Hank Williams frequently boasted in life that he could draw a bigger crowd dead than other country singers could draw alive. Thousands of people attended his January 4, 1953, funeral, and countless thousands have visited his grave in Oakwood Cemetery in the fifty years since.

From the Upper Wetumpka Road cemetery entrance, the grave is at the top of the hill on the right. The big marble monument is hard to miss. It includes Williams’s boots and cowboy hat immortalized in stone, with "Luke the Drifter" inscribed beneath and a lyric from Williams’s gospel song “I Saw the Light.”

People leave flowers, money, bottles of whiskey. Alan Jackson had a 1991 country hit with “Midnight in Montgomery,” a song about a nocturnal visit to the grave. A less reverent song by the Austin Lounge Lizards goes, “I want to ride in / The car Hank died in.” The actual “death car,” a blue 1952 Cadillac, is the grimmest and most popular exhibit at Montgomery’s Hank Williams Museum. It’s on loan from Hank Williams Jr., who reportedly drove it to high school. Other items on display include the Gibson guitar that supposedly was Williams’s first and a bottle of Hidalgo, the 12-percent-alcohol elixir he once hawked in a traveling medicine show.

Some people call the exhibit exploitative, but it’s worth remembering that Williams actually charged admission to afternoon and evening performances of his wedding to his second wife, Billie Jean.

The museum is in the old Union Station downtown at 118 Commerce Street, across from the Civic Center. Hours are from 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Saturday, and 1:00 to 4:00 p.m., Sunday. Admission is charged. For more information about the museum, call (334) 262-3600 or log onto www.thehankwilliamsmuseum.net.

(Photographs courtesy of Niki Sepsas.)