John Derbyshire recently had a really well-done piece on Hank Williams in the National Review.
Hank Williams died in either 1952 or 1953, in either Tennessee or West Virginia. The confusions arise from the fact that he was in the back seat of a car, late on New Year’s Eve, being driven from Montgomery, Alabama to Charleston, West Virginia, by a young student hired for the purpose. At some point, most likely before midnight, Hank Williams died, from a combination of booze and pain-killing drugs — he suffered from a chronic back problem. Hank was 29 years old….
It is a wretched life to read about (there is a very good biography by Colin Escott), illuminated only by religious faith. Hank was raised in the spasmodic, repenting, all-consuming but occasional Christianity of the south, and as he sank into pain and despair in his last days, it was all he had left to cling to. One of his last recorded remarks was: “Every time I close my eyes, I see Jesus coming down the road.” The wretchedness and the booze destroyed his personality. I don’t think Hank Williams was ever an easy person to get on with, but by his late twenties he was impossible….
Sad or gay, though, the songs Hank Williams wrote all came from the same place — from what Bob Dylan called “the old weird America,” a place where “multiculturalism” was not an empty cant phrase mouthed by social-engineering bureaucrats, but a daily reality of white, red, and black, hillbilly and cajun, bluegrass and blues, all jostled together — bickering, fighting and oppressing, to be sure, but also working, drinking, singing, and coupling. That America has now gone for ever, paved over with strip malls, industrial parks, community colleges, and trimmed suburban gardens. We gained a lot in the process, no doubt, but we lost something too. We lost it, and it will never be seen again in life: but the ghost of it is still there for anyone who seeks it, in the songs of Hank Williams.
Johnny Cash recently enlisted Nick Cave to help him do a really just (the wonder-struck and bemused irony is almost palpable in smirking Cave’s voice) cover of Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” on American IV: The Man Comes Around.
Fine Print’s Barry Engelhardt caught a Hank Williams III show last fall, and wrote a really great article about the topsy-turvy singer and his Ryan Adam-like tantrums.
Whether you love him, hate him or simply didn’t know he existed until you saw this article, one thing is certain, you can’t help but feel a little sorry for Shelton Williams, a.k.a. Hank Williams III. After all, the boy’s grown up in boots that seem impossible to fill. His grandfather conceived everything that is right about Country Music, dominating an era when country was country and men were men, but Hank Sr. died of a drug overdose at the age of twenty-nine, leaving everyone to wonder what could have been. He’d sang about working class ethics, women, and booze, and was the first installment of one of the longest running and most widely known musical legacies in recent history. Then Hank Jr. hit mega-stardom in his own right, giving birth to, well, I’m not quite sure what he birthed. Maybe Monday Night Football and Kid Rock. A strange legacy, but if it wasn’t for his kinfolk, Hank III probably wouldn’t have graced the pages of Rolling Stone, Time, Newsweek, and GQ….