| October 15th, 2005 12:58 AM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Hank Williams: The Story Of A Tortured Genius
2005-10-13/chronicle.com
By Richard Gaughran
In his biography of country music legend Hank Williams, Paul Hemphill occasionally makes bold pronouncements. Williams, Hemphill declares, is responsible for "the greatest single portfolio of songs ever written by any one person in the history of country music."
That’s quite a claim, especially since Williams’ recording career lasted only about five years. In that time he did record 66 songs, 50 of which he wrote himself, including classics familiar to even casual fans: "Cold, Cold Heart," "I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry," "Your Cheatin’ Heart," "Jambalaya" and "Lovesick Blues," which supplies Hemphill with his own title.
"Lovesick Blues" does nod in the direction of two competitors for the title of country music’s "greatest song writer," namely Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash. To be sure, Haggard and Cash have each compiled a list of titles that would number in the hundreds. Then again, they’ve had a lot longer time in which to do it. Hank Williams died at age 29, in circumstances that have become legendary.
As Hemphill retells the story, Williams was due for a midday concert in Canton, Ohio, on New Year’s Day, 1953. He hired a young driver, Charles Carr, to chauffeur the performer’s powder-blue Cadillac from Alabama while Williams slept in the backseat. In the middle of the night in West Virginia, Carr leaned over to adjust Williams’ blanket and was shocked to realize he was chauffering a corpse.
The cause of death, as Hemphill puts it, was "whiskey and despair." The biographer also strongly suggests that a quack "doctor" named Toby Marshall bears responsibility for the death, as he prescribed to Williams a sedative called chloral hydrate, which could be fatal when mixed with alcohol.
It’s clear, however, that Williams’ addiction to booze and pills was going to kill him at an early age, even without a push off the cliff from a self-proclaimed specialist in treating alcoholics. At times, reading "Lovesick Blues" is like watching the grim Nicholas Cage film of a few years back, "Leaving Las Vegas," in which the protagonist deliberately drinks himself to death.
Hank Williams started drinking at the ripe age of 10, when he and a buddy would hide outside Saturday night schoolhouse dances in Alabama, waiting to see where the arriving men hid their bottles. They would then help themselves to the stashes and drink until they passed out. Hemphill is credible when he declares that the singer was a full-blown alcoholic while still in his teens.
Inevitably, Williams’ drinking interfered with his career, besides the obvious fact that it ended it early. Frequently he was too "sick" to perform. Sometimes he had to be force-fed coffee and "uppers" an hour before a show. On occasion he resourcefully circumvented the best-intentioned efforts of his minders. Once, when locked in his booze-free hotel room before a scheduled performance, he fashioned a rope out of sheets and fastened a 50-dollar bill and a note to it. He lowered the cash and note to the room below him. The note instructed the occupants to get him two bottles of whiskey and keep the change.
Others of these tales are not so funny. In similar circumstances he once called room service asking for a bottle of rubbing alcohol, supposedly for an ailing leg. When it arrived he proceeded to poison himself by mixing it with tomato juice.
But there is the other side of Hank Williams — the lasting legacy of his songs. Hemphill argues that Williams knew he was writing and recording for posterity. An important indication of how Williams felt about his songs is that he never entered a recording studio unless he was cold sober: "Of the legions of Drunk Hank Stories that have amassed in his wake, not one of them takes place anywhere near a recording session. The studio was sacrosanct."
Hemphill’s chronicle might sound too depressing to bear, but it’s actually difficult to put down, thanks to the fact that the biographer is a seasoned writer, with a novelist’s sense of pacing and proportion. I do have minor complaints, however. For one thing, Hemphill raises the issue of the connection between addiction and creativity, but he never speculates about this connection, if there is one.
There’s also little analysis of the songs themselves or an attempt to explain why they are timeless. Hemphill does mention Roy Acuff as an influence on Williams, as well as the black street singer Rufus "Tee-Tot" Payne. But neither these influences, nor the sorrows stemming from the women in his life — an overbearing mother and a harping wife — can account for the genius of the songs. When Hemphill does discuss the label "genius," he washes his hands of the issue and leaves the analysis to others, saying only, "If he had a genius, it was for simplicity."
Perhaps the best words on Williams’ greatness come from songwriter Kris Kristofferson: "‘Nobody had a talent for making suffering enjoyable like Hank Williams.’" "Making suffering enjoyable" could stand as an explanation of how blues music functions. And, as blues giant B.B. King has repeatedly argued, country music is the white man’s blues music.
"Lovesick Blues" lacks the apparatus one expects to find in biographies that get called "definitive." There are no photos, no appendices, no song lists, no index and no notes. Hemphill acknowledges a previous biographer, Colin Escott, and readers can look to Escott’s work for fuller documentation.
It’s clear from Hemphill’s framing chapters, written in the first person, that he is chronicling his personal connection to Williams. Hemphill too is from Alabama, the son of a father who idolized the singer. And Hemphill recalls his own past as a "runaway husband and father… drunk and suicidal and unable to write," comforted by none other than Hank Williams. "Lovesick Blues" comes from a personal perspective, but that’s no reason it can’t be recommended. It somehow manages to make suffering enjoyable.
Contact Richard Gaughran at [email protected]
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| October 15th, 2005 04:02 AM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Here's the link at Amazon, if anyone's interested.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670034142/immaculate-books/102-1552708-7337714 |
| October 15th, 2005 04:16 PM |
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| texile |
i don't think anyone can overstate hank's genius - that voice singing those words....just pure and true;
i read a bio years ago because i wanted to know if there was a woman behind all that misery and despair....
there was - plus other things....which makes the music even more real......
a true poet.
i once read an antedote about charlie parker listening to "so lonesome, i could cry" over and over on a jukebox - and people were asking him why he was listneing to that "hillbilly music" - and bird told them, 'just listen -that's real..' |
| October 16th, 2005 09:03 AM |
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| Jimmy B. |
......and to think that he died at such a young age (29)...such a pity...and a GREAT,IMMEASURABLE loss.....
Jimmy B. |
| October 16th, 2005 10:43 AM |
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| FPM C10 |
Hank's songs have, it has always seemed to me, a quality of timelessness which extends in both directions. It's not just that their greatness will extend into the future. I can't imagine someone actually sitting down and writing them, and I also can't imagine a world in which they did not exist. They seem like mountains - they're just THERE and always have been.
The bit of performance footage of Hank that is in Martin Scorsese's monumentally mind-blowing Dylan documentary "No Direction Home" is riveting - his talent didn't end with songwriting - but the thing that floors me about it is the look in his eyes. It's about the same time in the film that Dylan mentions that the thing which ties together all of his favorite performers is the look in their eyes, the sense that they know something which nobody else knows. Hank sure had that look.
[Edited by FPM C10] |
| October 16th, 2005 11:55 PM |
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| Bloozehound |
quote:
Ten Thousand Motels wrote:
That’s quite a claim, especially since Williams’ recording career lasted only about five years. In that time he did record 66 songs, 50 of which he wrote himself, including classics familiar to even casual fans: "Cold, Cold Heart," "I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry," "Your Cheatin’ Heart," "Jambalaya" and "Lovesick Blues," which supplies Hemphill with his own title.
I always find this the most interesting apect of Hanks life, all those great classics written in such a short time span
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