The song was “Long Gone Lonesome Blues,” and it opens with a man going down to the river to watch the fish swim by. That opening didn’t come from a notebook or a late night at the piano. It came from a frustrated friend in a fishing boat who wanted Hank Williams to quit daydreaming and fish.
A title Hank couldn’t finish
By late 1949, Hank Williams was the hottest new name in country music. “Lovesick Blues” had gone to No. 1 that spring and carried him onto the Grand Ole Opry. Since then he’d scored one top-five hit after another. But none of them had made it back to No. 1, and everyone around him knew the next single mattered.
Hank liked to tell interviewers that he simply cleared his mind and let God write his songs. This one didn’t come that way. According to biographer Colin Escott, Hank built it piece by piece from a title he had been carrying around for a while: long gone, lonesome, blues. He had the title. He didn’t have the song.
There was another catch. The new record had to feel like “Lovesick Blues,” with the same easy bounce and room for that famous yodel, but it couldn’t sound too much like it. “Lovesick Blues” was an old Tin Pan Alley song, and producer Fred Rose couldn’t risk another lawsuit from Mills Music, the company that held it.
The trip to Kentucky Lake
So Hank went fishing with Vic McAlpin, a fellow songwriter at Acuff-Rose, the Nashville publishing company that handled Hank’s songs. The two drove up to the Tennessee River, where it widens into Kentucky Lake.
Hank couldn’t sleep on the way. He kept turning the title over in his head. Even after they were out on the water, his mind was somewhere else. Years later, McAlpin told journalist Roger Williams what finally broke the spell. He got fed up and asked:
“You come here to fish or watch the fish swim by?”
Hank’s answer came fast: “Hey! That’s the first line!”
How the river became the song
Once Hank had that opening, the rest fell into place. He leaned on an old blues picture, a heartbroken man heading for the river. In Hank’s version, the man is so lonesome he wants to jump in, and then finds the river has gone dry. It’s a dark idea, but Hank sings it over a bouncing beat with that high yodel, and the mix became one of the song’s trademarks.
McAlpin chipped in a few lines of his own. Hank later bought out his small share, and when the song was published in March 1950, it carried one writer’s name: Hank Williams.
The backup plan
Hank wasn’t sure the river song would make it, so he wrote himself an insurance policy, a lighter tune poking at his troubles with his wife Audrey called “Why Don’t You Love Me.” On January 9, 1950, he took both songs into Castle Studio in Nashville with Fred Rose producing.
For the first time in almost three years, Hank recorded with his own road band, the Drifting Cowboys, instead of studio players. Jerry Rivers played fiddle, and Bob McNett on lead guitar and Don Helms on steel opened the record with a little yodel-like figure played together. Rose shaped the sound as they went, telling Helms to keep the steel in a different range from Hank’s voice.
The backup plan turned out to be unnecessary. “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” went to No. 1 that spring and stayed on the country chart for 21 weeks. Then the insurance song went to No. 1 too.
The man in the other seat
Vic McAlpin kept writing. He and Hank wrote another song together, “You Better Keep It on Your Mind,” which came out in 1954, after Hank was gone. McAlpin’s songs were later recorded by Johnny Cash, Kitty Wells, Ferlin Husky and Glen Campbell, and in 1970 he was among the first songwriters inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. He died in 1980.
His name never went on the label of the song from that fishing trip. But every time someone plays “Long Gone Lonesome Blues,” it still opens with the man at the river, watching the fish swim by. That picture started with Vic McAlpin’s question on Kentucky Lake.