Hank Williams

Texas, 1963. Strange rumors are circulating in the slums of San Antonio. Everyone knows that when things go bad, old Doc is the man to see: to pay for his daily fix, he'd be ready to patch up any wound. But for some time now, it seems he's even managed to heal the most desperate cases. In fact, whoever knocks on the door of his squalid boarding house on the South Presa Strip comes out completely changed. They say it's thanks to the Mexican girl who now lives with him. They say she has a wound on her wrist that keeps bleeding without ever healing. But what they certainly don't know is that Doc has a very particular confidant. Someone only he can see: the ghost of Hank Williams.

To talk about Hank Williams, one could start from his homeland, Alabama. Or one could begin from the back seat of that Cadillac where, on New Year's Eve between 1952 and 1953, his life tragically came to an end after just twenty-nine years. Steve Earle, a worthy heir to the country outlaws who have always inspired him, chose to start from his ghost. And in his first novel after a long career as a songwriter, he decided to tell the story of a doctor indissolubly bound to the legend of Hank Williams. Because Earle imagines that Doc, too, was in that Cadillac. And from that day on, nothing would ever be the same for him.

The book is titled "I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive", just like the last single of Williams's career. Even though it's set ten years after his death, the presence of the king of country looms palpably over every page. Hank is the mirror in which Doc sees the unraveling of his own life reflected. But he's also the mysterious counterpoint to his one last chance at redemption.

Sixty years have now passed since the death of Hank Williams. Looking at the black-and-white images of his lean, angular figure, with that inevitable cowboy hat pulled over his face, he seems to belong to a forgotten era, one the present has nothing left to do with. And yet his music hasn't lost the evocative power that made it unique from the very first moment. You just have to be able to recognize its traces, just like the characters in Steve Earle's novel.

Following the cues of "I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive", we too want to set off in search of the ghost of Hank Williams. Taking the occasion of the anniversary of his death to offer you an imaginary compilation dedicated to rediscovering his legacy.

"He'd spent most of his life in Southern joints, and it always ended up the same damn way. If you sat there long enough, sooner or later some asshole would put on a Hank Williams record. Old Hank was long gone, buried for almost a decade now under six feet of rusty red Alabama dirt, and yet he still kept collecting their nickels and making them cry. (…)

– SIDE A –

1. I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry

There are plenty of ghost stories in Alabama. One of the most famous tells of the spirit of a Methodist preacher named Bill Sketoe, hanged during the Civil War. A pit had been dug for his execution. A pit that, ever since the day of his death, no one has ever managed to fill, no matter how much earth they tried to throw into it.

Hank Williams was always a proud son of Alabama. And, just like Bill Sketoe's legendary pit, nothing was ever able to fill his heart: forever thirsty for everything, forever searching for something more.

There's no song in which he didn't leave some trace of that. But the most famous of them all is probably "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." It was never a hit, unlike so many other songs in his catalogue: on its release in 1949, it was simply put out as a b-side. And yet, few other Williams songs have been covered and reinterpreted so many times, becoming a true symbol of the father of American country music.

"Did you ever see a robin weep/ When leaves began to die?" Robin's tears, tears that seem to pour straight from the sky itself. "That meant he's lost the will to live/ I'm so lonesome I could cry." There's the whole weight of a man's grief, desperate to live every instant to the fullest, packed into those deceptively simple lines. Lines in which even the humblest of people can easily see themselves reflected, as always happens in Williams's songs.

Not just any voice will do to make those words ring true. But when, in 2002, Johnny Cash and Nick Cave met for the first time to record a song together, the choice was almost immediate. "I was secretly terrified I wouldn't be able to sing this song with him," Cave recalls. The old Man in Black would die the following year, and the illness was already eating away at him. "As I sat there with him talking, I wondered how he'd be able to sing anything at all. But when he started singing, all his illness seemed to disappear."

Johnny Cash & Nick Cave – I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry

(American IV: The Man Comes Around, 2002)

2. Ramblin' Man

On the streets of the small town of Georgiana, in the heart of Depression-era Alabama, it wasn't an everyday sight to come across an old Black bluesman with his guitar, playing on some street corner. Everyone called him Tee-Tot, though his given name was actually Rufus Payne. To the eyes of a white Southern kid, he was something utterly magnetic, impossible to look away from. Hank Williams was eleven years old the first time he encountered Tee-Tot's spellbinding voice. And from then on, he started following him everywhere, eagerly picking up the tricks of the trade from that old drifter.

His mother Lillie had no time to worry about how the boy spent his days: she was the one who had to keep the family going, ever since her husband had been admitted to a veterans' hospital because of wounds suffered in the First World War. In practice, Hank would never really get to know him. Truth be told, Hank wasn't even his real name. His parents had named him Hiram, after the King of Tyre from the Bible. But he preferred to pick a name better suited to the hero of some Western movie.

