I am in the kitchen....wife is catching up on missed espsiodes as she was away on vacation.
all I heard was Hank Williams.....your cheatin heart....and perhaps some Cher
died on January 1, 1953. Williams was an American singer-songwriter and musician regarded as one of the most significant country music artists of all time. Williams was born with a mild undiagnosed case of
spina bifida occulta, a disorder of the spinal column, which gave him lifelong painβa factor in his later abuse of alcohol and other drugs. In 1951, Williams fell during a hunting trip in Tennessee, reactivating his old back pains and causing him to be dependent on alcohol and prescription drugs. This addiction eventually led to his divorce from
Audrey Williams and his dismissal from the
Grand Ole Opry.
Williams was scheduled to perform at the Municipal Auditorium in Charleston, West Virginia. Williams had to cancel the concert due to an ice storm; he hired college student Charles Carr to drive him to his next appearance, a concert on New Year's Day 1953, at the Canton Memorial Auditorium in
Canton, Ohio. In Knoxville, Tennessee, the two stopped at the
Andrew Johnson Hotel. Carr requested a doctor for Williams, who was feeling the combination of the
chloral hydrate and alcohol he consumed on the way from Montgomery. A doctor injected Williams with two shots of vitamin B12 that contained
morphine. Carr talked to Williams for the last time when they stopped at a restaurant in
Bristol, Virginia. Carr later kept driving until he reached a gas station in
Oak Hill, West Virginia, where Williams was discovered unresponsive in the back seat. After determining that Williams was dead, Carr asked for help from the owner of the station who notified the police. After an autopsy, the cause of death was determined to be "insufficiency of the right ventricle of the heart."