Jack McElroy

Knoxville (Tenn.) News Sentinel

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. The strange circumstances surrounding Hank Williams’ death quickly became apparent in the News Sentinel’s coverage back in 1953.

The songwriter’s 29-year-old heart turned cold, cold sometime on the last night of 1952 as his driver, Charles Carr, tried to get the star from Knoxville’s Andrew Johnson Hotel to a gig in Canton, Ohio.

The hotel was in the news again last week after Mayor Tim Burchett announced that Knox County would seek proposals to redevelop the building, where some say Williams died, but where, in fact, he may have been inadvertently killed.

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His death was declared in Oak Hill, W.Va., as reported on the front page of the New Year’s Day edition of the evening News Sentinel along with a more prominent story about the University of Tennessee football team preparing for the Cotton Bowl and the announcement of a new strip joining the comics page: “Pogo.”

The next day, though, the story took a strange turn.

Tennessee Highway Patrol Cpl. Swan Kitts reported stopping Williams’ Cadillac for reckless driving just outside Knox County around 1 a.m. on Jan. 1. The country singer was prone in the backseat and already “looked dead,” Kitts said. But Carr insisted Williams was just ill and had been given a sedative by a doctor in Knoxville.

Investigations ensued. The Highway Patrol found no sign of foul play, and a coroner’s jury in West Virginia determined that Williams died of a “severe heart condition.” Alcohol was in his bloodstream, but, supposedly, no drugs.

In March, though, a paroled convict with phony medical credentials told investigators in an unrelated case that Williams had been paying him $300 a week plus expenses to treat him for alcoholism and help him “sober up” for appearances.

The fake doc had prescribed a powerful sedative, chloral hydrate, shortly before Williams' death.

Then a few days later, a real doctor in Knoxville, “who asked that his name be withheld,” told a News Sentinel reporter that he had given Williams two shots just hours before he died. Williams had been drinking, but the doctor denied the injections were the “final blow” that did him in.

“The shots I gave Williams had absolutely nothing to do with his death,” the physician said, and “it is ridiculous to think that they did.”

The news tapered off in the months that followed, but books and articles speculating about the death have proliferated through the years, including some theorizing that Williams already was dead when Carr took him from the Andrew Johnson Hotel.

Perhaps the definitive piece in the News Sentinel was by music writer Wayne Bledsoe, who interviewed Carr at length in 2002. He said it was the hotel doctor who gave Williams shots of morphine and B-12 before they left town

A few hours later, somewhere around Bristol, Williams spoke his last. Carr asked if he wanted anything to eat:

“He just thought he was going to get some sleep.”

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