Nearly forty years after a failing country singer signed a legal pad in Montgomery the buried document finally brought his daughter home. In 1989 the Alabama Supreme Court affirmed Jett Williams as a rightful legal heir to half of the estate of her father Hank Williams and fulfilled a protection he had tried to secure before she was ever born.
On October 20 1952 Hank sat down in Montgomery Alabama to sign a notarized custody and support agreement for an unborn child. He was twenty nine years old and only seventy three days remained before he would die in the back of a baby blue Cadillac.
That contract with nineteen year old Bobbie Jett placed his mother Lillie Williams and his older sister Ernestine Irene Williams Smith at the center of the future of the child. Fifteen years before signing that paper Hank had depended on those same two women to build his music career out of the Montgomery boardinghouse run by Lillie.
In the late 1930s fourteen year old Hank won an amateur contest at the Empire Theater and landed a twice weekly radio slot on WSFA in Montgomery. Lillie and Irene then ran the family business behind his teenage band the Drifting Cowboys. Lillie drove the group sedan across South Alabama with upright bass fiddles tied to the roof while Irene sorted stacks of listener mail by county and nailed handbills to general store walls and stood at schoolhouse and tavern doors collecting fifteen and twenty five cent admissions in a cigar box.
That fierce family partnership carried Hank to Nashville in 1946 where he signed with Acuff Rose Music and became the biggest star on the Grand Ole Opry. By the fall of 1952 spinal surgery and heavy drinking and prescription painkillers had led to his dismissal from the Opry and a contentious divorce from his first wife Audrey Sheppard who was the mother of his three year old son Randall Hank Williams Jr.
Worn down by pain and addiction he still used his final strength to accept paternity and financial responsibility for the child he would never meet.
During that turbulent year Hank lived between the house of his mother in Montgomery and bookings on the Louisiana Hayride. He fathered a child with Bobbie Jett and then married nineteen year old Billie Jean Jones in October 1952. Before that marriage he had his lawyer draft the notarized October agreement and the contract stipulated that Lillie would raise the infant in Montgomery and Irene would assume legal guardianship if Lillie died or became incapacitated.
Hank died at age twenty nine on January 1 1953. Five days later and three days after twenty five thousand mourners filed past his casket at the Municipal Auditorium in Montgomery Bobbie Jett gave birth to a daughter named Antha Belle Jett on January 6 1953. Honoring the signed instructions of her son Lillie brought the newborn home to her house on McDonough Street and petitioned to adopt her legally in December 1954.
Before the final adoption decree could be signed fifty six year old Lillie died of a heart attack on February 26 1955. Thirty two year old Irene then stepped in as co administrator of the Hank Williams estate alongside William W. Stone who was the second husband of Lillie and she took control of family property and the trunks of handwritten song manuscripts Lillie had saved.
When the terms of the 1952 contract called for Irene to take in two year old Antha Belle she declined custody and formally renounced the backup guardianship her brother had arranged. Behind closed doors family members and estate attorneys negotiated the complex royalty division of the catalog of Hank while Audrey Sheppard maneuvered to secure the full child heir share for young Hank Williams Jr.
In March 1955 the Montgomery County Juvenile Court declared the toddler a ward of the state and placed her for closed adoption. Renamed Cathy Louise Deupree by her adoptive parents Wayne and Louise Deupree of Mobile Alabama she grew up completely cut off from the Williams family and omitted from official biographies while the songs of Hank earned millions of dollars.
For more than three decades she was erased from the official family record while the music of her father generated millions.
Notice of the birth of the child had scarcely vanished from Montgomery court files except for a single $2,000 trust fund Lillie had set aside before her death. When Cathy Deupree turned twenty one in 1974 and asked about that small inheritance adoptive relatives told her only vague rumors that Hank Williams might have been her biological father and she had grown up without a single keepsake or photograph of him.
In the mid 1980s after relocating to Nashville and hiring investigative attorney Keith Adkinson she petitioned to unseal the locked Alabama adoption and probate records. Inside the files Adkinson uncovered the original October 1952 custody contract signed by Hank Williams alongside court papers showing how the estate administrators had handled the child after the 1955 death of Lillie.
A 1987 Alabama court ruling declared her the daughter of Hank and demonstrated that she had been defrauded out of her birthright. The landmark decision that followed in 1989 completed the long journey home for the daughter Lillie had honored and the estate had buried and proved that a signature placed in love and fear in October 1952 could still speak across nearly forty years.