time, including finishing The Rabbit Factory,” he said. “I didn’t work as hard on this novel as I’ve been working on this screenplay.” Brown squeezed in a brief promotional trip to Austin, Texas, “then I had eight more days off and I told myself that I needed every one of those eight days to go and revise and everything.” Brown’s first draft of what he was calling “A House Of Gold: The Hank Williams Story” ended up an enormous, unwieldy, wholly impractical, virtually unfilmmable 584 pages. “That’s what I come up with,” he sighed.
The prospect of editing sometimes bothered Brown, who was an inveterate over-writer. His editor Shannon Ravenel speaks of his immense manuscript drafts landing heavily on her desk at Algonquin Books, and she and Brown both admitted to enduring sometimes fiery confrontations over the inevitable edits. Fiction writer Clyde Edgerton, a longtime friend of Brown’s, recalled for me a telling incident near the end of Brown’s work on the screenplay:
We’re in a hotel room. I think it’s in Decatur County, Georgia. It was a book thing. I’m in his room, he’s on the bed. It’s five o’clock, and he’s got a five-fifteen interview with somebody downstairs. He’s lying on the bed talking, and we’re talking, and as I recall he’s sober. I’m worried about his interview, but, you know, I won’t say anything about it. A good buddy, Tom Rankin, and I always talk about Larry Time, very different from Normal Time. And he said, “You know Clyde, that script is over five hundred pages long.” I said, “Larry!” I thought he might be kidding a little bit. I kinda looked at him, and he was dead serious. He said, “And they want me to cut it! But Clyde, how can you take a hunk out of a man’s life?”
Edgerton admits now that he felt somewhat surprised that Brown didn’t have a better feel for what he was doing, “but that was one thing about Larry. He was dead serious on writing this screenplay, and dead serious that it had to be five hundred pages. He couldn’t cut it because it would be detrimental to the man, detrimental to leave stuff out of his life that Larry felt had to be in there.” In the hotel room, the phone rang. “I knew what it was, it was the damn interview!” Edgerton remembers, laughing. “By now it was five fifteen or whatever. He hung up the phone, got up, put on some clothes, went into the bathroom, came out. I’m looking at my watch and I’m sweating, because he’s missed this fucking interview. He goes out the door, turns around and looks at me, and says, ‘I hate it when they rush me.’”
Myron and Thornton wouldn’t rush Brown, but neither could they pay him for a second draft. “We never got the financing together to make the movie,” Myron acknowledges. “We financed the screenplay ourselves, but then to make the movie we needed someone to finance the movie and we could never get that together. I liked the screenplay a lot; I thought it was very strong. It was just, of course, way too long.”
Brown’s “House of Gold” was enormous, narrated too much of a life, took up block after block. Unwilling to work without pay, hesitant to edit anyway, Brown set aside the screenplay and devoted himself to finishing A Miracle Of Catfish. In that novel, a young boy named Jimmy rides his beloved go-cart up and down the road in front of his family’s trailer every day until dark, hoping against hope that his dad—a philandering loser who’s given only “Jimmy’s dad” as sobriquet—will buy him and his sisters tickets to a Kenny Chesney concert. This being a Larry Brown novel, Jimmy’s dad fails to deliver. Jimmy’s yearning to go see Chesney play, to commune in a happy crowd of fans, is thwarted. But Brown died before he completed the novel. Does Jimmy ever get to go and hear country music? We’ll never know.
. . .
I contacted Shane Brown in October. I introduced myself and asked if he knew the whereabouts of the screenplay, because the librarians at the University of Mississippi had informed me that the manuscript wasn’t in the Larry Brown collection there. I asked him if I could read the screenplay if it turned up; he copied on his mother and a close family friend to the email thread, and replied that he’d hunt for it in his dad’s writing room when he found the time. Two months later I received an e-mail from him that read, “I’ve got good news . . .” Later that day he sent a photo of the screenplay’s cover page.
