Hank Williams' Last Opry

Hank Williams was fired from the Grand Ole Opry on 11 August 1952, at twenty eight, as the biggest star in country music. The Opry's manager, Jim Denny, had run out of patience after Williams failed to appear for a scheduled spot two days earlier. It was not the first missed show. Williams drank, and he took morphine for the constant back pain of a spinal condition he had been born with, and by that summer his first marriage had ended and he was often not fit to walk on stage. Denny told him he could come back when he was sober, and nobody involved seems to have thought the sentence would be permanent. Williams had joined the Opry in June 1949 on the strength of Lovesick Blues and had been called back for six encores on his first night, which is the kind of debut the show had no procedure for. Williams went back to the Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport, the show he had graduated from four years earlier, and kept cutting records that sold. On the first day of 1953 he was found dead in the back seat of a Cadillac outside Oak Hill, West Virginia, on the way to a show in Canton, Ohio. He was twenty nine. His songs are among the most valuable copyrights the country music business owns. The Opry has never taken the firing back. His grandson has campaigned for a reinstatement for more than twenty years, and the Opry's answer has been that membership belongs to living artists, so there is nobody left to reinstate.