Life had no homeless fate in store for him like Tee-Tot's. And yet, in his own way, he too would become a wanderer: always on the road, riding in a car headed for his next show. "When the Lord made me, he made a ramblin' man." Who knows if, singing those lines, Hank's mind drifted back to the days of Tee-Tot. What's certain is that the dust of the road they were born from has traveled intact through time. Right up until it was picked up by Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, who gave it a desert-swept, seductive reading thanks to their unmistakable blend of shadows and whispers.

Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan – Ramblin' Man

(Ballad Of The Broken Seas, 2006)

3. Lovesick Blues

In Nashville, on the stage of the Opry House, there's a circle of oak wood, worn smooth by time. It was preserved from the boards of the old Ryman Auditorium, for years home to the Grand Ole Opry, America's most celebrated country music radio program. It's the wood once trodden by Hank Williams's boots on his debut at Nashville's musical temple. And that alone is enough for anyone who still steps onto that stage to immediately feel history's weight.

For years Williams had dreamed of being welcomed into the court of the Grand Ole Opry, alongside stars like Roy Acuff and Ernest Tubb. He would only manage it in 1949, thanks to his first great hit: "Lovesick Blues." According to legend, when the song was recorded, the reaction of his longtime mentor, publisher Fred Rose, was icy to say the least: "That's the worst thing you've ever done." Within a few months, though, the song would shoot to number one on the Billboard chart, branding Williams's very image with its heartbroken yodel. So much so that, from its very first notes, it earned him a triumphant welcome at the Ryman Auditorium (and from millions of American TV viewers).

Norah Jones hadn't even been born yet, back then. But Hank Williams's music has always played a fundamental role in her roots, so much so that she included the classic "Cold Cold Heart" on her hugely successful debut, "Come Away With Me." It's alongside the Little Willies, though, that the American singer chose to reveal her most rustic side, sweetening even the lonesome tears of "Lovesick Blues" with the honey of her voice.

The Little Willies – Lovesick Blues

(For The Good Times, 2012)

4. Still In Love

Nobody leaves a honky-tonk sober: alcohol and music have always been inseparable in the bars of the South. It was his cousin who introduced young Hiram to drink: their escapades through the Alabama woods regularly ended up in some dive bar where a fiddle and a decent stock of bottles were enough to dance the night away. Later, once Hank started playing around with his Drifting Cowboys, he had to learn to get used to honky-tonk bars: the natural stage for country music, with all the brawling and drinking that came with it. Often he and the band had to brandish guitars and bottles to defend themselves from some hothead. Often the ride home had to be spent with an ice pack on some bruise. And even more often, the night ended with a hefty dose of whiskey in his system.

Alcohol is the anesthesia with which to endure the operation of life, George Bernard Shaw once said. For Hank Williams it was always like that: the easiest way to try to exorcise his own demons. Concerts abruptly cut short, cancelled radio shows, film projects sunk before they even began increasingly punctuated his career, in parallel with his growing dependence on the bottle. But when it came time to step into the studio, Williams never lost his clarity. He approached every recording session with the secret awareness of a legacy destined to endure.

Chan Marshall too had to learn the hard way just how heavily alcohol can weigh on an artist's life. For a long stretch, the erratic nature of her live shows became almost proverbial. "It was something to do with feeling uncomfortable in my own skin," she says. "That's why alcohol was always by my side." Identifying with Williams's music, for her, has been like looking in a mirror since the very beginning. It's no coincidence that her cover of "Still In Love" dates back to the time of her second album as Cat Power, "Myra Lee," born from the same sessions as her debut. A choice that sounds like a declaration of belonging to the roots of the South.

Cat Power – Still In Love

(Myra Lee, 1996)

5. You Know That I Know

"When I hear Hank sing, all movement ceases to exist. The slightest whisper feels like a sacrilege." For Bob Dylan, the mystique of Hank Williams's songs has to do with the very essence of American music itself. "In the songs Hank recorded there were the archetypal rules of the poetic song. They had forms like marble columns, essential to the whole architecture. Even his words: every syllable he uses is divided up so as to achieve a perfect mathematical sense. You learn a lot about the art of songwriting from his records."

In the first volume of his autobiography, "Chronicles," Dylan recalls the first moment he heard Williams sing: "The sound of his voice went through me like a jolt of electricity," he recounts. A voice capable of redefining the very boundaries of a genre that seemed as unchanging as country: "They said he was a hillbilly singer, but I didn't know what that meant," Dylan continues. "Hank wasn't an empty head. There was nothing of the clown about him. Even as a boy I completely identified with him. I didn't need to go through his same experiences to understand what he was singing about."

