Out In The Bust-Up Southern Be-Bop Night- Hank Williams Rides The Lonesome Highway

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Hank Williams performing his classic angst song, Cold, Cold Heart

CD Review

Hank Williams: Greatest Hits, 2 CD set, Hank Williams and various back-up combinations, 1991

I have been listening to a local weekend folk, rock and contemporary music interview show here in Boston for years. The format of the show is to interview, in depth, contemporary well-known singers, songwriters and musicians as well as young unknowns looking to make their mark. One of the questions always asked of each interviewee is about formative influences on their musical development. Although I do not believe that I have ever heard what I would consider a country singer interviewed on the show the name Hank Williams has come up as an influence many more times than any other from young and old interviewee alike. When New Age- type musicians and old- time 1960s folk revival minute artists are going on and on about brother Williams you know something is up. And that is exactly the point. He has been a long gone daddy on that long lonesome highway for over fifty years yet those well thought out ballads and ‘jump’ country swing tunes still sound pretty damn good.

Sure that is easy for me to say now. Although I was raised in the North my father was from the South, a hillbilly. This is music that I unconsciously heard at my father’s knee. But such tunes as Cold, Cold Heart and You’re Cheating Heart that he sung to me as a child were his kind of music. It was not until fairly recently that I got the message. His was the collective music memory of his post-World War II red scare night angst and alienation. In any case this greatest hits compilation gives as good a cross section of Hank’s work as you are liable to get with a mix of heart-felt ballads, some crossover tunes and, as seemingly inevitably in greatest hits packages, some novelty songs that could have justly been left out. I would note that not all of the many Williams compilations are equal either technically or musically. Here the technical quality is more than adequate and the producers seen to have put the best back-up band versions of his material that they could find. So stop Honky-Tonking and listening to whippoorwills and get this CD album.