Hank Williams News

New Year’s marks 60 years since Hank Williams departure

HANK — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 04:03:05 +0000

Hank Williams’ music, mystery, legacy lives on
Posted on December 28, 2012 by Peter Cooper, The Tennessean

Sixty years ago, right about now, 29-year-old Hank Williams was getting ready to go.

He thought he was heading from Montgomery, Ala., to Canton, Ohio, to play a New Year’s Day show.

But he was heading to Birmingham, after taking a shot of morphine. Doctor’s orders. Or rather, Hank’s orders, to the doctor. His back hurt, all the time.

Beyond Birmingham, where he slept on Dec. 30, Hank was heading to Knoxville, to Corryton and Blaine and Bristol in Tennessee, to Bluefield up in West Virginia. And then on to Princeton and Mt. Hope, W.Va., and then to the great beyond. Maybe not so great, who knows? Anyway, the beyond.

Which is why 10 years ago I wrote a story about the death of Hank Williams, on the 50th anniversary of all that dreariness. (Read that story here.)

Hank Williams Sr. featured in the “Moonrise Kingdom” Soundtrack

HANK — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 01:51:07 +0000

Top 3 songs are featured in the Moonrise Kingdom soundtrack: Kaw-Liga, Long Gone Lonesome Blues, and Ramblin’ Man.

Stars bring Hank’s ‘Lost Notebooks’ to life

HANK — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 23:56:19 +0000

By CHRIS TALBOTT - Associated Press

NASHVILLE, Tenn. —
Over the years, Holly Williams never felt much of a connection to her grandfather. So when she slipped on a pair of white gloves and lifted one of Hank Williams’ old spiral-bound notebooks to inspect its pages full of careful cursive script recently at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, she was a little bit startled to feel a deep visceral reaction.

“Just amazement,” she said a few minutes later. “Just shock and awe.” Touching the notebooks left her with a feeling of “just how prolific he was.” “I’m 30,” she said. “It makes me go, ‘God, I sure haven’t got much done.’ … He died at 29 and he wrote these songs.”

Williams’ notebooks not only inspired his granddaughter, but an all-star cast of artists who put the country archetype’s unfinished lyrics to music for the new project “The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams.” Williams used to carry the notebooks in a battered old leather briefcase he always had with him, including at the time of his death just before or on Jan. 1, 1953, on the way to a show in West Virginia. His mother found a cache of material after his death as well. She turned the song fragments over to Williams’ publisher and they’ve sat in a vault for most of the ensuing decades, until producer Mary Martin came up with the idea for breathing life into them.

All participants were challenged to put Williams’ words to music. Some added lyrics of their own to flesh out fragments, and all were responsible for their own melody and instrumentation. For the most part, the principles stick close to what they imagined the source material should have sounded like, but each brings something a little different.

Williams is joined by her father Hank Jr. on her contribution “Blue is My Heart.” Dylan, his son Jakob, Alan Jackson, Merle Haggard, Jones, Jack White, Vince Gill and Rodney Crowell, Lucinda Williams and Sheryl Crow also cut songs for the long-simmering project, which Bob Dylan released this month on his Columbia Records imprint Egyptian Records, in association with the hall of fame.

Jackson delivers the closest homage with leadoff song “You’ve Been Lonesome, Too,” Norah Jones keeps it stripped down to acoustic guitar and harmony on “How Many Times Have You Broken My Heart,” and Crowell and Gill lay down what sounds like a classic song coming out of the radio circa 1950 on “I Hope You Shed a Million Tears.”

Gill and Crowell frame part of their song as a spoken-word monologue, adding a classic feel.

“To say you wrote a song with Hank Williams, yeah, that’s pretty cool,” Gill said. “Rodney was the biggest part of that, of taking it and making it something special. You couldn’t envision that would ever happen. You wouldn’t think there’s a bunch of unfinished Hank Williams songs laying around and they’re going to be giving them some folks who are kind of eccentric and talented, and have them finish them up.”

Martin’s original intention was for Williams fan Dylan to do a full album, but he eventually scuttled that plan. He spoke with Holly Williams about it around eight years ago, giving her a handful of copied lyrics while the two stood outside his tour bus.

“And you could tell it was a Hank song in an instant because of the way it was written,” she said. “I said, ‘These are Hank lyrics,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, they want me to do an album of these but that’s a lot of pressure on me, so I may give them to a lot of different artists.’ I wanted to take them and run with them and read them, but he put them back on the bus.”