. . .
In March, Amy and I drive down from DeKalb. Shane works for a landscaping crew in Oxford, and couldn’t meet me until after five o’clock. Late afternoon on a Monday, I leave Oxford, navigating the quiet Square, drive east out of town, turn south at a car-and-truck dealership, and drive a dozen or so miles on Route 334, a pleasant, winding road through dairy- and-beef cattle farmland dotted with churches and modest wooden and red-brick single-story homes. The Brown Dairy Farm, operated by Shane’s brother Billy Ray, comprises seventy acres of hilly, green pastures, and is thriving; Billy Ray leases another fifteen hundred acres to farmers in Lafayette County. I shoot past the home several times before we finally connect; Shane helpfully waits for me at the end of his drive in a black Toyota truck—his dad’s. Named for the titular character of the 1953 Western (a favorite of Brown’s), Shane, who is thirty-seven and energetic, hops out of his truck, directs me to park at an angle on the front yard in front of a red-brick ranch home, and greets me. He is a virtual copy of his dad: he’s of medium height, has a compact frame and a ruddy, narrow, creased face that often blossoms into a crinkly smile. His eyes are bright, and he wears a trimmed reddish-brown beard. Often during our conversations he removes his trucker’s cap to run his hands though his cropped hair.
He leads me directly into a room off of the breezeway. “We keep it unlocked,” he says mildly. I notice the letters C O O L affixed to the door, above scattered postcards. “Yeah, dad called it Cool Pad but he never got around to puttin’ the other word up,” Shane explains. We step into the narrow, carpeted room, maybe four feet wide and a dozen feet long, and Shane switches on an overhead light. The air’s musty and a touch moldy, and he sends a ceiling fan moving. A low, cinder-block-and-wood-plank bookshelf runs along on one side, two acoustic guitars leaning against it, and on the other side shelves hold framed photographs, pottery, plate ware, an empty Bud Light can or two, and more books. Affixed to the walls, like so many moths, are movie posters, concert fliers, mementoes from readings and lectures Brown gave, a few framed broadsides, and dozens of photographs of family and friends and musicians, many coiling with age. On the far end of the room a black leather, high-backed chair sits in front of a mid-century metal desk that barely holds a vintage turntable, amplifier, speakers, and towering stacks of CDs reaching to the ceiling. Manuscript stacks dot the room (many, I’ll learn, unpublished stories and essays of Brown’s). As if Brown had just pulled them off, a pair of black cowboy boots sits in repose next to the desk. On the wall, hanging from a silver string, is a shiny black Danelectro guitar with two Post-it notes affixed to the bottom, one reading “HANK SEPT. 17 1923,” the other, “DEAD JAN. 1 1953.” Shane points to the guitar: “I thought of you when I saw that.”
After a few minutes, Shane asks me if I wanted to visit the writing shack that his dad built on his land in Tula, a ten-or-so minute drive away. The sun’s setting quickly, and as we climb into his truck, Shane opens the can of beer resting in his drink holder. “I’m having myself a cold one. Do you want one?” I say sure, and Shane reaches into the back seat and hands me a Bud Light. As we head along 334 and turn south onto 445, we sip our beers and Shane talks about his brother’s dairy-and-beef cattle farm, his own semi-satisfying work as a landscaper, his family, a bit about his dad and his work and legacy. We drive into increasingly rural land, and he points out a patch of woods here, a two-bedroom trailer there, a convenience store long gone, places where his dad had based characters and scenes in his novels.
