In the opening scenes of the 1964 biopic Your Cheatin’ Heart, Hank Williams hawks patent medicine, swills whiskey and throws a few punches. Moments later, at a church social, Hank — played by George Hamilton — makes a pass at his future wife and busts a guitar over the head of a heckler. Overripe with swagger and excess, Hamilton’s performance comes off as a clumsy composite of James Dean, Jerry Lee Lewis and John Wayne.
Though cartoonish, the movie underscores the enduring challenge in deciphering this country music pioneer. More than five decades after his death, in 1953, of an overdose of morphine on his way to play a show, Hank Williams lives on in myth that is so fraught with melodrama — the liquor and pills, heartache and gloom — and so calcified by decades of redaction and hype that it’s almost impossible to tell the singer of Lost Highway from his songs.
But two recent projects help recast him in a revealing new light, without whitewashing the intemperance and scandal. The first, an exhibition at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum here, features family artifacts that have never been displayed in public before. The second, a CD box-set called The Unreleased Recordings, is the first installment of unearthed radio transcriptions to be issued by Time Life. Far from presenting this archetypical singer-songwriter as ghostly or morose, the exhibition and box-set leave the impression of a devout man who, despite debilitating health and personal problems, loved his family and liked nothing so much as a good prank.
“You talk about pulling practical jokes — him and the band, that’s all they did,” said Hank Williams Jr, 59, in an interview at his customized RV here this summer. (He also owns several residences.) “We’re talking about a bunch of 20-year-old guys,” he continued, referring to his father’s band, the Drifting Cowboys. “He would sign autographs and they would come up behind him with a stink bomb.”
The exhibition, Family Tradition: The Williams Family Legacy, depicts the lives of three generations, from Hank and his wife, Audrey, to Hank Jr’s five children, and features items like the 1944 Martin D-28 guitar on which Williams wrote many of his hits. The Scotch-taped scrapbooks that Hank’s mother kept during his rise to fame are presented alongside touch-screen recreations of their contents. There are candid family photos from the late 1940s, home movies of a trip to Disneyland and a snapshot, taken decades later, of a young Hank Williams III taking a bath with his half-sisters Holly and Hilary. (All three now sing professionally.) The singer Jett Williams, Hank Sr’s daughter from his brief affair with Bobbie Jett, is also a subject of the exhibition.
Originally preserved on 16-inch acetate discs, the 143 transcriptions included in The Unreleased Recordings — the first 54 of which were released last week — nearly double Hank Williams’ recorded output. The music was rescued from a Dumpster in the late 1980s by an employee of WSM-AM, the Nashville radio station on which the songs were originally broadcast, on an early morning program sponsored by Mother’s Best Flour Company, in 1951. The decision about what should be done with the transcriptions was delayed by protracted litigation over the Williams estate.
The recordings greatly expand what we know of Williams’ persona and repertory. We hear him not only exulting in the pleasures of making music, but also clowning with his band and crooning old hymns like Softly and Tenderly and Victorian parlor ballads like The Blind Child’s Prayer.
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