The song is “My Name Is Bocephus,” and Hank Williams Jr. wrote it by himself for his 1986 album Montana Cafe. On the surface it is a rowdy piece of country rock. Underneath, it is a grown man taking the nickname his father gave him as a baby, a name borrowed from a ventriloquist’s dummy, and wearing it like a badge.
The Dummy on the Opry Stage
Randall Hank Williams was born on May 26, 1949, in Shreveport, Louisiana. A month later the family moved to Nashville, because his father, Hank Williams, had been invited to join the Grand Ole Opry.
One of the Opry’s biggest laugh-getters in those years was Rod Brasfield, a comedian from Smithville, Mississippi, who was the show’s top male comic from 1947 until 1958. Brasfield played the lovable sad sack opposite stars like Red Foley, Minnie Pearl and Hank Williams himself, and he sometimes worked a ventriloquist routine with a dummy named Bocephus.
Hank borrowed that name for his baby boy. Accounts differ on why. Some tellings say the infant looked like a little doll; others say it was simply a father’s joke. Either way, it stuck.
Three Years, Then a Shadow
Hank Williams did not get long with his son. He died on New Year’s Day 1953, at 29, when the boy was three.
Audrey Williams raised Hank Jr., and she put him to work early. He played his first concert at eight, in the Audrey Williams Musical Caravan of Stars. He was taught to sing his father’s songs in his father’s style, and the crowds who came to see him expected exactly that. At 14 he released his first album, built on his father’s songs.
Even then, the nickname followed him. He cut some rock and roll records under the name Bocephus, and in 1975 he released an album simply titled Bocephus. Looking back in a 1982 interview, he summed up those years by saying that doing Hank Williams was fun for the little boy but hell for the man.
The Fall That Gave Him His Look
On August 8, 1975, during a hunting trip in Montana, Hank Williams Jr. slipped on an icy ledge on Ajax Peak and fell about 500 feet down a jagged slope. The head injuries were massive. It took several operations and months of recovery before he was back on his feet.
When he came back, he came back looking different. The beard, the cowboy hat and the sunglasses hid the scars, and they became his trademark. Musically, he had already started turning toward the blend of country, rock and blues he loved: Hank Williams Jr. & Friends, recorded before the fall, came out while he was still recovering. In his autobiography, Living Proof, he wrote that the goal was to make his own music, “not Daddy’s, or Mother’s, or anybody else’s.”
The Song
By the time “My Name Is Bocephus” came out in 1986, that new sound had made him one of the biggest acts in country music. Montana Cafe went to No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart.
The song plays like a self-portrait. He walks into a bar, hat, shades and beard and all, and introduces himself. He waves off the imposters going around pretending to be him, saying they don’t have the scars or the feel of the real thing. That line carries extra weight from a man who spent his childhood being taught to imitate someone else, and whose scars came from a Montana mountain.
He also says where his music came from, and the list is pure Hank Jr.: Lynyrd Skynyrd, Ernest Tubb, and his daddy, side by side. He calls what he plays country rock and blues. And at the very end, he spells out the nickname his father gave him, letter by letter.
Opening the Show
Hank Jr. took the song on the road. When he recorded concerts between June and September 1986 for the album Hank Live, “My Name Is Bocephus” came right after the opening intro. The live album was released in January 1987, went to No. 1 on the country albums chart and was certified Platinum. That live version later landed on his Greatest Hits, Vol. 3.
In 1987, the Country Music Association named him Entertainer of the Year. His reaction used the old nickname: “This is the one old Bocephus has been looking for.”
That same year, the Country Music Hall of Fame inducted Rod Brasfield, the comedian whose dummy had lent the name. In 2020, Hank Williams Jr. was named to the Hall of Fame himself, joining his father there.