In 2011, it was Dylan himself who brought together the artists called upon to set Williams's lost verses to music for the first time. "The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams" came from the old notebooks cluttered with unfinished songs that were found after his death. It pays tribute to Williams's legacy with an effort probably less personal than what Billy Bragg and Wilco did with Woody Guthrie's lyrics, but driven by the same desire to bring the furrow of tradition into the present. Alongside old Bob is also one of his most steadfast admirers of recent years, Jack White. Ready to shed the blues stamped with the White Stripes to step into the shoes of the sentimental cowboy of "You Know That I Know."

Jack White – You Know That I Know

(The Lost Notebooks Of Hank Williams, 2011)

6. Your Cheatin' Heart

The first time they met was among the wagons of a medicine show. He was playing his guitar amid miracle elixirs and sideshow oddities. She had stepped out of her Oldsmobile like a vision summoned by some street preacher. By the end of the night, Hank Williams was already ready to ask for Audrey Mae Sheppard's hand. They would marry the following year, 1944, at a Texaco gas station. But their love would always be tormented and stormy, caught between furious arguments and sudden reconciliations.

The divorce, as bitter as the script demanded, would be just the final page of a love fatally destined for self-destruction. Williams would die just a few months later, just in time to arrange a second marriage to nineteen-year-old Billie Jean Jones. But "Your Cheatin' Heart" would capture in its verses the bitterness of one final reproach: “Your cheatin’ heart/ Will make you weep/ You’ll cry and cry/And try to sleep/ But sleep won’t come/ The whole night through/ Your cheatin’ heart/ Will tell on you”.

The version of “Your Cheatin’ Heart” recorded by Beck alongside Jon Brion, hazy and opalescent like certain moments on Sea Change, is part of one of the most celebrated tributes to Williams in recent years: the tribute album “Timeless”, crowned “Best Country Album” at the 2002 Grammys. Proof that the echo of Williams's songs still resonates at the heart of American musical sensibility.

Beck – Your Cheatin' Heart

(Timeless: Hank Williams Tribute, 2001)

7. Alone And Forsaken

The allure of America's musical heroes lies behind the veil of an apparent contradiction: “the idea of the Christian and the sinner wrestling within the same body”. So says Amanda Petrusich, the New York writer and journalist who, in the pages of her book It Still Moves, chronicled the stages of a deeply personal journey to the heart of Americana. “It's the classic American paradox”, she continues. “Sinners obsessed with salvation, puritans absorbed in reading Playboy, gluttons fixated on healthy eating”. The tension between right and wrong, between the carnal and the spiritual, is in short what made the founding fathers of America's musical tradition, in Petrusich's words, “such hypnotic (and recognizably American) figures”.

Hank Williams is an emblematic example: thirsty for fame, for alcohol, for women. Yet always driven by a stubborn need for redemption. Saint and sinner, like every true man. So much so that he decided to invent himself a country-gospel preacher alter ego, Luke The Drifter, under whose name he released the songs deemed too “devout” for his official repertoire. Songs built around sermons with a biblical tone, backed by a droning organ and a lurching spoken delivery.

No one is better suited than Dave Eugene Edwards, leader of 16 Horsepower and Woven Hand, to still give voice to the deeply Southern religious sense of Williams. Raised by a preacher grandfather, amid visions of eternal damnation and old Johnny Cash records, Edwards has always placed at the center of his songs a literary calling directly inspired by the pages of Flannery O’Connor. In the tribute to his roots he paid alongside 16 Horsepower, “Folklore”, a Hank Williams song was bound to appear. And his choice fell on the anguished, questioning “Alone And Forsaken”: “Alone and forsaken by fate and by man/ Oh Lord, if you hear me please hold to my hand”.

16 Horsepower – Alone And Forsaken

(Folklore, 2002)

8. Keep It On Your Mind

The strength of Hank Williams's songs lies in their simplicity. The nostalgic wail of the steel guitar, the dusty rhythm, the brushstrokes of the fiddle: nothing more is needed to let his heartbroken voice cut through the purity of the melody. The same recipe applies to one of the biggest hits of his career, “Cold Cold Heart”. Except that it wasn't Williams's spare version that topped the Billboard chart, but the one thick with syrupy orchestration recorded by Tony Bennett in 1951. A union between the Tin Pan Alley pop tradition and that of hillbilly music that would open the doors to a new and much wider audience for the country epic.

“Tony, why did you ruin my song?”. That's reportedly how Williams greeted Tony Bennett after the triumph of “Cold Cold Heart”. In truth, though, it's said that Williams never missed a chance to put the Italian-American singer's version on the jukebox himself. But one thing is certain: it's in its barest, most unadorned form that Williams's songwriting reveals its nature as the archetype of country music (and of American song tout court).

