Hank Williams recorded 30 hit singles, including seven number-one hits, on the Billboard Top Ten country-western charts in six years, but his erratic behavior caused by a mixture of alcohol and narcotics led WSM’s Grand Ole Opry to fire him in August 1952. Seeking to revive his stalled career, he left his mother’s boarding house in Montgomery, Alabama, on Dec. 30 for four holiday concerts, with 18-year-old Charles Carr, the son of a taxi service owner, driving his 1952 Cadillac convertible. After an overnight stop at the Redmont Hotel in Birmingham and rest and medical attention at the Andrew Johnson Hotel in Knoxville, weather delays in Tennessee and dense fog that thwarted air travel forced him to miss two New Year’s Eve concerts in Charleston, West Virginia, as they raced toward Ohio for two New Year’s Day shows in Canton. In the predawn hours of Jan. 1, 1953, on the road south of Beckley, Carr found Williams unresponsive on the backseat of the Cadillac and rushed to Oak Hill Hospital, where the 29-year-old singer, known for songs such as Hey, Good Lookin’ and I Saw the Light, was pronounced dead of “heart failure” at 7 a.m. Tyree Funeral Home embalmed and dressed his body and drove it in a hearse to Montgomery for services, and an estimated 20,000 mourners overflowed and surrounded the City Auditorium on snowy Sunday, Jan. 4. Within a year, publishers released four more songs that became hits, including Kaw-Liga and Your Cheatin’ Heart, and the route from Knoxville to Blaine to Bristol to Bluefield to Princeton to Mount Hope to Oak Hill remains a sacred pilgrimage for many fans.