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Arriving on a Jett plane THERE’LL BE NO TEARDROPS TONIGHT GEOFF HELISMA
It’s 1974 and Cathy Louise Deupree is sitting on a bed talking with her adoptive mother and playing a game of “20 questions”. It was a surprise meeting, she told the Washington Post’s Jeffrey A. Frank in 1989. Her mother says, “I’m going to tell you who your father could be. You know who he is?” Deupree answers, “No ma’am.” Her mother offers a clue: “Well, he’s a musician [and] ... he comes from Montgomery, Alabama.” Deupree says “the first thing that popped into [her] head” and guesses Nat King Cole. Her mother is somewhat nonplussed by the answer: “Oh be serious Cathy!” Deupree then plumps for Hank Williams – and the 21-year-old’s life soon takes some remarkable turns.
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hese days Deupree’s legal name is Jett Williams, an amalgam of her mother’s and father’s names. Bobby Jett met Hank Williams in Nashville and dated him during the first six months of 1952; Jett Williams was born Antha Belle Jett on January 6, 1953, five days after Hank Williams, 29, died of a heart attack in the backseat of his Cadillac. Hank, one of country music’s revered superstars – he wrote songs such as Cold, Cold Heart, Your Cheatin' Heart and Hey, Good Lookin' – had executed a custody agreement for the yet unborn child in October 1952. His mother, Lillian Stone, adopted Antha in December 1954 and renamed her Catherine Yvonne Stone, however, Lillian died in 1955. ‘Cathy’ was made a ward of the state of Alabama. She was later adopted by Wayne and Louise Deupree who renamed her Cathy Louise Deupree. There were two court cases brought by Hank’s wife Audrey, involving the sale of Hank’s song copyrights and the management of his estate, when Cathy (Jett) was 15. ‘As the trials continued, one headline was particularly intriguing: Possible Daughter Complicates Trial,’ Jeffrey A. Frank wrote in his Washington Post story. ‘In fact, a court had learned for the first time of the existence of a possible heir [Jett Williams].’ But there was no epiphany for the 15-year-old Cathy Deupree. “The first time I knew was when I was 21,” she tells me, speaking on the phone from Hartsville, Tennessee. Her reaction to this revelation was a comforting resolution to the mystery of who her parents were. “It wasn’t so much that he was Hank Williams,” she says, “it was that he wanted me; he’d signed all of the legal papers, he just didn’t count on dying at 29.” Come the early 1980s, ‘Jett went on a search for her true identity,’ says her official Facebook biography. ‘Dead end after dead end and failure after failure led her eventually to Keith Adkinson, an investigative attorney from Washington, DC, whom she later married.’
Nine years later, after ongoing litigation, ‘the web of deceit so artfully woven for so long by so many’ was unravelled. The Alabama Circuit Court ruled in October 1987 that Hank Williams was Jett’s father. In July, 1989, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled she was defrauded and awarded her one-half of his estate. Finally, in July 1992, the Federal Court in New York awarded Jett her share of Hank Williams’ copyright renewal royalties. When asked about how her marriage to Adkinson affected her life and music, Jett says she was “married to Keith for 27 years and he has passed away [in 2013]....” She pauses, a short silence follows, and then she digresses, “I would like to say I am looking forward to my first trip to Australia.” So how did Antha Belle Jett become Jett Williams? “A gentleman by the name of Owen Bradley, who is one of the greatest [record] producers, it was actually his suggestion; when I was working with him around 1985, 1986. “I had, like, eight names in my life and we decided to join them all together, and that is what we came up with. Eight names, two adoptions, two foster homes, so we just put it all together and made a full circle.” Jett made her professional debut in 1989, at the age of 36, fifteen years after discovering who she was. She says at a musical level she lived “a kind of normal life working in Montgomery; and I was always playin’ music and singin’ ... mostly for friends and getting together with some good pickers who lived in Montgomery and, you know, we’d sit around and pick and play – mostly country music then.”During this time, she says, there were no thoughts of making country music her profession; that was until she “made a demo and took it to Nashville. The producers said they wanted to work with me. I went on from there; one of the biggest booking agencies signed me on and I was able to go out on the road with my dad’s original band members – Donny Helms played steel for my Dad and Jerry Rivers played fiddle.”
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September 2017