Photograph by Lori Canada

Bedford Police Officer Brian Turpen has spent years immersed in Hank Williams’ life and music. He has compiled a collection of articles he has written into a book called Ramblin’ Man: Short Stories from the Life of Hank Williams.

For the last seven years, when he hasn’t been chasing area hell-raisers, Bedford police officer Brian Turpen has quietly and painstakingly researched the life of a man who, according to country music lore, was perhaps the quintessential hell-raiser: Hank Williams Sr.

Turpen, whose zeal for the music legend is already well-known among a small but fervent church of Hank Williams superfans, may be on the verge of achieving wider recognition with the July release of his book, Ramblin’ Man: Short Stories from the Life of Hank William.

The book is a collection of more than 50 articles Turpen has published in various fanzines and newsletters over the last few years, all of them written exclusively by the man in blue, with the exception of one sprawling, standout piece on the 1949 Grand Ole Opry European Tour, which was co-written with Manfred Reinhardt of Germany.

A native of Bedford – Bloomington’s folksy neighboring town whose own southern-fried history reads not unlike a Hank Williams song – Turpen has been sporting a badge and fighting crime for nearly 20 years. Known widely as one of the “good cops” in a town divided sharply along socioeconomic lines, he says he cut his musical teeth on the classic country his parents had on constant rotation: Hank Williams, Webb Pierce, Hank Snow and other genre-defining legends of that era.

“The music of that time was original and not cookie cutter like so much of what you hear today,” he says.

Later, Turpen’s curiosity about Williams was further piqued when he began listening to the plaintive, autobiographical songs of Hank Williams Jr., the troubled and talented son of Hank Sr.

But it was when he encountered Colin Escott’s Hank Williams: The Biography that Turpen took his novice interest to a new level, making contact with two of the book’s contributors and setting into motion a dizzying series of leads that the police officer pursued as tenaciously as he would an unsolved whodunit.

After numerous interviews – which Turpen speculates were so fruitful in part because folks were more apt to trust a crime buster – and both scholarly and less formal research, some of his contacts urged him to put his findings out in the ether.

“People started asking me, ‘Hey, why don’t you write up some of your findings and send them to this or that newsletter or fanzine?’” Turpen says with an easy laugh. “I really never had to try very hard. It just all sort of branched out from those first contacts, and after each new thing I had published, people would typically keep asking me to put out more.”

Eventually Turpen’s work caught the eye of Louisiana’s Robert Gentry, who made the unassuming police officer a deal he couldn’t refuse: Release a batch of the meticulously researched articles as a book through Gentry's publishing company, Old Paths, New Dreams, at no financial risk to the author.

“His game plan was to sell it through some trade magazines and things like that first, which we’ve been doing, and then get it picked up by some major chains like Barnes and Noble and Borders, which is also happening,” Turpen says. “We’ve also got some museums selling it, as well as the Earnest Tubb Record Shop and the Country Music Hall of Fame.”

The book has been promoted in print and radio, and sales are going “better than expected,” according to Turpen. Sales are likely to be propelled with book signings on the horizon, including one Sept. 14 at the Hank Williams Museum in Montgomery, Ala., where Turpen will be the guest of honor that evening as part of a weekend-long Hank festival.

Part of the book’s appeal, aside from the scrupulous abundance of details and intimate photographs boiling between its covers, is the articulate but plainspoken, just-the-facts-ma’am mode in which it was written. Moreover, because of his tenacity, Turpen uncovered a number of widely unknown tidbits about the enigmatic honky-tonk legend, his day gig again coming in handy.

“Some researchers might stop if they come to a dead end and say, ‘Never mind,’” he says. “But in my job as an officer, that’s not an option.”

Turpen’s perseverance enabled him to uncover little-known facts about Williams, including the short life and death of his older brother, Earnest Huble, a behind-the-scenes look at several of his more popular songs and the “hillbilly poet’s” brief stint as a college student.

Has Turpen been surprised by any of his own findings?

“Somewhat,” he says. “I did learn that Hank didn’t drink nearly as often as has been portrayed. He would go six months without drinking a drop and then go off on a binge, which explains why his tolerance was so low. He also had a very religious side and wrote a lot of great gospel songs. He was a complicated man.”

Aside from reluctantly promoting his current book, with the gentle prodding of his wife – whose sapphire peepers are the stuff of a Hank song – these days Turpen continues to focus on what has been his real passion for the last five years: Williams’ 1953 death at the age of 29.

Turpen’s work on this subject – whose mysterious circumstances have captivated fans for five decades – is already familiar to Hank wonks and anyone who caught his appearance on the Hank Williams documentary that was part of the PBS American Masters Series.

Turpen says that, in addition to his vast body of “so many well-defined and known songs,” Williams’ untimely, controversial death partly explains the romantic, mythical stature he has held for the last 50 years. Turpin hopes to release his investigations into the country giant’s death as a book at some point.

For now he is content with enforcing the law, spending time with his de facto manager-wife Jennifer and exuberant daughter Miranda and seeing what happens with his fledgling side career as a writer.

Not bad for a man who says, “Before all this, the only thing I had written were reports for school!”

Lori Canada can be reached at locanada30@yahoo.com.