Brown’s wife’s family owns seven acres of land in Tula. After turning left on a cutoff road, we arrive, drive through an open gate, park out front next to a “Trump 2016” sign, and walk around back. Rain had fallen for several days in northern Mississippi before I visited, and the ground, mostly mud anyway, is still wet. Shane lives in this cabin now, and writes some, and when he’s home from work or done milking the cows at his brother’s farm he likes to kick back with a few beers and play guitar, like his dad. In the backyard we walk around a darkening pond to the abutting one-room shack, which Larry Brown designed and built himself over several years, after cutting back considerable high grass and brush, clearing trees, and excavating the cove. Inside, Shane shows me his dad’s writing desk at a window overlooking the pond, and the homemade candelabra that descends from the ceiling and provides the only light in the room. Brown is buried on this land, and after we pay our respects at his gravestone, we stand at the pond edge, drink beer, and listen to the cicadas and bullfrogs sing startlingly loudly. The afternoon quickly grows dark.
While driving back to Yocona, the truck’s headlights cutting through the dark, I ask Shane to talk about the bars that his dad drank in, which ones were still around, which were gone. He tells me about an over-enthusiastic fan at City Grocery—Larry Brown’s bar of choice in his later years—who’d recently tried to pry off the plaque bearing Brown’s name marking his regular stool; the bar owner intervened in time, and the plaque’s now safe in the frame of a photo behind the bar. Shane also tells me how raising children and generally growing older had tempered his dad’s social habits a bit, that near the end of his life he didn’t escape home for the Oxford bars quite as often. I think about a comment Brown had made in 2003, when asked by a reporter about his personal demons: I’m doing pretty good, I reckon. I just try to stay home and stay out of bars and stay out of trouble. I ask Shane if he thinks that Hank Williams’s drinking interested his dad.
“Sure, yeah, absolutely,” he says quickly, one hand on the wheel, one around his Bud Light. His voice grows quieter. “Yup.” He pauses. “His life, his roughness, I would say. His rowdiness.”
. . .
Back at the Cool Pad, Shane offers me another beer and shuts the door behind us, walks to his dad’s desk, and pushes aside a stack of manuscript sheets. “Yeah, here it is,” he says, and produces an enormous three-ring binder, at least four inches thick. “You just sit there. I’m gonna hang out. I might have a friend over later.”
I sit in Brown’s chair at Brown’s writing desk and consider the behemoth before me. “If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed,” said Stanley Kubrick, and in my mind’s eye I see Brown nodding grimly. Dated September 2003, the first and only draft of “House Of Gold: The Hank Williams Story” runs to 673 scenes over 584 pages. If in a conventional screenplay one page equals approximately one minute of screen time, than Brown has written a ten-hour miniseries, or at least the most unconventional feature film bio-pic in Hollywood history. The binder’s so full it barely lays flat on the desk. Overwhelmed, I page through the screenplay, doubtful that I can absorb the draft in one sitting, or ten. To me the problem appears threefold. Brown couldn’t or wouldn’t rein in his writing in his early drafts. He relied overly faithfully on Escott’s biography. And he didn’t know how to write a screenplay.
“The thing with biographies is you want to shine a light on certain aspects of someone’s life and put other aspects in the shadows,” Ben Myron told me. “If you shine a light on the whole life it becomes a little bit long. It’s challenging, because you have to kind of edit yourself as you’re going, or you have to figure out what it is that you’re gonna focus on, certain relationships, a certain period of time, a certain event, that kind of thing, and build from there.” Brown, conversely—perversely— adapted Escott’s thoroughly researched book rather than selected iconic moments from Wiliams’s life, forgetting, or stubbornly refusing to acknowledge, that he wasn’t writing a book but composing a story to keep moviegoers in their seats for ninety minutes or two hours.
I gaze up at the CDs towering over me: Gillian Welch, Jim Reeves, Robert Earl Keen, Jr., Buddy Miller, Patty Loveless, Tim McGraw, Charley Pride, Vic Chesnutt, Ben Weaver, Blue Mountain, Wilco, Leonard Cohen, Dylan. These were only a few of Brown’s kindred spirits and partners in crime, fellow artists whose music he’d play when he needed refreshing, or needed to hear something articulated that he felt but couldn’t yet name, or just needed a good time or maybe to help, with the beer and the bourbon, stave off the noise coming from the cardboard box sitting on top of his stereo receiver, on which he’d scrawled in black ink, THIS BE THE BOX WHERE I PUT ALL THE SHIT—mostly, it seems, bills and business. Gazing a bit higher, I note a “Faulkner And Religion” poster from a Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference at the University of Mississippi peeking over the top of a CD shelf, next to an oversized poster promoting Brown’s own Big Bad Love.
