Losing Her By Fractions - Del Ray Hillian

Del Ray Hillian was born and raised on Sand Mountain, Alabama, a hard plateau where the air is thick with both history and humidity. His reputation as a songwriter was always for lyrics that cut straight to the bone. A former gospel tenor who fell in with the barroom circuit by his mid-twenties, Hillian carried himself with the grizzled ease of the outlaw generation — too plainspoken for Nashville polish, too raw for radio sweetness.

His lone single for WonTone, “Losing Her By Fractions (One Fifth at a Time),” was cut in Fort Payne in 1978, and it bears all the marks of a man torn between scripture and the saloon. The song runs nearly five minutes, building and breaking like the storm it describes: quiet, confessional verses that give way to surging choruses, then fall back into hush, echoing the push-and-pull of a love dissolving by degrees. Hillian sings low and ragged, his voice catching on the edges like a man talking to himself as much as to the listener.

Though marketed at the time as a straight honky-tonk ballad, the track is closer to outlaw country in its bones. The band drives harder than Nashville norms for the time, with drummer Terry “Sticks” Collier letting the beat drag just enough to give the song its staggering gait. The highlight comes at the midpoint: a twin-guitar break from Bobby “Two-Tone” Mathers and Clint Rawlins, drafted for the session from a Scottsboro bar band. Their harmonized lines climb and collapse in lockstep, wringing heartbreak out of six strings as Hillian mutters back into the microphone, half-sung, half-sworn.

Lyrically, the conceit is cruel and clever — a relationship slipping away measured out in halves, quarters, and fifths, matched by the bottle draining on the table. The closing line of the bridge, “that handle had a handle on me,” lands like a confession in a confessional booth with no priest, just an empty glass.

Released on a limited run of 45s, Fractions sank without trace, overshadowed by WonTone’s pivot to disco and pop. But the few who heard it never forgot it. In late-night jukebox rotations from Huntsville to Chattanooga, the record became a kind of regional ghost song — too heavy for AM radio, too haunting to die.

Del Ray never cut another side. He returned to Sand Mountain, playing VFW halls and back-road beer joints until his death in 1994. Yet “Losing Her By Fractions (One Fifth at a Time)” endures as one of WonTone’s most haunting curiosities: outlaw country distilled into a single, slow-burning pour, a song that rises, falls, and finally empties out — just like the struggle with the bottle and the lost love it mourns.

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She said she’d had enough of the bottles and the bars,
Of me rolling home late, changing clothes out in my car.
I swore I’d change my ways tomorrow, then tonight I changed my mind,
Now I’m watching her walk away in increments of time.

I’m losing her by fractions....one fifth at a time,
Every whiskey takes me further, another pour across the line.
Her love was steady measured,
mine spilled out like cheap red wine,
And now I’m losing her by fractions—one fifth at a time.

It was the addition of my addiction that divided her from me,
It multiplied my weakness by a bottle, two, or three.
And I know I was never equal to what she needed me to be,
Still it never added up to me to think she’d really leave.

I’m losing her by fractions....one fifth at a time,
Every drink just takes me further, another pour across the line.
Her love was sippin’ whiskey,
mine a box of table wine
And now I’m losing her by fractions—one fifth at a time.

She was halfway out the door and I was three sheets to the wind,
She said, “You can’t have the whole of me and half your happy hour friends.”
And I thought, if I had a quarter for every time she said she’d leave…
But that handle...had a handle...on me.

And now I’m losing her by fractions, one fifth at a time,
Every bottle takes me further, another pour across that line.
And if I had the strength to stop it,
Lord, she would still be mine,
But I’m losing her by fractions—one fifth at a time.

If I had the strength to stop it,
Lord, yes, she would still be mine,
But I’m losing her by fractions—one fifth at a time.