Hank Williams - Alone and Forsaken
Rock and Roll and Country have always had kind of an uncomfortable relationship, one camp always eyeing the other dirty, like they somehow got it wrong. There have been a few that successfully moved in both circles, Kris Kristofferson to a certain degree, Steve Earle slightly more so and of course Johnny Cash. Arguably part of what made these cats Rock and Roll was how they conducted themselves. It just happens to be we need our Rock stars to be speed tweaking, dope seeking, hard drinking mother fuckers, and that those guys were. But there was one who came before them, a Country Rock star before Rock as we know it existed.
Hank Williams, born Hiram King Williams, was born under a bad sign. His father died young leaving the family to fend for themselves and young Hank was born with a painful back condition which likely had a part to play in the alcoholism and drug dependence that would ravage and end Hank’s life. Even with the deck stacked against him, Hank took to the road full time and with a series of bands crossed the country and churned out eleven top ten hits, more often than not drunk on whiskey and nodding off on morphine the whole way down the line. The tour ended for Hank in 1953 at the age of 29, in the back of a Cadillac outside of Oak Hill, West Virginia. It is not for nothing that G.G. Allin worshipped not Satan but Hiram King Williams.
So that, in a roundabout way, brings me to this compilation. This CD is not at all representative of all of Hank Williams’ work. You are not gonna find any Hey Good Lookin’ on this piece, not Jambalaya either. This was put together with the Hank Williams myth in mind. This album compiles everything we think we know about Hanks’ brief life, every song is about death, violence, heartache, loneliness, death and death. This is a recording meant for those who want to explore Rock and Roll’s dark roots and not really for Country music aficionados. But on a lot of levels it succeeds in painting a (one-sided) portrait of one of American music’s greatest voices. Oh yeah, and the intro track by the guy from The The? Ignore it.
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