Tell me one more time, just so’s I’ll understand, are you sure Hank done it this way?
On the morning of August 11, 1952, Hank Williams was lying in the back seat of a Cadillac outside of WSM, drunk, depressed, and, as of a few hours earlier, out of work. He had just been fired from the Grand Ole Opry, and although another job was waiting at the “Louisiana Hayride” in Shreveport, Hank felt all the consolation that a deposed chairman of the board would find in knowing he could still be head cashier. The Opry, in those days, was the top of the country music heap, and Hank had struggled long and hard to get there.
Once he had arrived, he had taken the Nashville stage by storm, beginning with his first guest shot on June 11, 1949. People who were there that night maintain with absolute conviction that it was one of the most exciting moments in the history of country music. Such assessments can’t be measured, of course, but there is very little evidence to prove them wrong. Williams encored six or seven times, singing over and over again the song that brought him to the Opry in the first place, a Tin Pan Alley number called “Lovesick Blues.”
It was Hank’s first big hit, and in the hands of a lesser artist it might have been a mediocre song, filled as it was with uninspired couplets such as this one: “I’ve grown used to you somehow/I’m nobody’s sugar daddy now.” But when Hank would get to the chorus and let loose his yodeling moan about being lo-onesome, the people in the audience understood exactly what he meant, and the thunderous, foot-stomping ovations threatened to tear the tar paper right off the Ryman.
Hank projected that same kind of energy wherever he went, his six-foot, hundred-and-forty-pound frame taking on commanding and charismatic proportions as the applause reverberated through his head and lit up the grin on his high-boned face. At least that’s how it was when he was sober. When he was drunk (and he stayed that way a good part of the time during the waning months of his life), he couldn’t sing a lick, and half the time they would find him passed out in some hotel room, unable to appear at all.
When the cancellations became commonplace, the people at the Opry felt they had no choice but to drop him from the cast, and although Hank was determined until the end to make a triumphant return, he never did. He died, apparently from the accumulated effects of too much alcohol, a few hours into New Year’s of 1953—passed out in his car, as he and a young driver were heading for a show date in Canton, Ohio. He was twenty-nine.
The brevity of Hank Williams’s career has sparked continual speculations about how things might have been if he hadn’t been driven to the bottle by whatever it was that drove him. The point is obviously moot, and his biographer, Roger M. Williams (no relation), speculates plausibly that Hank’s drinking and his astonishing abilities as a songwriter may have sprung from the same inner agonies. Whatever it was that gave Williams his power of feeling, the songs that grew out of that power include some of the most impressive ever written, not only in country music, but in any other field as well. To this day, he is probably the most imitated singer and songwriter that country music has ever produced, and that fact has proved a double-edged sword. Hank wasn’t a bad one to imitate, but slicked-up carbons seldom have the freshness of original versions, and country music has had to contend with that reality for the last twenty-five years.
At first glance, it seems a little strange that would be the case. As you read through the lyrics of a Hank Williams song, the words are so simple, so obvious—the vocabulary about what you would expect from a small-town Alabama boy who grew up during the Depression with an utter lack of interest in formal, or even informal, schooling. But if the songs themselves are uncomplicated, the emotions they captured are not, and that’s what gives them the kind of gut-stabbing realism that country music fans have always remembered.
One of Williams’s best-known songs, for example, is “Cold, Cold Heart,” which, on the surface at least, seems almost trite. It is the lament of a lovesick hillbilly whose woman is still hung up on a man who done her wrong. Very uncomplicated. But as the verses unfold, it turns out that the singer is not simply trapped in a wallow of self-pity. He is also hurt by the woman’s own unhappiness, which is genuine and multi-layered. Part of it stems from the simple fact of having been wronged by another man, but also, the song suggests, from the knowledge that life is passing her by while she is trapped by a grief and a repression of feelings that she can’t seem to control.
All in all, it’s a subtle and true-to-life twist on the unrequited-love genre, and yet it’s so simply done that you don’t have to think through it to appreciate it, any more than Hank probably thought through it to write it. The communication is potent, instantaneous, with no special need for critical analysis.
The same is true, even more emphatically, of a song that many people believe is the best Hank ever wrote. It began as a few scrawled lines on a scrap of paper, and at first he didn’t know quite what to think of them. He took them to a songwriter friend named Jimmy Rule to ask if they made any sense. Rule assured him they did, and with a little coaching and polishing from his publisher, Fred Rose, Williams achieved a nearly perfect evocation of loneliness. “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” was a watershed song for country music - sixteen lines of metaphor and imagery that comprise not the straight-forward story line of an old-fashioned ballad, or even Williams’s usual description of a particular situation, but rather a haunting word picture of an abstract feeling.
The silence of a falling star lights up a purple sky and as I wonder where you are I’m so lonesome I could cry.
The quality of the poetic components varies a little from verse to verse. But all of it works and, in the last verse especially, the technique is as sophisticated as any you’ll find. The metaphor of a sky being lit by silence is precisely the way it strikes the brain—hearing and sight are at work simultaneously, blended at the moment of perception.
