Billie Jean Horton, a true American classic

Billie Jean Horton is an American classic and a treasure unique to this area, a product of the old South and the classic country-western honky tonk scene that gave us music and role models from George Jones to Lefty Frizzell.

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Now 83 and living in an assisted-care facility, the red-tressed hourglass-figured Bossier City beauty captured the hearts of two of country music's icons, minstrel Hank Williams Sr. and balladeer Johnny Horton. Each of those men died young and tragically, Williams in 1953 and Horton in 1960, leaving her a young widow with babes in hand. So she added the role of single mother to her repertory and soldiered on.

Smart, sassy, sexy and possessed with spirit and captivating zest, she was born for today's era of social media and supermarket checkout-line tabloids but arrived 60 years too soon. Billie Jean at the height of her allure could have given the Kardashians a run for their money. She was as much at home on the skeet range and the fashion runway as the stage and nightclub front rows.

If it premieres in theaters Friday as expected, the long-in-the-making movie "I Saw the Light" may give the legend of Billie Jean Horton another grab at the brass ring. The biopic of Hank Williams Sr., starring Tom Hiddleston in the title role, features up-and-coming actress Maddie Hasson as Billie Jean, the self-assured daughter of a police captain and detective. Hasson, from North Carolina, is known for her supporting-actress work in such works as "God Bless America" with Bobcat Goldthwait and the Fox series "The Finder," a spinoff from "Bones" starring Geoff Stultz and the late Michael Clarke Duncan.

Following Williams' untimely death on New Year's Day 1953, Billie Jean spent much time in court defending her status as his widow and establishing claims to copyrights and estates. She fought a massive legal battle in the early 1970s to stop distribution of the MGM film "Your Cheatin' Heart," a cinematic version of Williams' story starring George Hamilton. Ultimately, she won.

"The movie portrayed me as a harlot," she told this writer in 1986. "But there they were in court, looking at my marriage certificate with mine and Hank's signatures on it."

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But those who know her understand that Billie Jean Horton could fill a movie like this on her own. She deserves a biography, though the people who could fill it with anecdotes and innuendo all are dead: Hank and Johnny, best friend Johnny Cash, Claude King, Faron Young (who dated Billie Jean and who introduced her to Williams), and the energetic, larger-than-life and ebullient Merle Kilgore. Even some of her major antagonists in life, who could probably have offered significant observations, are gone: Audrey Williams, Shelby Singleton, Tillman Franks. If you have to ask who any of those folks are, you don't know country music, and you don't know Hank and Johnny.

This columnist is lucky enough to know Billie Jean Horton, not in her prime perhaps, but certainly in active years when she was actively protecting and multiplying the intellectual property of the music of her late musical husbands. (She's been married two other times in her life, to non-musical men. She's single now.)

The first encounter was just as a fan watching her perform in the mid-70s at a music festival at a park near Marthaville honoring the grave of the "unknown Confederate soldier," now called the Rebel State Historic Site.

The next encounter was perhaps a decade later, when she was interviewed by this columnist for The Shreveport Times and the Los Angeles Times. Upon arrival at her house on Audubon Place on the East Kings Highway Bayou "Old River," two things were awe-inspiring: the sight of her car, a long-wheelbased, low-slung 12-cylinder-engine beauty custom-built in the style of a classic Deusenberg, and Billie Jean herself, lithe with long, dark reddish-black hair finishing yoga exercises in a tight white outfit that looked like it had been spray-painted on her.

Captivating to say the least, she proved a frank, articulate, confident interview subject, with strong opinions, strong loves and dislikes, attended by Yanina, the middle of her three daughters, all of whom continue to live in Shreveport today.

She also turned into a friend, helping out in tough times. Within a few years, when a family member had a lengthy hospitalization, Billie Jean and Yanina were kind enough to babysit two rambunctious young boys, in their single-digit years, when their dad had to cover some late-night rock or rap concert or review a band in some smokey bar. (Other frequent volunteer babysitters who deserve a public shout-out years later include James and Louise Burton, Karen Carlson and Ellie Ransburg.)

She also started to call at late, odd hours, and none of the calls was boring.

One example: A call came that she had broken her leg. How? A cat had started to wail and screech outside and Billie Jean figured it was time to grab her gun and take care of the matter. She started to search for the cat outside, stepped into a gopher hole or the like and snapped a bone. While she was lying there in misery, the gun thrown just out of reach, who came along to comfort her until help came? The cat, of course. It got adopted.

That's the Billie Jean one hopes is captured, in some sense, by Hasson in "I Saw the Light." Not the caricature in the George Hamilton movie, but the captivating beauty who could snare the hearts of Faron Young, Hank Williams and Johnny Horton, and still find love for a cat that literally made her break a leg.

It's still wait-and-see with the new movie, Yanina Horton said during a brief chat at Julie-Anne's.

"It depends on how they portray my family," she said. "Mama's kind of pleased with it, she says it will be okay."

Uniquely the widow of two country legends, Billie Jean shared insights in her 1986 interview.

"Hank was actually a fan of Johnny's and used to listen to every record Johnny would come out with," she recalled. "He would stop the car if we were riding along and Johnny came on the radio.

"I remember the last record Hank heard him sing — 'The Child's Side of Life,' which was a real dog, too. Hank said, 'Wait a minute, baby, let's hear this kid.' After it was over, he turned it off and he said, 'No son, this one ain't gonna make it!' But he told me that one day Johnny would be one of the biggest stars in the business.

Nine months after Williams died, she married Johnny Horton.

"Horton was a beautiful person," she recalled. "We hunted and fished together and after we married, I quit the road. I just wanted a home and a family."

John Andrew Prime wrote for The Times for more than 37 years, from 1978 to late 2015. He is the coauthor of a book on Barksdale Air Force Base and has contributed to books on area music. He is co-author of “Legendary Locals of Shreveport," just published by Arcadia/History Press. Email him at japrime@bellsouth.net or visit his website at japrime.com.