And when Hank Williams is listened to, something revelatory seems to happen. But the truth is, writing about music is never as effective as the act of simply listening to it. Those are among the saddest words ever written and sung in music-Elvis once said so-and arguably the greatest. Few musical legends live on as an almost touchable, feelable presence in the anatomy of modern popular music as does the enigmatic, goofy-looking guy who carried a nascent country music formula to its full potential, then exited stage right in total and abject loneliness.Ĭonsider textural lyrics about robins weeping and leaves dying, the will to live lost, punctuated by the lament I’m so lonesome I could cry. Yet, more than 60 years after his premature death at age 29, no country artist living or dead can approach the familiarity the general public has with Hank Williams, whose sad, lonely songs are playing right this minute on some roadhouse jukebox. (Nov.Of the 33 records that Hank Williams placed on Billboard country and western Top 10 charts during his short lifetime, only two made the mainstream pop chart, and even those had much to do with pop artists like Tony Bennett having their own hits with them first.
Ribowsky offers cunning readings of Williams’s songs: “Mansion on the Hill,” he says, reflects a familiar Williams template that is “part croon, part hoedown, and a metaphoric lament of loneliness and the promise of a reward too far.” Williams emerges from Ribowsky’s powerful biography not only as the author of many familiar country and pop favorites, such as “Hey, Good Lookin’ ” and “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” but also as a man whose back pain drove him to drink and pills and whose soul was filled more often with gloom than with light. To Audrey Mae Sheppard Guy, and their miserable but symbiotic relationship his slow but sure rise to country music stardom on the Grand Ole Opry and WSM radio his marriage to Billie Jean Eshliman and his death in the back of his Cadillac on January 1, 1953, at the age of 29. He chronicles Williams’s childhood in Alabama his marriage Nevertheless, Ribowsky is an engaging storyteller, and he tells Williams’ story with such verve and humor-albeit with some over-the-top phrasing (“he was a dysfunction junction” “Hank seemed like an afterthought lying carefree in a casket”)-that Williams and his music come alive. Country singer Hank Williams’s story is already so well known that Ribowsky’s ( Dreams to Remember) entertaining, critical biography reveals no newly uncovered information about him.
0 kommentar(er)
