![]() There are so many ways to feel cheated, so many longings and lacks. ![]() Drinking and cheating are familiar troubles, but they are also proxies, let’s say. Hank called it folk music, before that term took on another connotation. ![]() “If you’re gonna sing,” Hank said, “sing ’em something they can understand.”Īfter he died, a Wisconsin woman wrote in to a newspaper in Montgomery: “We have listened to Hank Williams on disc jockey shows so often that we felt he was a friend of ours someone we had known for a long time.” There’s a tear in my beer, and so on and on. The brief career of Hank Williams became such a definitional anchor for what was then mostly known as hillbilly music and is now known as country that you can catch yourself wondering if the whole genre might have had slightly different preoccupations if Hank wasn’t so fixated on cheating and drinking. Sometimes I think it’s the meanest lullaby ever written. It is just one of those songs: Slinks up as lazily as a python before you know it, you’re smothered. His rubbery tenor, the way the tune yo-yos up and down like something about to snap. On the one hand, we can say heartbreak is an essentially generic topic for a song, and the lament of the cuckold is a rather sour brand of the form. Hank’s second wife swore “Your Cheatin’ Heart” was about his first wife his first wife swore he had written it about himself. ![]() He was in a bad way on booze and pills and injections, but the circumstances of his death, like his life, remain murky. A little more than three months later, he died in the backseat of a baby blue Cadillac. Four songs, four classics-including “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” That’s just how it was for Hank, even then, at the tail end of drinking himself to death. The final recording session Hank Williams had was banged out over a couple hours in a studio in Nashville on September 23, 1952. ![]()
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