washerman's dog: Remembering the Long Gone Daddy: Hank Williams

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Remembering the Long Gone Daddy: Hank Williams

Hank Williams

If there were but one lonesome reason to give country music a chance that reason would be named Hank Williams. Hank was a lightning strike across the face of American music: brilliant, dangerous, crooked, electrifying and short lived. They say that the temperature around a lightning strike is several times hotter than the sun. That is an apt descriptor of the searing influence Hank had on popular music.

The songs he wrote and sang between the age of 25 (1949) and 29 (1953) when he died in the back of a Cadillac are every bit as enduring as any other songbook by any other American song writer, including the Gershwins, the Berlins, Cole Porter and Bob Dylan. Country music was changed completely after Hank. It was his ability to compress the emotional whirlwind of the human spirit into a 3 minute song that has made songs like, Cold Cold Heart, You Win Again, Hey Good Lookin’, I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry, and I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive (to name just a few titles) instant classics. Shakespearian in their profundity, alarming in their simplicity.

Alas, he lived the life he wrote about and like that lightning flash he came and he went in barely the blink of an eye. His son Hank Jr. never really knew him but went on to become as rowdy as Dad. Hank III, keeps the flame alive today. Hank’s songs are still recorded by contemporary musicians from all sorts of backgrounds. He is not merely a country singer, but an American and indeed, a musical giant.

Tonight’s post is a doubleheader. First a 2001 collection of some of Hank’s best known songs by a jury of outstanding rockers and rollers.