Introduction
HANK Williams has been dead for fifty years. In fact, it was fifty years ago the night of this writing that he began his last journey. Knowing all that we now know about the precise route, it’s tempting to look at the clock and imagine where he was. It’s equally tempting to wonder if he knew where he was. Midnight struck for Hank Williams somewhere on that last eerie road trip. But where? Born in the oppressive heat and humidity of south Alabama, he almost certainly died with snow in his headlights.
Ten years ago, I was finishing the first edition of this book. I clearly remember working on New Year’s Eve 1992, having much the same thoughts as I have now. Where was he forty years ago tonight? If asked, I wouldn’t have bet on too much new information turning up between the fortieth and fiftieth anniversaries of his death. Perhaps a couple of interviewees who’d eluded us would emerge; perhaps one or two who’d avoided us would cooperate; perhaps a few recordings would turn up. I thought our little book would otherwise stand unchallenged and unchanged. But I was wrong. Several of Hank’s former bandmembers, long thought lost, have indeed come forward. Many new recordings have been uncovered. Hank’s sister, Irene, died, leaving a trove of photos, papers, and memorabilia that no one knew she possessed. Another trove of legal correspondence has surfaced, and beneath the lawyers’ dry concision there’s a sense of the bitter conflict that drove one legal action after another, year upon year. Crucial information has emerged on the blues musician, “Tee-Tot,” who taught Hank. Even more information has surfaced on the long car ride during which Hank died and the bogus doctor who treated Hank with such disastrous results over his last weeks.
As early as New Year’s Day 1953, Hank Williams became an object. Parties wrestled over him, not only as if he wasn’t there (which, of course, he wasn’t), but as if he’d never been there. He was like an antique to which several family members laid claim. Yet the reason that the legal actions continue year after year is that the small body of work left to us grows in importance. Every year, several hundred thousand people buy a Hank Williams CD. Surely longtime fans aren’t buying these records. Thanks to the record companies, longtime fans have every hit several times over. Those several hundred thousand new sales must, for the greater part, represent a new audience discovering the truths that we discovered all those years ago. It seems as though the sterner stuff survives. Both Frank Sinatra and Perry Como sold millions of records, yet it’s Sinatra’s dark soliloquies that have lasted while Como’s records remain trapped in their place and time. Bruce Springsteen’s bleakly minimalist Nebraska dismayed the stadium rock crowd on release in 1982, but now sounds better with every passing year. The fierce, insurgent music of Hank Williams still reaches us in a way that the cheerier music of Eddy Arnold and Red Foley does not. Yet, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Arnold and Foley comfortably outsold Hank Williams.
Hank Williams had the great fortune to come and go at exactly the right time. Most of his contemporaries lived long enough to make some very bad records; Hank didn’t. Most of his contemporaries had to come to terms first with rock ’n’ roll, then with the Nashville Sound; Hank didn’t. Several of his contemporaries found themselves hawking remakes of their greatest hits on cable television; Hank didn’t. Death is a good career move if it can be timed right, and no one ever timed it better than Hank Williams. In terms of forging a legend, he could have done no better than burn out at twenty-nine before his fire grew dim and the face of country music changed. His death left what is still the most important body of work in country music; in fact, one of the defining caches of American music. It also left the tantalizing promise of what might have been.
Perhaps the next ten years will see as much new information emerge as has emerged in the last ten years, but that’s no reason to hold off this revision. For a few weeks in 1994, we flattered ourselves into believing that our old work was definitive. That’s no longer the case. Enough new information has surfaced to warrant a complete rewrite, and so many new photos have been found that Kira Florita and I coproduced a photoessay, Hank Williams: Snapshots from the Lost Highway (DaCapo Press, 2001), which serves as a companion piece to this work.
Thinking about Hank Williams, I return endlessly to a poem I learned back in England when I was a child, A. E. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young.” Housman says much that I’ve struggled to say when called upon to explain the iconic power of Hank Williams. Here it is, in part.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears;
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
Colin Escott
New Year’s Eve 2002