Hank Williams

Hank Williams

Specials

by John Morthland

Where to begin an article about Hank Williams! How about with the kind of gross overstatement that it�s impossible to disprove (or prove)? To wit:

Hank Williams is probably the most influential recording artist of all time. In his day, he cut across all race, age and class barriers; today, his influence is possibly even stronger. Don Covay and Little Richard, to name but two, have cited Hank Williams as a major influence. (Hank, in turn, had learned nearly everything he knew about guitar and singing from an old black street singer in his home town of Montgomery, Alabama.) Later, Bob Dylan was to call Hank one of his two biggest influences. Of all the records in my collection, Hank�s are about the only ones that my parents ana t can agree upon as oeing gooa music.

Hank died early on the morning of January 1, 1953, on his way to a gig in Canton, Ohio. He died in the back seat of his car; the coroner�s report said it was a heart attack. He was nine months short of his 30th birthday.

His death seemed fated, climaxing as it did the end of an unbelievable year. Exactly one year prior to his death, he had barged into his house on a New Year�s drunk and taken four shots at his wife, Audrey. Their tempestuous marriage (traced from �Baby We�re Really in Love� to �My Love For You has Turned to Hate�) ended soon, and Hank remarried shortly before his death, on stage in New Orleans. Twice, in fact — once before each show. (Ironically, his second wife, a singer named Billie Jones, married Johnny Horton after Hank�s death, and Horton died later in a car wreck.) The legality of the second marriage was questionable,, and to this day lawyers for both women are often in the courts arguing about who has rights to his estate.

In that year before his death, Hank was on an endless drinking binge. The parties he threw were legend, lasting weeks at a time, and he made it to jobs only when someone picked him up, put him in a car, and drove him to the location. He was dropped from the Grand Ole Opry, even at the peak of his popularity, for drunkenness and failure to show. One drink of liquor got him drunk, and he was incapable of stopping at one. Even when he went into sanitariums to detoxify, he ended up paying the attendant to slip some whiskey into his orange juice. He had a horrible back injury, for which he took tranquilizers, and heart trouble, for which he took a heart relaxant. Too much of the latter (chloral hydrate) was said to be what killed him. There was a scandal, one of many surrounding him, when it was learned that the relaxant was prescribed to him by an unlicensed doctor who was an ex-con, but for a good ol� boy from the South, there was nothing unusual about such a doctor.

For he was just that: a good ol� boy from the South. He was just like the people he sang to in the honky tonks and school auditoriums, country people gone to the city. He had little education, but much wisdom. He could beat his wife one day and the next day donate thousands to charity. When he remarried, he announced publicly that he was doing it to spite Audrey. He never forgot his friends, or his enemies, and he was as likely to hitchhike somewhere as he was to take one of his Cadillacs. His funeral in Montgomery was attended by 25,000 people.

In his four biggest years, and in the years after his death, Hank Williams basically imprinted country music on the national consciousness. Pop singers like Tony Bennett and Rosemary Clooney recorded his songs, and Hank himself made it onto national TV shows like Perry Como�s. Now that may not seem like a major accomplishment in the day of Glen Campbell, but at the time, :�liillbilly music� was aimed at as limited a market, and had as little importance as �race music.� Hank changed all that. The �high, lonesome sound� of his voice, the universality of his songs, captured the nation�s fancy; He was even considered by many a �folk artist,� and while I think that label reveals a misconception about popular music in general, I can see where it came from.

Quite simply, he used material from any source imaginable. �My Bucket�s Got a Hole In It,� was done years earlier by Louis Armstrong. �A Picture From Life�s Other Side� came from the turn of the century. �Too Many Parties� was a pop hit in 1925, and �Lovesick Blues,� his first hit, originated from the same era. He sang blues like he learned them from Teetot, the Montgomery street singer. Country music was in the process of becoming country and western, so he recorded cowboy songs and put that Bob Wills swing feel into several of his own songs. Spirituals like �I Saw the Light� were one of his staples.' �Kaw-Liga,� the story of a wooden cigar store Indian who fell in love with a wooden Indian maid across the street, was representative of his novelty tunes. Under the name of Luke the Drifter, he recorded moralistic recitations like �Be Careful of the Stones That You Throw� and �No, Joe, No,� an anti-Stalin song. �Fool About You� is a raucous rockabilly tune five years ahead of its time.

