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.
Continue reading “Things I Will Keep #25: HANK WILLIAMS, Rare Demos: First to Last”