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Hank: The Short Life and Long Country Road of Hank Williams

Review

Hank: The Short Life and Long Country Road of Hank Williams

Plagued by chronic illness, “skinny as a lamppost,” dead at age 29 of a heart attack brought on by years of self-medicating with booze and drugs, Hank Williams was a musical genius whose songs had the radio waves popping for most of his adult life.

His father was a disabled veteran who kowtowed to his mother Lillie, giving young Hiram a confusing sense of ambiguity about male/female interactions that lasted all his life. Hiram, later to be known as Hank, started singing in church and then, in the depths of the Depression, learned the art of busking, bringing home valued pennies to Lillie, who, after many changes of address, had set up something like a boarding house, a kind of brothel, in their Alabama residence.

"Ribowsky...makes the Hank Williams story come to life, revealing his desperation for painkillers and inability to sustain any sort of balance in his relationship with women."

Entrepreneurship would be a strong suit for young Hank, who formed his own band, the first iteration of the Drifting Cowboys, as a teenager, selling his songbooks at their shows. Partnering with producer/composer Fred Rose, Williams penned some of the enduring hits of what was then called hillbilly music: “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “Lovesick Blues,” “I Saw the Light,” “Move It on Over,” “Jambalaya,” “Hey Good Lookin’.” Married to Audrey Mae Sheppard, another overbearingly dominant female who soon took over management of his career, Williams moved from unplumbed shacks in Alabama to a sprawling home in Nashville that he and Audrey decorated with white velvet walls and gold paint.

The tragedy behind Williams’ achievements, as clearly depicted by author Mark Ribowsky in this lengthy, definitive examination, was an agonizingly painful back problem that had him addicted to alcohol from the time he could get his hands on a bottle of booze. Finally diagnosed with spina bifida, he continued his “ramblin’ man” lifestyle, giving his faithful fans the sound they wanted to hear: a soulful wailing vocal style that came to characterize country music in its nascent years. But his need for palliative meds, always including alcohol, began to get in his way. After he and Audrey divorced, with no one to oversee his behavior, he became increasingly unreliable, alienated many of his fans, and was banned from the Grand Ole Opry. He died in a car in a snowstorm sometime on New Year’s Day, 1953, somewhere in West Virginia, on his way to a concert.

Ribowsky, who has previously written about musical legends Otis Redding and The Temptations, makes the Hank Williams story come to life, revealing his desperation for painkillers and inability to sustain any sort of balance in his relationship with women. But all along, Williams had a way with his songs, Ribowsky sagely observes, a way of “making the familiar fresh.” He was often so frail that he appeared to be “swimming in his clothes” but nevertheless had the moxie to convert his “white trash” deficit into commercial success with more than 30 top 10 hits during his brilliant, lamentably brief, career. 

Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott on December 2, 2016

Hank: The Short Life and Long Country Road of Hank Williams
by Mark Ribowsky

  • Publication Date: November 7, 2017
  • Genres: Biography, Music, Nonfiction
  • Paperback: 512 pages
  • Publisher: Liveright
  • ISBN-10: 163149337X
  • ISBN-13: 9781631493379