29 July 2008

Profile of Hank Williams

Country giant established “standards” during his brief career

Hank Williams, considered by many county’s leading artist.

(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)

Hank Williams (1923-53) was the most significant country music figure to emerge during the post-World War II period. In the course of his brief career, Williams wrote and sang many songs that were enormously popular with country audiences; between 1947 and 1953 he amassed 36 Top 10 records on the country charts, including “Lovesick Blues,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” “Jambalaya (on the Bayou),” and “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” All of these hits – along with many other Williams songs – have remained country favorites and are established genre “standards.” In addition, his songs were successfully covered by contemporary mainstream pop artists, thus demonstrating the wide-ranging appeal of the new country material.

Hank Williams reinvigorated for the postwar country audience the enduring myth of the hard-living, hard-loving rambler. Williams’s life tracked that image so closely that one might believe – erroneously – that promoters had custom-designed a suitable biography: born into crushing poverty in Alabama, this son of a sharecropper learned to make his way at an early age by performing on the street, learning from a black street singer named Rufe “Tee-Tot” Payne. By the time he was 16, Williams had his own local radio show; shortly thereafter he formed a band and began touring throughout Alabama. Enormous success came by the time Williams was in his mid-20s, but it did not come without problems. By 1952 he was divorced, had been fired from the Grand Ole Opry (for numerous failures to appear), and was seriously dependent on alcohol and painkilling drugs. He was dead on New Year’s Day 1953 at 29, having suffered a heart attack in the back of his car en route to a performance.

Williams affirmed the importance of religious traditions in country music by recording some gospel material. However, the fact that he recorded his sacred tunes under a pseudonym, rather than under his own name, ties him more closely to the practices of black secular singers than to those of most white artists.

[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]