And there are the smaller things. The sky is purple instead of dark, black, or something more obvious, and there is the subjunctive verb in the title of the song—the singer isn’t crying, but he could—which suggests a kind of strength and endurance that is all the more lonesome because the feeling is bottled inside.
As Hank himself once said, “It was not too bad for an Alabama hillbilly,” and yet his songs appeared so simple that a lot of people who should have known better were inspired to travel his road. And that, unfortunately, is the other side of the Hank Williams legacy. Several generations of country musicians have set about copying the twang and the tear in his hard-edged voice, and the unobtrusive technique of his gut-level songs. In many cases they have succeeded, or come pretty close, but in a larger sense of course they’ve failed. For imitation is the antithesis of creativity, and creativity was what the Hank Williams tradition was all about.
There were at least a few people around Nashville who were able to grab hold of that understanding, amid all the swirling debates about what was country music and what wasn’t, and whether anything could really be country in a suburban nation homogenized by prosperity and television. One of those people in the 1970s was Waylon Jennings, a tough but gentle west Texas good ole boy who cut his musical teeth as the bass player for Buddy Holly.
Jennings’s rock ’n’ roll background cropped up often in the beat of his music, but never in his voice, which had as much pure-grade country soul as any voice could have. He had become, by the middle of the decade, the most prominent of an ill-defined class of innovative musicians around Nashville—a rough-hewn, sometimes inarticulate bunch who were serious about their music and bristled at the still widely held assumption that if you didn’t sound a lot like Hank, you were somehow doing violence to the tradition of country music.
In his words and his actions, Jennings refuted that notion. He boycotted the Grand Ole Opry because they wouldn’t let him use a full set of drums, recorded songs by Bob Dylan and other non-country writers, and made pioneer appearances at such big-city night spots as the Troubadour and Max’s Kansas City.
And yet, for all of that, he was as much preoccupied with the roots of country music as any other performer. The fans instinctively understood that fact, and those who poured in for his concerts were not only the younger and shaggier believers who had rallied to the cause in recent years, but also the older, more crimson-necked fans—who, like the young, recognized Waylon as one of their own. And if there was ever any doubt in their minds, all they had to do was listen to his songs—his ode to Bob Wills, written on a plane between Dallas and Austin, and even more important, his Top Ten philosophical hit about the legacy of Hank: Lord, it’s the same old tune, fiddle and guitar/Where do we take it from here?
Jennings performed that song nearly everywhere he went, and on a swing through Atlanta in 1975, he grabbed a few minutes backstage to talk about the thoughts behind it. “The key idea is expansion,” he said. “That’s what all of us are talking about. Hell, Hank just didn’t live long enough. He’d be the most progressive guy around today. And Bob Wills was playing with a twenty-one-piece band, with horns and all that stuff - back in the forties, man. So the music keeps expanding. You look at any of the giants - Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills, Hank Williams - they all understood that, and all of us oughta be understanding it today.”
The problem, in Jennings’s view, is that the powers that be in Nashville have a history of timidity about change or expansion beyond a polishing of yesterday’s rough edges. Frustration over such closed-mindedness became an obsession with Jennings, and eventually he banded together with a fellow nonconformist named Tompall Glaser to do battle with record company execs in the cause of greater independence.
To everyone’s amazement, their efforts paid off. “About two years ago [in1974], I got the absolute musical freedom to do whatever I want,” said Waylon, and the results from the very beginning were spectacular. Record sales exploded, his concerts were packed, and he was named country music’s top male vocalist in 1975.
Waylon, in a sense, seemed a little bit bewildered by the sudden admiration that came his way, and the hard and fast living it has helped thrust upon him. It unleashed some of the vagaries of his volatile personality—a darker, moody streak that coexists stubbornly with his fundamental decency. He and Glaser had a falling-out in 1976, and wound up wrangling through lawyers about how to dissolve their business liaisons. But musically, all that was beside the point. Jennings et al continued to embody a well-rooted willingness to change that, at least for a while, kept country music from going stale.
Nobody embodied that willingness more thoroughly than Tompall Glaser. Even though he was never as popular as Jennings, Glaser struck out on the most radically creative direction of all. He decided to fuse the sound of the blues with the sound of country, which was not in itself unique. What was unique was that Glaser approached the task in the most obvious way—by putting together a band that consisted of both blues and country musicians.
The idea jelled several years back when he wandered into the New York club Max’s Kansas City to catch the closing act of a high-powered rhythm and blues singer by the name of Bobby Blue Bland. Anchoring the band that night was lead guitarist Mel Brown, a native of Jackson, Mississippi, who had grown up on a steady diet of delta blues and had retained his affinity and fascination with the roots of Southern music. Glaser was stunned by the skill of Brown’s picking, and after the show he called him aside, told him what he had in mind, and asked if he would be interested in coming to work in Nashville. Intrigued, Brown agreed to think it over, and about two years later he called Glaser to say he was ready. He brought with him drummer Charles Polk, another Mississippian, and together with Glaser and three top Nashville pickers, they embarked upon the task with an idealistic fervor.