Low fidelity, in short, suits Williams's songs more than ever: it helps explain why Americans (with their unmistakable flair for hyperbole) coined for him the label “Hillbilly Shakespeare”. From the early cassette tapes of Mountain Goats, then, emerges a raw, vibrant rereading of “Keep It On Your Mind”. The year is 1992, the same year as the first cassette John Darnielle recorded with his trusty Panasonic tape recorder (which, not coincidentally, also contained a cover of “I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry”). Hank himself, probably, would have agreed: in certain cases, a lo-fi microphone can say more than an entire orchestra.

The Mountain Goats – Keep It On Your Mind

(The Hound Chronicles / Hot Garden Stomp, 2012 [Reissue])

9. I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive

Every mile of road, for Hank Williams, was like torture. On his endless car trips from one show to the next, along the lost highways sung about in “Lost Highway”, the pain in his back never gave him a moment's rest. The fault of the spina bifida that had marked him since birth: he'd tried surgery, but it hadn't helped at all. On the night of December 31, 1952, too, he was on his way to a show. A few months earlier, the Grand Ole Opry had dropped him after yet another drunken binge. To free himself from alcohol, Hank had even gone so far as to seek treatment from a self-styled doctor, who had prescribed him a cocktail of sedatives and morphine.

That evening, snow had kept him from flying, so he set off for Ohio in his powder-blue Cadillac. At the wheel was a college kid named Charles Carr. At the first stop, in Tennessee, Hank had immediately needed a doctor. A shot of morphine and vitamins, and then back on the road. But from the back seat of the car, not another sound was heard. Only at the next stop, at a gas station in West Virginia, did Charles realize that Hank wasn't simply sleeping.

The last single he had released, before that fateful dawn in 1953, sounded like a sinister premonition: “No matter how I struggle and strive/ I’ll never get out of this world alive”. The hoarse, cavernous voice of C.W. Stoneking seems to come from some unreal time, as he repeats those lines once more. That's always how it is with the music of the eccentric Australian bluesman: you'd swear it came off some old gramophone, unearthed in the corner of an attic. His version of “I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive” is part of a tribute album dedicated to Hank Williams and Leadbelly, namely the white and black roots of American music. It's titled “Hiram And Huddie”, after the two artists' given names, and stands as one of the least predictable tributes to the country-blues legacy released in the 2000s.

C.W. Stoneking – I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive

(Hiram And Huddie, 2009)

10. I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry (Reprise)

The notes stretch out, floating suspended in the nave of the church. Twenty years have passed since the neo-Gothic architecture of Toronto's Church of the Holy Trinity first hosted the Cowboy Junkies. “The Trinity Session”, the album born within those walls, has by now earned the reputation of a classic. So, at the end of 2006, the Canadian band decided to return to the same Anglican church that had hosted their most celebrated recordings. Once again, Margo Timmins's enveloping voice slowly caresses the contours of “I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry”. This time, though, she's joined by Vic Chesnutt and Ryan Adams, lending a choral breadth to the anguish of loneliness evoked by Hank Williams's lyrics.

The uniqueness of the Alabama songwriter's figure is something deeply rooted in the American consciousness. In his book "Lovesick Blues", devoted to Williams's life, writer Paul Hemphill recalls how his own initiation into Williams's music came through the radio he listened to as a child in his father's truck, always on the road across America. Years later, he recounts going to visit his old father to show him his new Chevrolet. "It's probably got a terrible transmission," his father needled him skeptically. "But it's got a great radio," he replied proudly. His father kept pressing him: "And does it pick up country music?" "Of course it does." "Then it must really be some radio. There hasn't been any country music since Hank died."

In truth, though, Hank never really disappeared. His shadow, just as in the pages of Steve Earle's novel from which we set out, has never stopped being cast over the present. And the echo of his voice has never stopped finding hearts willing to take it in. "A gut-wrenching, desperate moan that cut into your bones like a cold, damp day. The funeral wail of a folk spirit announcing imminent ruin." More than anything, the voice of an unquenchable longing that nothing could ever silence.

Cowboy Junkies feat. Vic Chesnutt & Ryan Adams – I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry

(Trinity Revisited, 2007)

"Being alone is a temporary condition, a cloud that blocks out the sun for a while and then, once it moves on, makes the rays seem even brighter. Like when you're far from home and you miss the people you love and you feel like you'll never see them again. But you will see them, and when that happens you no longer feel alone.

Being lonesome is another thing entirely. It's incurable. Terminal. A hole in your heart so big a tractor-trailer could drive through it. So big that no amount of money, whiskey, women or drugs could ever fill it, because you dug it yourself and you're still digging it, one lie, one disappointment and one broken promise at a time."

Note

All quotes from Steve Earle are taken from "I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive", Mondadori, 2012, translated by Martino Gozzi.

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