Keith Richards says “Honky Tonk Women” was written as a “Hank-Jimmie Rodgers sort of number.” The first popular reference to a “rolling stone” was heard in Hank’s 1949 cover of Leon Payne’s “Lost Highway.” And, obscure as it is, on an early demo record, covering Lonnie Glossom’s “Rockin’ Chair Money,” he sang, “And now I’ll rock, yeah, rock, oh baby, rock, rock on down the line.” That was in 1948.Īmong the country set, there have always been similar assumptions about the broad outlines of his work. (Haley had also ripped off “Cold, Cold Heart,” retitling his record “Icy Heart.”) Hank’s honky-tonk classic “I’m a Long Gone Daddy” is the derivation of Bruce Springsteen’s line about being “a long gone daddy in the U.S.A.” His guttural blues lament “Ramblin’ Man” (“I love you baby but you gotta understand, when the Lord made me he made a ramblin’ man”) foretold Dickey Betts’s tune that “swaggers along in the grand tradition of Hank Williams.” Hank even sang about purple skies long before Prince was born.

To make the point, a good prelude to reading these pages would be to find and listen to his first successful song, the 1947 12-bar blues rag “ Move It On Over,” which spins a melody instantly recognizable as Bill Haley and His Comets’ “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock,” which birthed rock and roll to the masses a year after Williams died. And when Hank Williams is listened to, something revelatory seems to happen. But the truth is, writing about music is never as effective as the act of simply listening to it.

Those are among the saddest words ever written and sung in music-Elvis once said so-and arguably the greatest. Few musical legends live on as an almost touchable, feelable presence in the anatomy of modern popular music as does the enigmatic, goofy-looking guy who carried a nascent country music formula to its full potential, then exited stage right in total and abject loneliness.Ĭonsider textural lyrics about robins weeping and leaves dying, the will to live lost, punctuated by the lament I’m so lonesome I could cry. Yet, more than 60 years after his premature death at age 29, no country artist living or dead can approach the familiarity the general public has with Hank Williams, whose sad, lonely songs are playing right this minute on some roadhouse jukebox. Of the 33 records that Hank Williams placed on Billboard country and western Top 10 charts during his short lifetime, only two made the mainstream pop chart, and even those had much to do with pop artists like Tony Bennett having their own hits with them first.

Hank by mark ribowsky