He wrote most of his own material, often in the back seat of his car on the way to a show. Hank would make up the songs and one of his Drifting Cowboys would write it down. He told one interviewer that he threw out any song that took him more than 20 minutes to write, adding that while he might have lost a few good ones that way, most songs that took that long came out forced and unnatural.

That attitude reveals a simplicity that carried over to his recordings and performances as well as the songs themselves. The Drifting Cowboys were a string band — steel guitar, fiddle, bass, lead guitar, his own rhythm guitar — in the country tradition. Their backing was sparse, to highlight his voice, and their solos short and to the point. And no matter what material he did, Hank was true to his origins: rural Alabama, and heavily influenced by black blues. So even though his songs, as done by himself or Tony Bennett, were pop hits, they were also unmistakeably in the traditional vein.

They remain so today. Every country star worth his sequins and his Winnebago has at least one Hank Williams song in his repertoire, and among those who have done tribute albums are Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Don Gibson, George Jones, Charlie Rich, Johnny Cash, Stonewall Jackson, and Hank Williams Jr., who sang the soundtrack to his father�s film biography, �Your Cheating Heart,� made years after his death. Country-rockers Ronnie Hawkins, Del Shannon and Roy Orbison have also done albums of Hank�s songs, as have Connie Stevens and the 101 Strings.

Ask any two people what their favorite Hank Williams songs are and you�ll likely get two different answers, so I�m not going to inflict my tastes on you beyond the obvious ones like �Jambalaya,� �I�m So Lonesome I Could Die,� �Lost Highway,� �Hey Good Lookin�,� �You Win Again,� and �I�ll Never Get Out of This World Alive.� What�s needed here is a word of caution about the albums in print, because they are a musical jigsaw puzzle.

For those who thought Mike Curb was setting new standards in incompetence at MGM, rest assured he�s only carrying on a long tradition. After Hank�s death, drums were overdubbed onto all of his. records, presumably in order to �modernize� him. The biggest travesties are the �Hank Williams and Strings� albums, where a sappy violin section was added. There are curiosities as* well: I have one version of �Alone and Forsaken� with a studio band, another with just Hank�s voice and guitar. Many of his biggest hits were posthumous, so I guess some were made from living room tapes to which a band was later added. Every few months a �new� Hank Williams album is released and an �old� one deleted; it�s usually the same songs, slightly reprogrammed, with a new cover. The way songs overlap from album to album makes a mess, and what�s doubly infuriating about all this is that Hank Williams made that label, he being the first artist they signed after MGM decided to get into records. (Before that, he had eight sides on the Sterling label, but those are all available now bn MGM.)

As a country musician said to me a few months back, �It is impossible to have grown up in America in the 1950�s and never have heard Hank Williams.� I tend to agree, but the following list of albums in print should be of some help to those who haven�t heard him and those who have heard a little and want to know where to turn next. All catalog numbers are MGM-SE...

RECOMMENDED:

Essential Hank Williams (4651) or

Very Best, Vols. 1 and 2 (4168 and 4227), or

24 of Hank Williams� Greatest Hits (4755-2), or

Greatest Hits, Vols. 1, 2, and 3 (3918, 4040 and 4140)

PICK AND CHOOSE:

I Saw the Light (3331) (Spirituals)

Unforgettable Hank Williams (3733)

Wait for the Light to Shine (3850) (spirituals)

Let Me Sing a Blue Song (3924)

Wanderin� Around (3925)

I�m Blue Inside (3926) (mostly blues, real good)

First, Last and Always (3928)

Spirit of Hank Williams (3955)

On Stage, Vols. 1 and 2 (3999 and 4109) (radio transcriptions)

Lost Highway and Other Folk Ballads (4524)

Kaw-Liga and Other Humorous Songs (4300)

Luke the Drifter (4380) (recitations)

In the Beginning (4576)

Life to Legend (4680)

POISON:

Legend Lives Anew — Hank Williams With Strings (4377)

More Hank Williams and Strings (4229)

I Won�t Be Home No More - More Hank Williams and Strings (4481)

Hank Williams and Strings, Vol. 3 (4529)

Hank Williams Sr. and Hank Williams Jr., Vols. 1 and 2 (4276 and 4378) (Hank Jr. is great, but...) u