After winning an amateur talent contest, Williams began his professional career in Montgomery in the late 1930s playing on local radio stations and at area venues such as school houses, movie theaters, and bars.

The next year he released a cover of "Lovesick Blues", which quickly reached number one on Billboard's Top Country & Western singles chart and propelled him to stardom on the Grand Ole Opry.

Although unable to read or notate music to any significant degree, he wrote such iconic hits as "Your Cheatin' Heart", "Hey, Good Lookin'", and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry".

Many artists have covered his songs and he has influenced Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones, among others.

[3][4][5][6][7] Elonzo's family came from south and central Alabama,[8] and his father fought during the American Civil War, first on the Confederate side, and then with the Union after he was captured.

[11] Williams was born with spina bifida occulta, a birth defect of the spinal column that caused him lifelong pain and became a major factor in his later alcohol and drug abuse.

After being evaluated at a Veterans Affairs clinic in Pensacola, Florida, doctors determined that he had a brain aneurysm, and Elonzo was sent to the VA Medical Center in Alexandria, Louisiana.

[24] Payne's basic musical style was blues; he repeatedly stressed the importance of maintaining good rhythm and time,[25] and he added the showmanship of stoops, bows, laughs and cries to his performances.

The original members were guitarist Braxton Schuffert, fiddler Freddie Beach, and upright bass player and comedian Smith "Hezzy" Adair.

[37] Originally billed as "Hank and Hezzy and the Drifting Cowboys", they frequently appeared as fill-ins at the local dancehall, Thigpen's Log Cabin, just out of Georgiana.

While he was medically disqualified from military service after falling from a bull during a rodeo in Texas and suffering a back injury, his band members were all drafted to serve.

As part of the arrangement, Williams got a program on the station and bookings through the Hayride's artist service to perform across western Louisiana and eastern Texas, always returning on Saturdays for the show's weekly broadcast.

[55] After a few more moderate hits, in 1949 he released his version of the 1922 Cliff Friend and Irving Mills song "Lovesick Blues", made popular by Rex Griffin.

He eventually gave the acetate to Hank Williams, Jr., who had a hit with it and an accompanying video which depicted the son playing with his father in an overdubbed dream sequence.

[75] There he sang "Hey Good Lookin'", and the next week Como opened the show wearing a cowboy hat and singing the same song, with apologies to Williams.

[79] In the spring of 1952, Williams flew to New York City twice with his band and a Grand Ole Opry troupe to appear on two episodes of the nationally broadcast The Kate Smith Evening Hour.

[90] Williams's last known public performance took place in Montgomery, on December 21, where he sang at a benefit held by the local chapter of the American Federation of Musicians for a radio announcer who had polio.

[94] The marriage was always turbulent and rapidly disintegrated,[95] and Williams developed serious problems with alcohol, morphine, and other painkillers prescribed for him to ease the severe back pain caused by his spina bifida occulta.

Carr stopped at a small all-night restaurant and asked for a relief driver from a local taxi company, as he felt exhausted after driving for 20 hours.

They drove on until they stopped for fuel and coffee at a gas station in Oak Hill, West Virginia, where they realized that Williams had been dead for so long that rigor mortis had already set in.

[125] The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame praised the "straightforward approach" of Williams's songs, which they deemed "brutally honest" and written in the "language of the everyman".

Reeking of self-pity, he wrote and sang some of the greatest woe-is-me music of the century [...] Brimming with an anger that regularly spilled over into misogyny, Williams was also a master of spite".

[133] Many artists of the 1950s and 1960s, including Elvis Presley,[134] the Beatles,[135] Bob Dylan,[136] George Jones,[137] Tammy Wynette,[138] Jerry Lee Lewis,[139] Merle Haggard,[140] Gene Vincent,[141] and Ricky Nelson and Conway Twitty were influenced by Williams.

According to reportage in the Los Angeles Times, on his road trips Williams carried a brown leather briefcase containing notebooks in which he wrote musings, lines and verses of song lyrics, as well as jottings on whatever had been handy.

After he died, the cache of sixty-six unpublished songs in four notebooks was stored in a fireproof vault at the Nashville offices of his publishing firm, Acuff-Rose Publications.

[175] Meanwhile, in Nashville, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum organized a concert featuring artists including Rodney Crowell and Williams's grandchildren Holly, Hillary, and Sam among others.

[181] Doubtful of the legality of the marriage in Tennessee and Alabama, Lilly Williams and her lawyers made several offers to settle out of court with Billie Jean that reached a final of US$30,000.

[190] In 1969, the guardianship of the estate was transferred to lawyer Robert Stewart after Irene was arrested and sentenced to a jail term for possession of cocaine by a Texas court.

[188] On October 22, 1975, a federal judge in Atlanta, Georgia, ruled that Billie Jean Horton was Williams's common-law wife, and that part of the copyright renewals of the songs belonged to her.

Leverett then told The Tennessean that the original acetates did not belong to Butrum, and that the two of them made a deal to share the profits of the planned Legacy Entertainment Group release.