During the Great Depression in 1930s Alabama, a young Hank Williams and his older sister Irene spent their days swinging hoes in the dirt behind their mother’s boarding house and carrying baskets of fresh vegetables door to door for nickels and dimes. With their father, Lon Williams, hospitalized long-term at a veterans facility in Louisiana, their mother, Lillie Williams, kept the family afloat by opening modest boarding houses in Georgiana and later Montgomery. When she moved them into a second boarding house with an open plot of land out back, the sturdy, no-nonsense mother turned the yard into a working garden to feed her family and paying boarders. She taught her children never to ask anyone for pity, insisting they earn every coin with their own hands. Born just a year apart in 1922 and 1923, Irene and young Hiram worked side by side in the Southern heat to break the hard ground, plant seeds, haul water, and tend rows of vegetables and fruit trees. Because Hiram was born with spina bifida occulta, a spinal condition that left his thin frame in constant pain whenever he bent over a furrow, Irene routinely stepped in to take the heavier lifting off her little brother. Once the boarding house kitchen had enough food, the two children packed the extra okra, tomatoes, and peaches into baskets and walked the dusty neighborhood streets, knocking on doors to help Lillie make the rent alongside the pennies they earned shining shoes, delivering papers, and selling roasted peanuts. At the end of those long afternoons, with sore feet and dirt still on their hands, they sat together on the wooden porch steps to count out their change before handing it to their mother at suppertime. Years later, even after he stood under the lights of the Grand Ole Opry as country music’s biggest star, Hank Williams still spoke and sang in the plain, unvarnished voice of the boy who had worked those Alabama garden rows beside his sister.

In 1931, after a house fire destroyed nearly everything Lillie Williams and her two children owned in Georgiana, Alabama, a local landlord let them move into a raised two-story cottage at 127 Rose Street with an open plot of dirt out back.

A year earlier, in 1930, seven-year-old Hiram King Williams and his eight-year-old sister, Ernestine “Irene” Williams, had watched their father leave home for good. Elonzo “Lon” Williams, a former railroad locomotive engineer for the W.T. Smith Lumber Company who had suffered a head injury and broken collarbone during World War I, developed facial paralysis and a brain aneurysm that sent him to the Veterans Administration hospital in Alexandria, Louisiana, for the next eight years.

Left to raise two young children during the worst years of the Great Depression, Jessie Lillybelle “Lillie” Skipper Williams refused to rely on charity. Standing nearly six feet tall, she took shifts in a local cannery, worked nights as an unlicensed practical nurse at a hospital, and turned the Rose Street cottage into a working boarding house for railroad men and traveling laborers.

Behind the house, Lillie put Irene and young Hiram—nicknamed “Harm” around the family—to work breaking the South Alabama soil. Born just thirteen months apart in August 1922 and September 1923, the two children swung hoes in the summer heat, planted seeds, and hauled buckets of water down rows of okra, tomatoes, butterbeans, and greens alongside fruit trees.

Because Hiram had been born with spina bifida occulta, an undiagnosed spinal defect that caused persistent lower-back pain whenever he bent over a garden furrow, Irene routinely stepped across the rows to take the heavier lifting and bucket hauling off her younger brother.

Once Lillie had enough produce to feed her family and the paying boarders at the dining table, Irene and Hiram packed the surplus vegetables and fruit into baskets. Walking the dusty streets of Georgiana, they knocked on neighborhood doors to sell the fresh garden crops for nickels and dimes, adding those coins to the pennies they made selling roasted peanuts in paper pokes, delivering newspapers, and shining shoes.

While living at the Rose Street boarding house, the family also caught a financial break when campaigning U.S. Representative J. Lister Hill passed through Butler County. Approached by the Williams children on a Georgiana street, Hill helped Lillie cut through government red tape to collect Lon’s delayed military disability pension, bringing a steady monthly check into the household.

It was on the wrap-around porch and underneath the raised stilts of that Rose Street house that eight-year-old Hiram began practicing a $3.50 acoustic guitar Lillie bought him from a Sears, Roebuck catalog. In exchange for small coins and plates of food from Lillie’s boarding house kitchen, a Black street musician named Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne sat with the boy in Georgiana and later in nearby Greenville, teaching him chord progressions, blues timing, and how to hold an audience on a street corner.

In the fall of 1934, Lillie moved the family fifteen miles north to Greenville, opening a new boarding house right beside the Butler County courthouse so she could serve meals to lawyers, jurors, and county clerks. Three years later, in July 1937, after Hiram got into a dispute with a Greenville high school physical education coach over exercises his weak spine could not handle, Lillie packed up the family and partnered with relatives to open a boarding house on South Perry Street in downtown Montgomery.

That same summer in Montgomery, thirteen-year-old Hiram began calling himself Hank and busked with his Silvertone guitar on the sidewalk outside the studios of radio station WSFA. After winning fifteen dollars at an Empire Theater talent contest in late 1937 and landing his own fifteen-minute radio program as the “Singing Kid,” Lillie and Irene turned the Montgomery boarding house parlor into the headquarters for his teenage band, the Drifting Cowboys.

For the next decade, as Lillie drove the band’s sedan to schoolhouse and honky-tonk bookings across Alabama and Irene collected admissions in a cigar box at the door, the three of them ran Hank’s career with the same fierce self-reliance that had kept their boarding houses afloat.

Even in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Hank Williams was headlining the Grand Ole Opry and riding in a custom Cadillac, he still returned between tours to his mother’s Montgomery boarding house on McDonough Street, sitting at the kitchen table with the woman and the older sister who had once counted out vegetable money with him on the wooden porch steps of Rose Street.