He took his first drink when he was 10 years old. In Hank Williams: A Biography, Colin Escott-who also provides notes for the boxed set, as he did for 1990's The Original Singles Collection-unearthed this verse, written when Hank was 11: "I had an old goat / She ate tin cans / When the little goats came / They were Ford sedans."įrom the beginning, he also drank. When, at 14, his family moved to Montgomery (because there was a radio station there), he changed his name to Hank because he thought it sounded more like a cowboy singing star's name.įrom the beginning he wrote songs, and even his earliest lyrics show a mastery of rhythm and absurdist humor. At 11, Harm was already playing guitar on the streets of the small towns of southern Alabama. Williams' mama, Lillie, was a tough, hard, and greedy woman, the stereotypical stage mom, obsessed with forwarding her son's career. His first nickname, given to him by his mother, was a beautiful piece of literary foreshadowing: Harm. He would recall in interviews that his first experience with music was at age 5 or 6, sitting by his mother's side in church and singing along while she played the organ. Hiriam Williams was born September 17, 1923, in Mount Olive West, Alabama. The Hank Williams set locates the artist behind the legend and, without sentimentality, without hero-worship, without varnishing over his many faults, restores him to vibrant life. That's why The Complete Hank Williams, released to coincide with what would have been his 75th birthday, is as stunning to its genre as The Complete Works of William Shakespeare is to literature. His songs are no longer aired, even on so-called country radio. And Williams is now a specialty taste even more so than Shakespeare, while legions of imitators-including Williams' own son and grandson-have enriched themselves on his genius.Īnd yet of all the American musical icons of this century-Elvis, Dylan, Sinatra, Armstrong, Ellington, Bernstein, Gershwin-Hank Williams is fading fastest from our national memory. Williams' lines-"Hey good lookin' / Whatcha got cookin'?"-are common parlance, just like "All the world's a stage." Trainspotters claim neither man wrote his entire catalog. Their influence is so pervasive, so much a part of our culture, that their contributions are almost invisible. Williams has often been called "the hillbilly Shakespeare," and even if the moniker is an insult to both writers, they do have much in common.
His body of work has defined country music for half a century. And, of course, he wrote and wrote and wrote about the devastation of a love gone rancid ("Your Cheatin' Heart," "Cold, Cold Heart," "You Win Again"). He wrote about the exhilaration of new love ("Howlin' at the Moon") and plain old lust ("Hey, Good Lookin'"). He wrote of deep compassion ("I'm Sorry for You, My Friend") and terrible vengeance ("My Love for You "), intense longing ("I Can't Help It ") and glorious redemption ("I Saw the Light"). The Complete Hank Williams, a just-released limited edition, 10-CD boxed set of 225 recordings, illuminates the singer's prodigious gift for channeling the warring factions of his personality into song. It's hard to say which passion caused him the most grief. He loved Jesus, women, and the bottle about equally. But no single artist has encompassed both sides like Hank Williams. One is pure, pious, and sentimental the other, "whiskey-bent and hell-bound." The best country artists-Merle Haggard, Patsy Cline, George Jones-have a little of each.
From the very beginning, from the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers' Bristol Sessions, country music has had two souls. Such are the contradictions of country music's most troubled legend, contradictions encoded in country music itself. He loved Western movies and comic books, suffered from a degenerative spinal disease, and spent his entire life under the influence of domineering, grasping women.
He was a sensitive, religious man and a doting father. Thirty-six of those were Top 10 country hits. In his brief recording career, from 1947 to 1952, he cut 66 songs in his own name, about 50 of which he wrote entirely or in part. He was a stingy manager of top-flight musicians and a notoriously unreliable employee who somehow managed to get canned from the Grand Ole Opry at the height of his own popularity.Īnd Hank Williams was one of the greatest popular songwriters in American history. He was a semiliterate plagiarist, a whoremonger, a brawler, and an egomaniac. Hank Williams was a drunk, a mean drunk who died at 29 in the back seat of a Cadillac.
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