“It just made good sense,” explained Mel Brown. “The roots, you know, are the same—hard times are on both sides. It’s just that he [Glaser] is the only cat with enough nerve to do it this way. ’Stead of a white cat playing the blues licks, he has me and Charles.”
By the spring of 1976, the blend had evolved well enough to go public with a new album and a major national tour. Reviewers, even in the highbrow New York Times, were ecstatic, and the crowds became downright unruly as they cheered and clapped and clamored for more. The scenes may not have rivaled, say, the Hank Williams debut at the Grand Ole Opry, but in places like Atlanta, Norfolk, and Chicago there were the same ripples of excitement as the fans realized they were hearing something fresh, different, and yet identifiably country.
One crucial test was Atlanta. The crowd that balmy mid-March night consisted entirely of the hard-core faithful, undiluted by the sprinkling of college kids and other young people who would turn out in other cities along the way. Mel Brown was vaguely uneasy, realizing that the time was not long past when such an assemblage might have waxed nasty at the sight of a couple of bear-sized black men playing the blues in a hillbilly band.
But on this particular night, the mood was friendly. The applause built steadily as Tompall opened the show with a Tom Paxton folk song called “The Last Thing On My Mind,” ran through a couple of straight country numbers, and then moved from center stage to let the band members do an instrumental and display their talents. The showstealer was Brown, bending over his guitar in rapt concentration and sending out a series of intricate, quick-fingered blues runs that drew half a dozen rounds of applause even before the song was finished.
Glaser lounged to one side, grinning, his elbow propped on an amplifier, and then moved back to the stage and broke into the old Jimmie Rodgers song, “T for Texas, T for Tennessee.” There was symbolic significance in the choice, for Rodgers is legendary for his own peculiar blending of country and blues—his twelve-bar stanzas, repeated lines, and guitar runs borrowed from the black railroad workers he had known in Mississippi.
In his early teens, Rodgers had landed a job carrying water to the depot workers in Meridian, and he was inevitably there during break time, when they retreated to their banjos and guitars. He learned to play both instruments during those years, and he also learned songs and fragments of songs that he would use later on in his recording career.
Because of recurring bouts with tuberculosis, Rodgers left railroad work after fourteen years, determined to make it as a professional musician. After knocking around for a couple of years, he landed a job in 1927 singing blues and mountain ballads at radio station WWNC in Asheville, North Carolina. In July of 1927, he learned that Ralph Peer, then of Victor Records, would soon be in the nearby town of Bristol, Tennessee, monitoring recording sessions for aspiring hillbilly singers.
Rodgers hustled over, got recorded, and when his music became moderately popular over the next few months, the Victor people decided that they had signed a potential star. They brought him to the company studios in Camden, New Jersey, for more extensive recording sessions, and it was on the first session that Rodgers cut “T for Texas, T for Tennessee.” The song proved to be significant for him in a number of ways. It was a hit, for one thing. But more important in the long run, it also marked the first time that he used his patented “blue yodel”—a homespun bit of vocal gymnastics in which he allowed his voice to warble from octave to octave, producing the pained and lonesome sound that was to become his trademark.
Tompall Glaser, whose whiskey tenor voice is not well suited to yodeling, doesn’t sing the song in quite the same way. But the fact that he does it at all underscores what he regards as a deeper kinship between himself, Rodgers, and some of the other unorthodox musicians who have come along from time to time in the history of country music.
The liner notes of his first album in 1976 sum it up very well. “Tompall does not break down tradition when he brings a new idea or arrangement to the studio or stage,” the notes affirm. “He does not break down tradition any more than Jimmie Rodgers did with his blues, Hawaiian instruments, and the use of Louis Armstrong on sessions. Or any more than Ernest Tubb did with his electric guitar or Hank Williams with a sound that changed all music or Johnny Cash with his protest songs or Waylon Jennings with his rock beat. There may be a break from traditional form of expression, but there is no break from the tradition of looking ahead and trying new ideas.”
“Hell,” agreed Tompall, “what we’re doing’s not radical. We’re just going after the entire spectrum of our roots, and the roots of country and the roots of blues are the same. It’s going to be fun to live it and put it together.”
That view of country music became common around Nashville sometime early in the 1970s—the assumption that the Nashville sound is closely related to a number of other musical traditions, including blues, rock, and even the folk-protest sounds of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. That assumption wasn’t new, but it had become submerged beneath the rhetoric and the reality of all the political and social forces that were affecting country music between the mid-fifties and seventies.
For a time at least, the rediscovery of common ground became a pivotal motif in country music, and as much as anything else, it was responsible for the renewed power and the broadened appeal of the country tradition. The thing that tied Roy Acuff to Willie Nelson, or Tompall Glaser to Charlie Daniels, or Kitty Wells to Emmylou Harris, was that they were all concerned in one way or another with getting back to the roots.