These are the liner notes from the CD, Hank Williams: Alone with His Guitar (Mercury Records) written by one of my favorite southern writers, William Gay.

Long Gone Lonesome Blues

   The voice was coming from the radio, but it had such an easy, affable tone that it could have been coming from the swing at the end of the porch, just the familiar voice of a neighbor dropped over after dark for a glass of iced tea and a little conversation, his disembodied voice coming out of the summer darkness where the shadow of the climbing roses fell.

   But it was the radio, a wooden cabinet hooked to a dry cell battery and an antenna and a ground wire secured to a steel rod driven into the ground. The combination of these three things, when they were all in place and the fates were kind, performed a sort of alchemy on a southern night, jerked voices and twanging guitars and a provisional kinship out of the very air itself. It tied you to the rest of the world, pushed the borders back and showed you that you were not as alone in the night as you might have thought. The battery itself was a source of mystery. They were heavy and expensive, and we were often without them, and a radio deprived of its battery was as silent as the grave. Once I had even disassembled one with a hatchet, laying out the tin-sheathed electrolyte and carbon rods as if somewhere among them were the depleted and uncharged husks of musicians, gap-toothed country comedians, folksy announcers hawking Warren paint, moon pies, Groves chill tonic.

  All across the south radios were tuned to the Grand Ole Opry. In the smalltown tract houses and the fading grandeur of the antebellum homes of country squires and in the coal oil lit shacks of sharecroppers and sawmill hands and factory workers, acolytes were gathered before a makeshift electronic shrine whose God was Hank Williams.

   For nobody was kidding anybody. The rest were the supporting cast, sometimes talking down to you, sometimes pious beyond belief, the glib announcers unconvincing in their sincerity. But Hank was the real thing. His Alabama twang cutting through the dross left no mistake that he was one of us, that even though he wore the tailored western trappings and rode in a Cadillac he could cut it punching a time-clock or chopping cotton. It was rumored that he had his problems, but hell, we all had our problems. That just made him less remote, more surely one of us: we knew that women could hurt him and whisky could make him wild then leave him sick and disconnected and that Monday morning was something that hung over Saturday night like a threat.

   Around midnight someone in the radio would say, ‘well, that old clock on the wall says we gotta haul’ and I would get up and turn the radio off, not wasting a moment of the battery’s mysterious strength, and I would know that all over the south people would be turning off their radios too, the music replaced by the calling of whippoorwills. Lights would be either switched off or blown out, the world caught at the tail end of its workweek and settling into a weary peaceful darkness that smelled like honeysuckle and kerosene. I would lie there on my pallet, my parents long asleep, and wonder what the musicians were doing in that far-off and almost mythical kingdom of Nashville. I could not imagine Nashville but I could imagine Hank Williams as clearly as if he were sitting across from me in the darkness, for his songs were so cut from the fabric I was familiar with that they connected on some level I could not begin to explain. I could imagine him turning away from the dead mic, casing his guitar and picking it up and carrying it like a suitcase into the night, but I could not imagine where he was going, or what he would do when he got there.

   The rural south, the dirtpoor sharecropper part of it, had been under the yoke of Reconstruction for almost a century. Held down by politicians and greed and the lack of education and the nagging guilty feeling that we might have brought it all on ourselves. It was hard to escape. Lives were boundaried at the four points of the compass: first the rented shack, then the red clay cottonfield, the other way a cinderblock honky-tonk with a graveled parking lot and flickering neon, and finally, ascending into pastoral Sunday morning, the whitewashed clapboard church in the wildwood where redemption and absolution waited like cool shade at the end of the row and you could lay your burden down.

   Hank knew all this, but he had made it through. Hank knew that life could kill you if you didn’t have a sense of humor, and even when things were falling apart he could laugh at himself. He knew that love had twisted and cut him like a knife, but he could sing, “My hair’s still curly and my eyes are still blue, why don’t you love me like you used to do?” He could joke in the face of the Reaper himself: “I’ll never get out of this world alive,” “I’m goin’ down in it three times, but Lord I’m only comin’ up twice.”

   The folks sitting by the radios regarded life with this same stoic forbearance, and they knew Hank was one of them. If you met him on a Saturday sidewalk you might swap lies and shake your heads at the doings of politicians, listen to some streetcorner prophet ranting an unhinged gospel of Hellfire so hot it would singe your hair just to stand too close to him.  Later you might walk down to the Snowwhite cafe and drink a cold beer, Saturday night and its promise spread out before you like an uncharted country.

   I had an uncle, with problems of his own, who regarded Hank’s yellow MGM 78’s with the reverence the church might accord the vialed blood of dead saints. Once while I was a child a miracle happened and we drove to a neighboring town where Hank was supposed to perform on a stage before the local movie screen.  My uncle had little faith in miracles and he sat tense and nervous, his hands knotted into fists, afraid that Hank would not show.

   But then there he was, though something was clearly wrong: his body was so thin it looked like sticks wired together and draped with the white coat. The face, with its gaunt eyes and high cheekbones, looked like a grinning deathhead.  But the voice was there, that sardonic voice with its magic intact, aligning itself with you, saying

‘I know what you’re thinking, I’ve been wandering around in your head. I’ve been thinking the same thing myself, and it’s me and you against the world.’

   My uncle was silent a long time on the drive back. Finally he said,

   “He didn’t look good.”

   “He needs to eat more,” I said.

   He fell silent again. After a while he said, “No. It’s us.’

   I didn’t know what he meant, and when I asked he couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me. Years later I read of the sin-eaters who were told to be common in the Appalachian Mountains. When there was a death in the family, food was laid out on the corpse and that night the sin-eater would eat it, consuming not just the food but the deceased’s earthly sins as well. I believe that he saw Hank as a sin-eater, taking on all of the trials and tribulations and burdens of his audience, all the broken hearts and burntup crops and empty bottles, all the broken promises and outright lies that life can deal up to you. Until they grew too heavy.  Until he was taking up the slack with drugs and alcohol and then when that didn’t work he just couldn’t go with it anymore.

  (Hank’s wife)

 I’ll never get out of this world alive, he had sung. On a day as cold and crisp as Christmas I walked back across the frozen woods to my uncle’s house. Hank is dead, he told me, in a voice that clearly said he didn’t believe Hank could be dead, not at twenty-nine, for God’s sake, that’s no more than a boy. Dead in the back seat of a limousine, he said. It was a day so cold the air was bluelooking and frozen and it was spitting snow but we sat on the edge of the porch while he told me about it.

  (The car Hank died in)

Children are aware of the cataclysms and tremors of adult life, because sooner or later they trickle down to them, and I knew that our lives had somehow been altered. Something had gone out of life, and what had replaced it was mortality: if life could get Hank it could get anybody.

   But the music had been there before anything else. Before the incessant and ultimately tiresome squabbling with wives and ex-wives, before Nashville’s machinery airbrushed his image to make him a sainted icon and delivered to the ages, before another decade clocked around when icons of another order were demanded and the faults and failings were painted back in and edged in black. Without the music there was nothing, and on that snowy New Year’s there was a makeshift comfort in knowing that it would endure. If my uncle were around today, almost half a century later, with a way of life long gone and the sharecroppers and sawmill workers just yellowing photographs in family albums, he would be even more comforted in knowing that the music is enduring still.

(Hank’s funeral)