Outside, Shane’s friend has arrived, and I can hear Shane and her talking quietly and opening beers in the front yard. I return to the screenplay. I try to digest the fact that Brown seems to have included virtually every scene in Escott’s book, as he took Myron’s and Thornton’s charge to heart: go from ’37 to ’53 and everything in between. (How can you take a hunk out of a man’s life?) As far as I can tell, the historical and biographical details throughout the screenplay are accurate. Early scenes are set in evocative places: a music store in Montgomery, Alabama; a radio station; Williams’s mother Lillie’s boarding house, where Williams lived off and on; a honky tonk bar. For the record, Williams is declared dead at the Oak Hill Hospital in Scene 657, and his funeral, packed with mourners, takes place in Scene 669. Toby Marshall figures prominently—he’s the forgery convict who, after his release from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in 1951, met Williams and convinced him that he was a medical doctor, eventually prescribing for Williams reckless amounts of amphetamines, Seconal, chloral hydrate, and morphine. In the screenplay, Brown describes Marshall as a “small, pasty angel of death,” and establishes a parallel narrative between Marshall’s legal and incarceration woes and Williams’s meteoric rise; their meeting is fated, and fateful. Generally, Brown captures Wiliams’s voice and vernacular well: “She’s gonna raise nine hunnerd hells,” he has Williams moaning to a bandmate about returning home to Audrey. And he exhibits a strong feel for the mortality dogging Williams through his intense suffering: in a comparatively cheerful scene set at Christmas in the Franklin Road house in Nashville, Brown notes “on the wall, a clock ticks away Hank’s time.” In the screenplay’s 673rd and final scene, Williams’s girlfriend Bobbie Jett gives birth to a baby girl, several days after Williams’s funeral. Brown seems to have wanted to evoke something being set in motion just as something was ending.
One provocative decision Brown made was to dramatize the activities of a couple, named only Elderly Fan and Wife, who act as a kind of rural Greek chorus throughout the screenplay. I mentioned this later to Myron and he said, “Oh yeah, Larry’s signature.” The couple appear early in the screenplay, making their way to Williams’s concerts; once, their vehicle breaks down, but they’re determined to get to the show. Brown seems to have viewed these older fans as essential country folk, Williams’s true fans, the ones he wrote the songs for and who understood him on a simple but urgent level. (Hank: For what he is singing, is the hopes, and prayers, and dreams and experiences of what some call the ‘common people.’) Awed and respectful, the couple shows up at Williams’s packed funeral, where these exchanges occur:
Elderly Fan: You reckon Hank knowed all these people?
Wife: I bet he did.
and
Wife: You know what, Paw?
Elderly Fan: What, Maw?
Wife: I wish we could’ve took him fishin’ or somethin’. Wouldn’t that have been nice?
Elderly Fan: It sure would’ve, Maw. I heard he loved to fish.
I don’t know whether these scenes would’ve made it past revisions or, if they did, whether they wouldn’t have reeked of sentimentality— but Brown was never too afraid to laud the modest desires and pleasures, not to mention the earnest naiveté, of his rural characters, the delight of hours of noiseless fishing, the wonder at, and the skepticism about, citified material successes. For Brown, Elderly Fan and Wife seem to be stand-ins for all of Williams’s admirers who saw him as a country boy singing the truth, no matter how dark that truth got, and no matter how successful their boy got. The rumors of his drunkenness and womanizing, the no-shows? Well, yeah, but the boy can sing.
