POWERGRAMS

33 11. In 1931, Rose offered a homeless Lilly Williams and her children his rental house free until they "could get on their feet." A year later, she bought her son a $3.50 guitar, and he began learning the blues from Rufus "Tee-Tot" Payne, a black street singer. Williams would sing and practice in the cool shade beneath the house, then perform with Payne for tips two blocks away in downtown Georgiana. Barely a decade later, Williams was the first superstar of country music. He recorded 35 singles that reached the Top 10, including 11 No. 1 hits. Five years into his unparalleled success, he famously died on New Year's Day, 1953. June Skipper Whittle points to a photograph of a 12-year-old girl standing in the yard of Lilly Williams' Montgomery boarding house, as pallbearers carried Hank's coffin down the steps toward what was the largest funeral in Alabama history. Whittle sat with the family during the service as an estimated 25,000 mourners lined the path to the cemetery. "He died 65 years ago and he's as popular today as he was then," Whittle, Hank's second cousin, says. "But when I was around Hank – he was at our house all the time growing up – he was just family. (His mother) Aunt Lilly normally came over on Saturday afternoons." In 1952, Hank and his new wife, Billie Jean Jones, went to church with Whittle and her family just days before his death. "The preacher didn't know who he was but Hank sang a couple of church songs," Whittle says. "If he was in Georgiana, he always came to see family." The next afternoon, Whittle was among a small gathering of relatives and customers at the Skipper's country store when Williams sang and played a few of his popular songs and "The Log Train." It was a new, unpublished song, written for his father as a Christmas gift, but Lon Williams wasn't expecting a visit so he was in Selma for the holidays. Most of the friends and relatives who knew and played with Hank Williams are gone. Many of the dance halls where he played have been demolished but when the museum opened in 1993 the decaying remnants of Thigpen's Log Cabin were brought to the grounds, and the restored structure is now a green room for performers at the annual Hank Williams Festival. Whittle is on the festival board of directors. She and Gaston join many Visitors Cindy, Zack and Dwayne Kersh of Moultrie, Georgia. Whittle points to herself in photo from Williams's funeral.

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