Hank Williams never released “I’ll Fly Away” on a record. The versions fans can hear today exist only because a WSM photographer looked into a box of discarded radio discs and decided they were worth saving.
A 15-minute show at 7:15 in the morning
In 1951, Hank Williams was the biggest star in country music, and he still had a morning radio job. His show on Nashville’s WSM ran 15 minutes, aired at 7:15 a.m., and was sponsored by Mother’s Best Flour. Between songs, Hank traded jokes with announcer Louie Buck and pitched flour and biscuits to listeners across middle Tennessee.
Because he spent so much of that year on tour, Hank and the Drifting Cowboys prerecorded 72 of the shows. They were cut onto 16-inch acetate discs, which were made to be played on the air a few times at most. Together, those shows held 143 performances.
An old hymn he never cut for his label
Many of those performances were gospel songs, and one of them was “I’ll Fly Away.” Albert E. Brumley got the idea for it while picking cotton in 1928 and published it in 1932. Gospel acts had been recording it since at least 1940, and the Chuck Wagon Gang’s 1949 Columbia recording, later chosen for the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry, had just carried it further.
Hank Williams sang it on more than one Mother’s Best broadcast. Later releases include two separate takes, each logged by its acetate number. Neither was issued during his lifetime, and there is no known studio recording of the song by him.
Hank Williams died on January 1, 1953. He was 29.
Saved from the trash
Years after the broadcasts, WSM cleared out old material, and the boxes of Hank’s acetates were put out to be thrown away. Les Leverett, the Grand Ole Opry’s staff photographer, spotted them and took them. Accounts disagree on exactly when this happened. The Tennessean put it around 1965, other reports tie it to a station move, and one gives a much later date. They all agree on the part that matters: the discs were headed for the garbage, and one man stopped them.
Leverett held on to them for years. Bob Pinson, acquisitions director at the Country Music Hall of Fame, eventually talked him into bringing them in. In early 1981, a 26-year-old engineer named Alan Stoker cleaned the lacquer-coated aluminum discs with soap and water and transferred them to reel-to-reel tape. Stoker later said what struck him was Hank’s warmth. “He had a great laugh.”
“I wish I had never told anybody”
In the 1980s, former Drifting Cowboys fiddler Jerry Rivers introduced Leverett to Jett Williams, Hank’s daughter, and Leverett handed the acetates over to her. That should have been the happy ending. It was not.
Some tracks had already leaked out on bootlegs. A company called Legacy Entertainment, which had obtained copies through former Drifting Cowboy Hillous Butrum, prepared its own release in 1997. PolyGram and Hank’s heirs sued to stop it, and the fight over who owned the recordings dragged on for years. Leverett, who had simply pulled the discs out of the trash, ended up in the middle of it. He told The Tennessean the whole thing had brought him nothing but heartache.
“I wish I had never told anybody I had these.”
The last disputes were settled in May 2008. That October, Time-Life released the first 54 performances as The Unreleased Recordings, and the complete Mother’s Best collection followed as a 15-CD set in 2010.
Where to hear it now
In 2022, BMG gathered Hank’s gospel performances from the show into I’m Gonna Sing: The Mother’s Best Gospel Radio Recordings, the first set built only around his hymns from those broadcasts. “I’ll Fly Away” is the second track. It runs just over two minutes, recorded one morning in 1951 by a man who had less than two years left, on a disc that was supposed to be played once and forgotten.