Two years later she got a call saying it was time to come pick up a few samples of what was available.

“I ran down to my publishing company and got the lyrics and spent two days soaking it up, like a lost ‘Harry Potter’ book or something,” she said. “I could not wait to get my hands on it.” “Blue is My Heart” had just six lines when she picked it. She fleshed out the song lyrically and added a melody.

“I hope that you can’t tell when he stopped writing and when I started writing it because it was exactly half,” she said.

Her father, Hank Jr., makes an appearance on her song. But that’s about all he has to do with the album. Asked what he thought of the project, he said: “Yeah, yeah, it’s different. Some of it’s OK, some of it’s not. It’s all right.”

Asked if he had a favorite song, he pointed to the entries from his daughter and Jackson.

“That’s probably the best two on there,” he said. “I wasn’t really contacted about it at all. Let me tell you, if you don’t need me, go ahead, rock on, brother.”

Holly Williams is extremely pleased with the project, though. She thinks it provides a chance for a new generation of fans to access the music of her grandfather in a meaningful way. Williams combined lonesome country sounds with the blues and other influences from his childhood in Alabama to revolutionize country music with universal themes almost anyone can identify with. He sold his first song at 19 and went on to record timeless classics like “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” ”Hey, Good Lookin’” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” His hard-living lifestyle and his tragic early death helped ensure his place as an American icon.

Combined with recently unearthed material on the new collection “The Legend Begins” and last year’s “The Complete Mother’s Best Recordings,” there is a new sense of discovery swirling around Williams in the 21st century.

“I feel like (‘Lost Notebooks’) is just going to open a door where people say, if Jack White or Norah Jones or Lucinda love this, maybe I should check it out,” Holly Williams said.
___
AP writer Caitlin R. King in Nashville contributed to this report.

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The Ghostwriter

HANK — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 22:13:25 +0000

by Andrew Romano

On New Years Day in 1953, Hank Williams, the man who invented modern country music, died of an overdose in the backseat of his Cadillac at age 29. A few days later, his mama searched his house and made a secret discovery that—60 years later, with a little help from Bob Dylan, Jack White, Merle Haggard, Norah Jones, and Lucinda Williams—would allow old Hank’s ghost to rise from the grave.

Six years ago, a pair of country-music archivists named Stephen Shutts and Robert Reynolds received a cryptic phone call from a woman in suburban Nashville. She had seen their ad in a local newspaper, soliciting memorabilia, and now she had something she wanted them to see: a creased brown notebook full of handwritten song lyrics with dates from the late 1940s. The woman said the journal once belonged to Roy Orbison, but Shutts and Reynolds, who could claim some expertise in these matters, having already managed to acquire a pair of Elvis Presley’s underpants, among other relics, for their travelling Honky Tonk Hall of Fame, knew that Orbison didn’t start writing songs until a few years later, when Dwight Eisenhower was president. They suspected that someone else had owned the notebook. After three visits to the woman’s house, Shutts paid $1,500 to add it, and several other items, to their collection.

At first, Shutts and Reynolds weren’t sure whose hand had written “Original Songs” in block letters across the cover of the brown journal, or who had marked its marginal ruled pages with lines like “the days that were happy turned into lonely years.” But then they happened upon a coffee-table book called Snapshots from the Lost Highway, which had been published in 2001. It was filled with photos and documents from the life of Hank Williams, one of the finest American songwriters of the 20th century. And there, in full color, was a photograph of the notebook they had just bought. Reynolds says he gasped when he saw it.

The collectors wouldn’t get to enjoy their new acquisition for long. In September 2006, someone at Sony/ATV, the publishing company in charge of Hank’s catalog, read an interview with Reynolds in the Chicago Sun-Times. “We’d love to see [Bob] Dylan… Alan Jackson… Holly [Williams] all get an opportunity to wrap their mind in the tradition,” Reynolds had told the paper. “What could possibly feel better than to sit there with your guitar, this notebook, and let the muse find you?” Soon, Shutts was under arrest for felony theft. The woman who sold him the relic, a former Sony/ATV janitor, was being booked as well; she said she had rescued it from a pile of trash. (The charges were later dropped.) And the notebook itself, after a brief frolic in the wider world, was locked up, yet again, in Sony’s secret vault.

