MONTGOMERY, Ala. - Editor's note: Retired News & Observer columnist Dennis Rogers and his wife, HollyAnn, are traveling the nation in a motor home. This is his latest column about their road trip.

South Alabama is nowhere to be on a short, cold day when the wind is whipping random snowflakes across a low, leaden sky. This is a sad and hungry place of peeling paint, leaning barns, rusting tools and swaybacked trailers.

And ghosts. Ghosts everywhere. Ghosts of the cotton cavaliers who truly believed Southern bravery could withstand cold Yankee steel. Crumbling ghosts of the grand homes they built. Weeping ghosts of those who suffered in agonizing slavery to support that faded empire on their bent shoulders.

We are not here by choice. We are here to seek another ghost, one of our own and one as elusive as any who haunt this defeated land.

We are here to find Hank Williams. We are here to stand at his grave and drink a toast with good Southern whiskey to the man who hurt enough to write these eloquent words:

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill

He sounds too blue to fly.

The midnight train is whining low

I'm so lonesome I could cry.

I've never seen a night so long

When time goes crawling by.

The moon just went behind a cloud

To hide its face and cry.

Did you ever see a robin weep

When leaves begin to die?

Like me he's lost the will to live,

I'm so lonesome I could cry.

The silence of a falling star

Lights up a purple sky.

And as I wonder just where you are

I'm so lonesome I could cry.

Don't worry, I won't hold it against you if you think we're crazy to drive five hours in nasty weather to pay our respects to a sickly and thoroughly screwed-up man who died in the back seat of his baby blue Cadillac on New Year's Day, 1953. I hope you never know the kind of lonely heartbreak it takes to drag those words up from your soul, but if you do, I'll lift a bottle over your grave, too.

Williams wrote "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" and dozens of other country classics in a short career that began on the streets of Georgiana, Ala., where he shined shoes and learned music from a black street singer named Rufus "Tee-Tot" Payne. It ended when he was 29 years old.

Hank died, as did Robert Johnson, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, at the top of his game. "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive" was heading for the top of the charts when he breathed his last near Oak Hill, W.Va., on his way to play a show in Dayton, Ohio. His death certificate says "heart failure," but it was the blues that killed him. He'd used everything that was in him to write the truth so the rest of us wouldn't feel alone in the night. And when he was done, when all the songs had been written, there was nothing left to do but die. Jesus paid for our sins. Hank Williams redeemed our lost loves.

Where Hank is -- and isn't

The Hank Williams Museum at 118 Commerce St. in downtown Montgomery is a good place to get your bearings when you're searching for Hank. Here, just a few blocks from where 30,000 people attended his funeral, the remnants of his short life are treated as holy relics. His suits -- he was one of the first to dress in rhinestones on the staid stage of the Grand Ole Opry -- are on display, along with his fabled blue Caddy convertible. And his hat, photographs and, always, his music. Much of the collection belongs to his son, Randall Hank Williams Jr.

But if you are lucky, and we were, you'll meet Joe Jones at the museum. He doesn't work there, but he's a part of the place. To say he looks eerily like Williams is to state the obvious. It is when he says that, since the Air Force transferred him to nearby Maxwell Air Force Base in 1983, "I've been chasing his ghost" that you realize he caught the specter. He not only looks like Hank, he sounds like him, too. He's got the same high cheekbones, the same lank hair, the same ... whatever it is that made Hank Hank.

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