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Summary
Summary
Hank Williams, the quintessential country music singer and songwriter, died alone in the backseat of his Cadillac on New YearÂs Day, 1953. He died much as he had lived: drunk, forlorn, suffering from a birth defect, wondering when the bubble would burst. Having sprouted out of nowhere, like a weed in the wilds of south Alabama, he was gone at the age of twenty-nine.Now, with his definitive biography of the man and his music, Paul Hemphill takes the reader on a journey through Hank WilliamsÂs life and times: his dirt-poor beginnings as a sickly child, learning music from a black street singer, refining it in raucous rural honky-tonks during the Depression, emerging as a star of the Grand Ole Opry. Uneducated, virtually fatherless, an alcoholic in his teens, unlucky at love, Hank mined his experiences to write songs that will live forever.Hemphill, author of The Nashville Soundand the son of a long-distance trucker from Alabama, brings his background to bear on a story that often reads like fiction. He has unearthed many fresh details in WilliamsÂs life, but most importantly, he has explained that life and given it the lively telling it deserves.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This concise, startling biography starts not with its subject, Hank Williams, but with its author sitting in the cab of his father's truck one day in 1949, hearing Williams sing "like a hurt animal." The brief incident immediately binds Hemphill and Williams (1923-1952) together as children of the rural South, united by the places and circumstances from which they came (Hemphill has written four novels and 11 nonfiction works dealing with the blue-collar South). Hemphill shifts from his own childhood to Williams's vagabond youth with scintillating descriptions of Depression-era Alabama. Against this backdrop, Hemphill tells the story of Williams's boyhood, which involved constant movement from town to town, infrequent school attendance and jobs as a shoe-shine boy and street performer. Williams's subsequent rise, from "Singing Kid" novelty to headliner at the Grand Ole Opry, could seem like a cliche, but Hemphill's descriptions of the "places where a chicken-wire fence separated the band from the crowd" lend a gritty reality. This frankness extends to the depiction of Williams's chronic alcoholism, violent marital troubles and lonely, sudden death at age 29. With the end of Williams's life, the book turns back to its author, as an older, wiser Hemphill recounts some of the sorrows of his own life. The connection between author and subject is what makes this book so rewarding. Agent, Sterling Lord. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Hemphill's absorbing traversal of the life of the single greatest figure in country music is something less and something more than a biography. Hemphill traces the life of Hank (ne Hiram) Williams (1923-53) faithfully and factually and labels prominent myths as such, but he doesn't indulge modern biography mavens with sociological detail about Williams' world or with psychological insight about Williams and his family. In so doing, Hemphill discounts the fascination of the Depression era that produced Williams and of the dysfunctionality of his parents' and first wife's behavior, let alone his alcoholism from adolescence on. Compensating this avoidance of the potatoes of most biographies (the facts being the meat) is the book's style, which while hardly high-flown sounds eulogistic. In this respect, the book recalls some of the earliest written lives in European literature--Boccaccio's Life of Dante, for instance--which each intended, without mythologizing, to establish its subject's legend. Despite some poor word choices and hyperbole, this is the finest work of literature about Williams yet written. --Ray Olson Copyright 2005 Booklist
Choice Review
This is not a scholarly, meticulously documented biography of Williams but rather a labor of love by a life-long fan who, like Williams, grew up in Alabama in a struggling blue-collar family. That said, Hemphill is a seasoned novelist and writer of nonfiction about the South, and he brings Williams to life in this intriguing book. Williams has been an icon in country music for more than 50 years, and facts and myths about him abound. Hemphill sorts them out and presents a balanced picture of a man who--troubled by economic hardships, alcoholism, and bad luck in love--wrote and performed songs that have spoken profoundly to millions. Hemphill's careful research is evident, even though he provides no notes (he does mention several sources and interviews that were useful to him, among them Colin Escott's Hank Williams: The Biography, rev. ed., 2004). Hemphill's keen personal interest in Williams, along with his knowledge of and affection for Williams' culture, results in a book that is well worth reading, but its lack of scholarly apparatus limits its usefulness in an academic setting. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Extensive academic collections supporting study of popular music; public libraries. D. Arnold University of North Texas
Kirkus Review
A veteran novelist and nonfiction writer offers a Southerner's take on country music's poet laureate. Hemphill, author of The Nashville Sound, an early look at the country music industry, and a number of other works with a Southern perspective, arrives decidedly late at the Hank Williams biography party. It's difficult to imagine anyone improving on Colin Escott's award-winning, meticulously researched 1994 work on Williams, revised last year; the Canadian writer, who won a Grammy as co-producer of a set of Williams's complete recordings, added to the literature with Hank Williams: Snapshots From the Lost Highway (with Kira Florita, 2001) and his work on the 2004 PBS documentary about the country singer. Hemphill acknowledges Escott's scholarship in his own unscholarly book, which offers the barest outline of Williams's brief, tortured career. That outline is familiar to any Williams fan: his hardscrabble Alabama upbringing; the meteoric success of his simple, cuttingly affecting songs; his slug-it-out relationship with first wife, Audrey; his drug- and drink-plagued stardom; and his precipitous decline, including his sideshow-like marriage to second spouse, Billie; and his sudden death at 29 as 1953 dawned. There's no deep new research here--the most talkative sources appear to be Williams's steel guitarist Don Helms and Charles Carr, who chauffeured the musician on the night he died. Hemphill, a fellow Alabamian, takes the tack that Hank was a good ol' boy just like Hemphill's father, a long-distance trucker who liked to pound out Williams's songs on the piano. The writer splashes plenty of local color on his canvas, especially in passages about Williams's barnstorming early days. But he never reveals anything essential about his subject as an artist or as a suffering human being; worse, he never explains how or why so distinctly Southern a musician achieved such universality in his lifetime, on his own and in covers of his songs by such unlikely performers as Tony Bennett. This particular song of the South merely scratches the surface of a legend. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
At least ten biographies have been written about country music superstar Hank Williams. This slim volume springs from the pen of a fan who remembers being exposed to Williams's music as a teenager riding in his father's big rig. Unfortunately, it does not add much to the facts known about the life of the tragic, self-destructive singer/songwriter, barring a tidbit that he learned some of his trade from a black street musician named Rufus Payne. Hemphill, an accomplished novelist and nonfiction writer (Leaving Birmingham: Notes of a Native Son), occasionally paints a vivid picture-e.g., "Out there in a harder America, they would open the doors of a barn or a Quonset hut or a roller-skating rink out on the edge of town on a weekend night, hire a country band, toss some sawdust on the dance floor, crank up the fiddles and the steel guitars, announce that the bar was open, and you had a bubbling volcano." But too often he dryly recounts the details of various musical events or describes Williams's endless bouts with alcoholism. Still, any fans new to the Hank Williams story will get most of the high and low points of his remarkable, meteoric career. Suitable for all popular and country music collections.-Bill Walker, Stockton-San Joaquin Cty. P.L., CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Prologue: Summer of '49 | p. 1 |
| Young Hiram | p. 11 |
| The Singing Kid | p. 27 |
| Miss Audrey | p. 42 |
| Fred Rose | p. 56 |
| The Lovesick Blues | p. 74 |
| A Star Is Born | p. 95 |
| Three Chords and the Truth | p. 111 |
| Lonely at the Top | p. 127 |
| The Crash | p. 150 |
| Lost Highway | p. 177 |
| Better Dead than Alive | p. 191 |
| Epilogue: Legacy | p. 204 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 209 |
