Hank Williams
Rare Demos: First to Last
1990, The Country Music Foundation
Hank Williams died of heart failure when he was only 29 and deaths like that freak you out when you get old. That’s a painfully young age to go, but too many pills and too much booze can snuff out the brightest candle.
It happened in the early hours of New Year’s Day, 1953. Williams rode in the backseat of a Cadillac, on his way from Knoxville, Tennessee to play a show in Canton, Ohio. Sometime around 5 AM, his driver stopped for gas in Oak Hill, West Virginia and then discovered that the great songwriter, who’d been silent for many miles, wasn’t merely sleeping off his latest bender.
No, he was even more pale than usual. Not breathing. Gone.
The story goes that Hank Williams died with these four things in his pockets: a loaded gun, a pint of vodka, tablets of chloral hydrate (a sedative), and a rough draft of lyrics for a new song written on a piece of paper.
All are symbols of what killed him and when I write about his death it’s not to romanticize it. No, it was pathetic and it shouldn’t have happened.
However, I can’t listen to Hank Williams songs without thinking about his death and that’s because they both reveal the same thing, which is the fragile soap bubble of human life. Our very hearts (in both the literal and figurative sense) sometimes try to kill us and often succeed.
Sometimes death is so close that it’s in your pocket.
When I was a young dope, I liked Hank Williams well enough because how can you not? If you’re exploring the hills and valleys of American music history and old records are your tonic, you’re going to run into him many times, whether it’s his own recordings or the stacks of cover versions by everyone from Ray Charles to The Residents.
It wasn’t until I got older though, older than Williams was when he died, that he started to speak to me.
In college, I had the 40 Greatest Hits album, but I almost never played it from start to finish. It was a museum exhibit rather than something that meant much to me. How many three-minute songs about hillbilly heartache can an impatient idiot who lives in a dorm room sit through? For me, it was a lot less than forty. While they were good songs, they also sounded like the same song over and over. I didn’t yet have the ears and the heart for this music.
Today, the very thing that once kept me at a distance from Williams now fascinates me the most. When I listen to him now, I hear the craftsman feverishly at work, taking on the challenge of saying the same thing in dozens of different ways and I get hooked on how clever he gets with it.
His subject: Relentless heartbreak. Love is always going wrong and Hank’s narrators are left alone, shattered, and stranded with maybe only a drink for company. Or God. His religious songs all have a dark edge to them, an implication that the path to faith is often great suffering. On the rare occasion that he writes a happy song something in his voice says that this feeling is only temporary.
His format: Three minutes of a record side, songs for the jukeboxes and the radio of the late 1940s and early 50s. The ambitions of modern artists, to craft 40-minute album experiences, was hardly a thought in anyone’s head back then. You had about three minutes in Hank’s day. That was it. Better use ’em wisely.
In many songs, his character is an innocent who just had his heart ripped out. Other songs depict the heartbroken man as the likely cause of his own pain (see “My Son Calls Another Man Daddy”, which reveals in its second verse that the narrator is in prison for crimes that he knows he committed).
Sometimes, Hank is the one who ends things, as in “You’re Gonna Change (Or I’m Gonna Leave)”.
In “Nobody’s Lonesome for Me”, he dares to be funny and make a joke of all of this.
In the songs of Hank Williams, his main character is a sad sack, a hero, a villain, and a clown. Every three minutes, he changes. Or maybe he’s the same person, as seen from different angles.
These days, I play 40 Greatest Hits straight through–and then often play it again for further meditation on the thought that maybe the three-minute heartbreak story is the true test of a songwriter.
Then there are the nights when I want to get deeper, and closer, and that’s when I reach for the next disc on my shelf. Rare Demos: First to Last.
It’s just Williams alone with his guitar and his latest song (and one song by another writer, “Fool About You” by Ralph Hutcheson) on a stack of recordings that we were never meant to hear and it’s one of the greatest albums to ever be pressed and packaged.
This is music for your 3 AM’s. You play Rare Demos when everyone is asleep except for you. It pairs well with solitude. Maybe the world has turned its back on you or you’ve turned your back on the world. Either way, sometimes the only other person you want to bother with is a guy who died in 1953.
Not everyone will understand that, but those who do might find something here.
The title implies that this 24-track disc is a complete collection of surviving demo recordings, but we know these days that it isn’t. A 10-CD box set of the entire Hank Williams body of work came out in 1998 and it brings a truckload more. I don’t own that set. I didn’t buy it at the time and now it’s a pricey collectible. Maybe I’ll have it someday, but for now I’m happy with this.
It sums up Hank nicely. It’s got a little of everything.
We get plenty of God, such as the gorgeous likes of “Wealth Won’t Save Your Soul”, “I’m Goin’ Home”, “Heaven Holds All My Treasures”, and “A House of Gold”, all songs that say that life is pain and your real rewards only come later, when your body is compost and your soul is eternal.
It even has happy songs. “Pan American” is a joyful cross-country train ride, but in the context of all of this gloom, I wonder what the character in this song is running from. “There’s Nothing as Sweet as My Baby” is all sugary goodness (“I like candy/ I like cake/ I like jam, but goodness sake/ There’s nothing as sweet as my baby”), but when you hear that in the voice of Hank Williams, it feels like only a matter of time before all of that optimism crashes down.
Sadness dominates in the end, but like all truly great sad music, the songs of Hank Williams are curiously uplifting.
Why?
For one thing, none of Hank’s songs are suicide notes. They’re the work of a real writer who finishes one piece and then starts up another right away. In his hefty stack of consistently great work, I hear a man who was as addicted to making things as he was to his intoxicants. Music is a lifeforce and Hank Williams wrote until he dropped.
To get more lofty about it, I think that sad songs are the sound of the earth. Every long-lived music movement thrives on sad songs. There’s a place for happy music, but happy music is like a polka dot shirt. It doesn’t go well with everything. When my head isn’t right, happy music can make it worse.
But sad songs always sound good. On the best day of my life, I can still get drawn into a sad song. A great sad song has a primal appeal.
I think it’s because we don’t always know for sure that happiness is coming to us, but we sure as shit know that sadness is coming. It’s somewhere down the road. And I’m talking about ALL of us. Rich or poor. Beautiful or ugly. In love or looking for love. Upwardly mobile or halfway in the gutter.
We’re all fucked.
Sadness leaves deep wounds. Sadness will derail your life and make you barely able to function. Sadness will beat you with a hammer.
But it makes for great songs. And that helps. It helps a lot.