From all reports he was a delightful man who was a very close personal friend to Hank in the early years and acted as a pallbearer at Hank’s funeral. No bigger honor than that.

They first met when Hank was 15 and Schuffert, who was already on radio despite his youth, helped Hank get on the local radio station. He was at Hank’s first ever show and played in his band for a number of years in the late 30′s and early 40′s. When the success came, Schuffert decided not to leave a job in Alabama and join Hank on the road.

In later years he was very generous in sharing his memories with Hank fans.

Braxton was a pretty sweet traditional country singer in his own right as you can hear here:

And here’s Braxton with some memories and music from a Montgomery Advertiser Video recorded a year ago when he was 96!

http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/videonetwork/2333333400001?odyssey=mod|tvideo|article

The whole audio is available on the right side of this page.

There are 5 videos of the Hank songs in the middle.

Here’s the link.

http://music.cbc.ca/#/concerts/Jill-Barber-sings-Hank-Williams-2013-02-08

The cemetery has now been left in legal limbo because of the death of the owner. Bills in the Alabama Legislature will allow a transfer to the city.

This should mean a more secure dignified future for the Hank Williams shrine, and is certainly welcomed by fans around the world. It’s good to know the site is being well taken care of and will always be treated with reverence.

Here’s a remembrance from Miller Williams (no relation) a well known Arkansas poet, published in the Arkansas literary magazine the ‘Oxford American’. Notice, he is the father of the very well known and well respected true American Country contemporary singer songwriter Lucinda Williams.

Yes, [in 1952] I was on the faculty of McNeese State College in Lake Charles, Louisiana, when he had a concert there. I stepped onstage when he and his band were putting their instruments away and when he glanced at me I said, “Mr. Williams, my name is Williams and I’d be honored to buy you a beer.” To my surprise, he asked me where we could get one. I said there was a gas station about a block away where we could sit and drink a couple. (You may not be aware that gas stations used to have bars.) He asked me to tell his bus driver exactly where it was and then he joined me. When he ordered his beer, I ordered a glass of wine, because this was my first year on a college faculty and it seemed the appropriate thing to do. We sat and chatted for a little over an hour. When he ordered another beer he asked me about my family. I told him that I was married and that we were looking forward to the birth of our first child in about a month. He asked me what I did with my days and I told him that I taught biology at McNeese and that when I was home I wrote poems. He smiled and told me that he had written lots of poems. When I said, “Hey—you write songs!” he said, “Yeah, but it usually takes me a long time. I might write the words in January and the music six or eight months later; until I do, what I’ve got is a poem.” Then his driver showed up, and as he stood up to leave he leaned over, put his palm on my shoulder, and said, “You ought to drink beer, Williams, ’cause you got a beer-drinkin’ soul.” He died the first day of the following year. When Lucinda was born I wanted to tell her about our meeting, but I waited until she was onstage herself. Not very long ago, she was asked to set to music words that he had left to themselves when he died. This almost redefines coincidence.

Here is a link to the article.

http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2013/mar/05/poet-interview-miller-williams/

But good news, the new site is totally redesigned and very attractive and informative;  I like it better than the older one so the exercise has been worthwhile although I’m sure very stressful to the museum staff. But still no link to the best Hank Williams blog on the web!

The link to the new site is the not exactly the same as the previous one.

Here it is.

We usually think of the Irish in America as the Southern  Irish Catholics who emigrated in the mid 1800′s to avoid the great Irish potato famine.These immigrants are best represented by the famous Irish of Boston exemplified by the Kennedy clan and figures such as the great House Speaker Tip O’Neil, and today’s Secretary of State  John Kerry.