“So, did it end?” Shane asks when I emerge from the Cool Pad after a couple of hours. I can barely see him and his friend in the dark.
“Well, yeah,” I say. “He ended it.”
Amy and I return a couple of days later to pay our respects to Shane and to thank him again for his hospitality. He introduces us to his sister-in-law and other family members, the youngest of whom is riding around the farm on a pony, shirtless, delightedly chased by other kids. Dogs run to and fro. “Lots of people, friends and family, just wander in and out of here,” Shane remarks. We walk across the yard to the barn and watch him set up his elaborate cow-milking equipment before we duck in to the writing room so I can take a last look around. At Brown’s desk, Amy asks, “What’s this?” She points to a photo that had curled closed; I hadn’t noticed it. She carefully lifts the photo with her finger. It’s a sepia-toned image of Hank Williams, suited up, gazing into the camera and leaning against a car, strumming an acoustic, from the cover of The Complete Hank Williams 10-CD box set. She lets go of the photo, and it curls shut. We leave Oxford the next day.
. . .
“I can’t imagine Hank Williams being all that different from Larry,” Clyde Edgerton said to me. “Hank had to be serious in a way that Larry was serious, which kind of defied believability in the most beautiful way in the world. When I see Hank, those little films and stuff, there’s somebody who looks kinda shy who’s just completely overcome with the notoriety that he has, not in the dark, and not unaware, but unschooled about how you might handle notoriety, positive notoriety. What do you do with that? He had no clue.
“I guess Larry was planning to cut the screenplay at some point. If he had gotten it into his head that he had to cut it back to a hundred and thirty pages, and he really believed he had to, if somebody said it’s never gonna hit the screen unless you do that, I believe he would’ve done it.”
…
Who knows what would’ve been in store for Hank Williams had he lived past his twenty-ninth birthday. Some commenters feel that, like many of his country music peers, he might’ve been left gasping in the wake of the Sun Records revolution in Memphis in the mid- and late-1950s. “Hank’s music, like that of his contemporaries, was adult in content,” observes Colin Escott in Hank Williams: The Biography. “Rock ’n’ roll was teenage music. The exaggeration and overstatement of rock ’n’ roll were alien to the fundamental values of Hank’smusic, and the sledgehammer beat was the opposite of The Drifting Cowboys’ sweet, mellow swing.” A few of Williams’s records, such as “Hey, Good Lookin’” and “Settin’ The Woods on Fire,” “prefigured rock ’n’ roll to some extent,” Escott notes, “but that was no guarantee that he could have weathered the storm any better than his contemporaries. Rhythm ’n’ Blues singer Wynonie Harris had much of what became the rock ’n’ roll swagger on his late ’40s and early ’50s hits, like ‘Good Rockin’ Tonight,’ but that didn’t help him score one hit after rock ’n’ roll broke. He was too old and too black. Hank was probably too old and too hillbilly. But by dying prematurely, he avoided the indignity of trying to answer the question of what he would have done. He also left the tantalizing promise of what might have been as well as a blank screen upon which vested interests could project all manner of fantasies.”
A Miracle of Catfish suggested that Brown was continuing to evolve as a writer. Following the misstep of The Rabbit Factory’s somewhat labored formal experimentation, A Miracle of Catfish arrived a few years after Brown’s death burdened with grief but fully alive. Though the novel’s unfinished, the world Brown creates is so full, the characters so round and naturalistic, the rolling, tense, and verdant landscape so sensually rendered, that the lack of any conventional resolution feels more realistic than not: this world is alive and unending. Loneliness, alienation, aimless driving, splintered families, beers on ice in a cooler on a truck’s floorboards, sticky heat, human anxieties and drama: Brown had explored it all before, but the interior lives of Jimmy, the young boy with the awful father, and Cortez, the old man up the road who befriends Jimmy, are more dimensional and innate than Brown had ever achieved. Had he lived, I only wonder what worlds, and what forsaken but proud and determined men, women, and children in them, Brown might’ve imagined for us on the winding roads and off-roads of his beloved, beleaguered northern Mississippi.
