The ploy worked, and the producer let the song slip by at the tail end of a late-night session. As the band was packing up, Sholes told one of them, “I don’t think we’ve got a single side here we’ll be able to use.” Of course, he was wrong, and Hank’s little deception won him a hit that became what today’s singers call a “career song.” It had been a long, long road to Nashville.
It began up beyond the northeastern border of Maine, in the Nova Scotia village of Brooklyn, where Clarence Eugene Snow was born on May 9, 1914. He and his three sisters led a reasonably normal life until he was eight; that year his parents divorced. Their split plunged Hank into a series of childhood experiences that resembles something out of a Dickens novel.
Two of his sisters were sent to an orphanage, and young Hank was sent to his paternal grandparents; he missed his mother, though, and repeatedly ran away to be with her. Finally she agreed to let him stay and moved to the coastal town of Lunenberg, where she remarried. By now a young teenager, Hank soon ran afoul of his new stepfather, a rough, violent fisherman. As Hank told it, “I was treated by him, mildly speaking, like a dog.
I took many beatings from him and still carry scars across my body that were left by his ham-like hands.” Years later, these experiences would lead Hank to form a foundation to help abused children; they would also affect him in more subtle ways, making him quiet, introspective, at times almost withdrawn. To escape from this impossible home life, he began to ship out as a cabin boy on a large fishing schooner.