The Scots and especially the Ulster Scots from Northern Ireland were protestant and came to America much earlier. Sad to say many Scots of that era were participants in the slave trade at the time of Robbie Burns in the late 1700′s. These Scots became involved in the Tobacco trade in the Southern US, and ran the great plantations of the Caribbean such as the sugar industry Jamaica. Scots also had a powerful position in the early days of the Republic as architects of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

I’ve stolen a lot of this information from a fascinating article in the ‘Irish Echo’ online newspaper a publication for Americans based in New York. Author Karen McCarthy places Hank Williams in the Ulster Scot stream of immigrants to America who settled largely in the south. Indeed the North South split can be traced back to Protestant Ulster Irish Scots settling the South while English Puritan stock and late Irish and European Catholics settled the north.

McCarthy cites Hank Williams as very typical of the Ulster Scot mentality, isolated from the south In Northern Ireland, separated from their native Scotland and then isolated once again in the American South after the Civil War. Ulster Scots in the South were, she says, clannish and inward looking and families didn’t move far from their roots through the generations. She identifies these roots as they influenced an artist such as Hank Williams:

Through centuries of hard work, harsh conditions, poverty, and war, the Scots Irish maintained their love of music and storytelling. People in the South still talk about Hank Williams, a country music legend who embodied the Scots-Irish contradiction: a poet that could move people to tears with his sincerity, yet terrify them with his violent self-destructive streak.

Here’s the link to the original article.

I haven’t personally researched Hank’s family history, but I am sure many of you have. If there are corrections needed to the Irish Echo article or my post, please add to the discussion in the comments section below.

Update: Karen McCarthy’s book ‘The Other Irish: The Scots Irish Rascals who made America’ was published in 2011. It is available from Amazon. Here’s a brief description from the Amazon website:

What do Mark Twain, Neil Armstrong, and John McCain have in common? They’re all descendants of a merry group of Scots-Irish braggarts that crossed the Atlantic from Ireland in the early 1700s and settled in America’s South. Also known as the “Other Irish,” this wild bunch of patriotic, rebellious, fervently religious rascals gave us the NRA, at least fourteen presidents, decisive victories in the Revolutionary War, a third of today’s US Military, country music, Star Wars, the Munchkins, American-style Democracy, and even the religious right . . . not to mention NASCAR, whose roots go back to Prohibition-era moonshine runners. Yet few Americans are familiar with the Other Irish or their contributions to American culture. Now author and documentary filmmaker Karen McCarthy shines a probing light on this fascinating topic, illuminating the extent to which the Scots-Irish helped weave the fabric of our nation.

MacEwen was famous across Eastern Canada for his New Year’s Day Hank Williams tribute programs. Back in 1978 he was instrumental in the founding of the Hank Williams Appreciation Society with Tom Lipscombe. He was well-known for his huge collection of records which formed the base of his radio programs. He was the co author of a 1994 Hank Williams biography.

Part way down the link below there is a long newspaper tribute to Bill from 2004.

Thanks to Tom Lipscombe for sending this link to more information on Bill.

Hank Williams knew a terrible secret, and he revealed it in his songs and performances. He knew that humans have a core of fear where love is a fleeting and treacherous thing, where redemption lies in death, and where loneliness and isolation is the human fate. In Hank Williams: The Unreleased Recordings, he fearlessly explores this core, leading us on the harrowing journey that ultimately claimed his life.  . . . . . . . .

Hank Williams understood loneliness as an essential part – maybe the essential part –  of the human condition, the surest path to the true self. He feared loneliness but couldn’t resist its embrace; in his exploration of loneliness, he ironically touched the most fearful part of all of us. Perhaps the knowledge that someone else understood that part of us and could express it as art eases our burden and lightens our step. Certainly, such empathy allowed one soul the redemption it never knew in life…

Currie recalls Williams doing a 20-to 30-minute set.

“He sang the Lovesick Blues,” he said. “I remember he said, ‘When I showed this to my producer when I came to do a record, I sang that and the guy told me that’s the worst’s thing I’ve ever heard.’

“(Williams) was a funny guy. He was a tall, thin, pale guy, long black sideburns. He didn’t look like a well guy, even back then. He was never well, I don’t think. But he lived awhile after that.

“So he did Lovesick Blues, and Wedding Bells. He told some jokes in between, even with his sad songs.”

This fine history  can be found here.