Sat, Feb 15, 2003
From BBC Press:
This is the story of Hank Williams, country music's greatest songwriter whose hard-drinking honky tonk lifestyle led to a rock 'n' roll style death aged just 29 in 1953.
It's also the story of how Nashville would end up squandering the legacy of its greatest star - they thought he was just a drunk hillbilly performer - just as surely as he had squandered his own life.
The Birth of Honky Tonk: Honky tonk music came out of the inter-war Texas oil-fields where a rough and ready style of entertainment had developed in beer-joints and roadside bars - known locally as honky tonks - to cater for the migrant oil-riggers.
They were rowdy places - hot beds of beer, lust and fistfights, where performers needed to play loud to compete with the noise.
The result was a harsher, amplified and more driven sound which took as its subject the very essence of bar life - loving, cheating and drinking.
The coming of honky tonk has been described as country music's loss of virginity.
Pioneered by Ernest Tubb, who sang over an electrified guitar for the first time, it also attracted the young Hank Williams who would go on to write such classic Honky Tonk songs as Your Cheatin' Heart and I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry.
Hank Williams was a prolific writer and an alcoholic, whose haunting gospel influenced songs are wracked with guilt and remorse and reflect his own troubled life, echoing the ups and downs of a turbulent marriage.
Yet such is their power that never had pain and sadness sounded so good.
His songs are classics of the genre and 50 years after his untimely, drink-related death on New Year's Day 1953, he is still regarded as the most important figure in the history of country music, although at the time he died the Nashville country music establishment had abandoned him as too unreliable to be allowed to appear on the Grand Ole Opry.
The Nashville Sound: Honky Tonk barely survived the advent of Elvis Presley and rock 'n' roll.
Nashville reacted by closing ranks and creating a smoother more pop friendly brand of country that came to be known as the Nashville Sound.
Producers Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins would use session artists to lay down an instrumental bed with the singer performing vocals which would then be sweetened with strings and lush vocal choirs giving the sound a smoothness and sophistication far removed from the twanginess of traditional country.
Jim Reeves and Eddy Arnold, both of whom had once flirted with honky tonk, built huge careers on the back of the Nashville Sound.
Contributors include: artists and musicians k.d. lang, Hank Williams III, Steve Earle, Hank Thompson, Kris Kristofferson, The Jordanaires, Ray Price, Brenda Lee, Bill Anderson, Eddy Arnold, Dwight Yoakam and Willie Nelson.
This is the story of Hank Williams, country music's greatest songwriter whose hard-drinking honky tonk lifestyle led to a rock 'n' roll style death aged just 29 in 1953.
It's also the story of how Nashville would end up squandering the legacy of its greatest star - they thought he was just a drunk hillbilly performer - just as surely as he had squandered his own life.
The Birth of Honky Tonk: Honky tonk music came out of the inter-war Texas oil-fields where a rough and ready style of entertainment had developed in beer-joints and roadside bars - known locally as honky tonks - to cater for the migrant oil-riggers.
They were rowdy places - hot beds of beer, lust and fistfights, where performers needed to play loud to compete with the noise.
The result was a harsher, amplified and more driven sound which took as its subject the very essence of bar life - loving, cheating and drinking.
The coming of honky tonk has been described as country music's loss of virginity.
Pioneered by Ernest Tubb, who sang over an electrified guitar for the first time, it also attracted the young Hank Williams who would go on to write such classic Honky Tonk songs as Your Cheatin' Heart and I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry.
Hank Williams was a prolific writer and an alcoholic, whose haunting gospel influenced songs are wracked with guilt and remorse and reflect his own troubled life, echoing the ups and downs of a turbulent marriage.
Yet such is their power that never had pain and sadness sounded so good.
His songs are classics of the genre and 50 years after his untimely, drink-related death on New Year's Day 1953, he is still regarded as the most important figure in the history of country music, although at the time he died the Nashville country music establishment had abandoned him as too unreliable to be allowed to appear on the Grand Ole Opry.
The Nashville Sound: Honky Tonk barely survived the advent of Elvis Presley and rock 'n' roll.
Nashville reacted by closing ranks and creating a smoother more pop friendly brand of country that came to be known as the Nashville Sound.
Producers Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins would use session artists to lay down an instrumental bed with the singer performing vocals which would then be sweetened with strings and lush vocal choirs giving the sound a smoothness and sophistication far removed from the twanginess of traditional country.
Jim Reeves and Eddy Arnold, both of whom had once flirted with honky tonk, built huge careers on the back of the Nashville Sound.
Contributors include: artists and musicians k.d. lang, Hank Williams III, Steve Earle, Hank Thompson, Kris Kristofferson, The Jordanaires, Ray Price, Brenda Lee, Bill Anderson, Eddy Arnold, Dwight Yoakam and Willie Nelson.