. . .
I never did track down Chip, friend of Larry’s, local bartender extraordinaire. That made a kind of sense, finally. Spirits abounded on this trip. When I sat at Larry Brown’s writing desk, I imagined him ghosting the same chair, fresh out of his boots maybe, a beer open, a cigarette lit, a manuscript hot in front of him. I imagined the CDs he’d take with him when he needed a break, wanted to go ride into the gloam in the truck that I’d sat in, on the roads I’d been on with his son. Brown had been chasing Hank Williams, hoping that Hank might stop long enough somewhere between the reality and the myth so that Brown could get a good, long look, maybe to get inside the man who sang such brutally simple songs about brutally complex things like love, loss, and heartache. I don’t know what dimensions Larry Brown’s House of Gold would’ve ended up assuming, whether Brown would have knocked out a floor or the attic, or reduced it to rubble and made it all over again—he did build houses, after all, and if he was paid for it, he sure as hell would try—or whether he ever could’ve allowed himself to reduce a man like that.
Special thanks to Shane Brown, Mary Annie Brown-Foshee, Jay Watson, Jean W. Cash, and Tom Rankin. Thanks also to the waitresses at Ajax Diner and the librarians at the Lafayette County–Oxford Public Library and the Archives and Special Collections at the J.D. Williams Library at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi.
Notes
Unless noted below, all quotations are from conversations with JB, February, March, and April 2016.
“I love a great song, man. Oh yeah...”, “Barry Hannah, Brad Watson, and Larry Brown: The Radio Session,” in Conversations with Larry Brown, edited by Jay Watson (University Press of Mississippi, 2007).
“I’ve always been a big fan...”, “Q&A/Larry Brown: Mounting Tension Is Critical to Storytelling,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 28, 2003.
“We have relied on Hank Williams...”, review of Don Cusic, Hank Williams: The Complete Lyrics, Journal of Country Music 16 (1993). Reprinted in The Hank Williams Reader, edited by Patrick Huber, Steve Goodson, and David M. Anderson (Oxford University Press, 2014).
“their ability to transport you to other times and other places...”, lecture given at the Lafayette County & Oxford Library, dated April 13, 1997, unpublished. Courtesy of Lafayette County & Oxford Library.
“a mix tape of sorts...”, Bloodshot Records press release, “Bloodshot Records to Release Just One More: A Musical Tribute to Larry Brown, 19 Songs Celebrating A Great American Writer on May 22, 2007— Artists Include Alejandro Escovedo, Robert Earl Keen, T-Model Ford, Vic Chesnutt, North Mississippi AllStars & Greg Brown,” dated January 29, 2007.
“Larry absolutely loved music...”, Bloodshot Records press release.
“You ask what makes our kind of music successful....”, Rufus Jarman, “Country Music Goes to Town,” Nation’s Business, February 1953.
“What they asked me to do...That’s what I come up with”, Marc Fitten and Lawrence Hetrick, conducted for Chattahoochee Review, unpublished, in Conversations with Larry Brown.
Losing the screenplay to a corrupt file, Larry Brown in a letter to Clyde Edgerton, dated March 10, 2003. Courtesy of Clyde Edgerton.
“I’m doing pretty good, I reckon...”, “Q&A/Larry Brown: Mounting Tension Is Critical to Storytelling.”
Colin Escott, with George Merritt and William MacEwen, Hank Williams: The Biography (Little Brown, 1994).
Joe Bonomo was named the music columnist for The Normal School in 2012. His books include Field Recordings from the Inside, Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series), Conversations With Greil Marcus, and, most recently, No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing. He teaches at Northern Illinois University and appears online at No Such Thing As Was. Visit Joe on Twitter and on Instagram.
Photo by Wendy Wei