···Eighteen months later, Norah Jones gave a midnight performance at The Living Room, the hushed songwriter’s haven on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where she’d launched her career. After breezing through her first three or four numbers, Jones paused to introduce a new composition. She didn’t mention its name, but she did say how she wrote it: by adding music to a newly-discovered Hank Williams lyric. Smiling, Jones added that she “was probably not supposed to play this.”

The Jones-Williams collaboration went over well; the next day, a friend of mine who attended the show told me the song was “gorgeous.” I quickly discovered that Jones wasn’t the only contemporary artist who’d gotten the chance to co-write with Hank. The previous winter, a bassist named Dominic Suchyta told Paste Magazine about a recent Nashville session with his old friend Jack White. The song they had recorded, Suchyta said, was “a Hank Williams lyric sheet that Jack put to music and edited a bit.”

“Dylan,” he went on, “had contacted [Jack] to see if he’d like to finish some of these tunes.”

Dylan. As in Bob Dylan. I knew that as a kid in Hibbing, Minnesota, Dylan would tune into distant Opry transmissions and comb the local record shop for Hank Williams 78s—his “first influence,” he would later say, and the reason he “started writing songs.” What I didn’t know, and what Suchyta had first revealed, was that Dylan had “acquired” a bunch of “‘lost’ Hank Williams songs”—songs that Dylan had begun discreetly asking artists such as White and Jones to reanimate. The project sounded similar to Mermaid Avenue, the 1998 album of unheard Guthrie lyrics set to music and performed by Billy Bragg and Wilco, only better. Bragg and Wilco were talented, but they weren’t Bob Dylan. And Guthrie was no match for the genius who had written “Cold, Cold Heart” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”

For most of the previous six decades, Hank Williams’s legacy had been set in stone. There was the battered, lifeless body he left behind, and the pitiful tale of how it came to be that way. And then there was his body of work: little more than 100 songs in all, performed live in the studio or on the radio, with sparse, mostly acoustic accompaniment, and carried through the decades, from vinyl to plastic to digital bits, by the haunting sound of his singular voice. In 1923, Williams was born, too restless for school and too sickly for manual labor, to an absentee father and a predatory mother on a bleak patch of pineland in Mt. Olive, Alabama. Thirty years later, he’d somehow managed to transform himself, as his hometown newspaper once put it, into “the Hillbilly Shakespeare.”

But now it was clear that there was more to Hank’s legacy than the hundred songs he had committed to wax. Over the next few months, I would learn that the brown notebook Shutts and Reynolds had purchased in the summer of 2006 was not the only one of its kind; there were three more just like it. Together, these four private scratch pads, which had been buried, stolen, bruised, and battled over in the six decades since Williams’s death, represented one of the headier what-ifs in pop history: a secret stash of 66 unrecorded songs by the man who had invented modern country music.

Dylan & Co., it also turned out, had assembled quite a team for their subterranean project: White and Jones, as well Alan Jackson, Merle Haggard, Sheryl Crow, Lucinda Williams, and Levon Helm, among others. By mid-2009, the album was mostly finished, but business squabbles and scheduling conflicts were keeping it mired in record-industry limbo. Not even the artists themselves were able to hear it. But this week The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams will finally be unveiled. The question now is what this strange experiment in musical creation will reveal about the magic that separates the hundreds of thousands of songs we forget from the rare ones, like so many of Hank’s, that we can’t seem to shake.

···Hiram King “Hank” Williams lived fast and died young, but he skipped the part about leaving behind a beautiful corpse. It was December 30, 1952 when the singer set out from his mother’s boardinghouse in Montgomery, Alabama, where he’d been bunking for the past few months with his new bride, Billie Jean, and began the long drive to Charleston, West Virginia and Canton, Ohio for a pair of New Year’s shows. They were the only commitments left on his schedule. The haunted figure slumped in the back seat of the 1952 powder-blue Cadillac convertible coupe that morning was still dressed like the honky-tonk superstar who’d scorched the Grand Ole Opry stage only a year earlier: white felt hat, white cowboy boots, blue serge suit, navy blue overcoat. But now the clothing looked like a costume.

Williams was 30 pounds overweight. His hair was falling out. He’d always been a drunk, of course, but he’d recently started supplementing his standard liquid diet with morphine, Dexedrine, and chloral hydrate, which his doctor, a self-described “pathological, constitutional liar” who’d spent time in San Quentin for armed robbery, had prescribed to ease the chronic back pain that became unbearable after Williams fell five feet down a gully hunting groundhogs in late 1951. But his condition hadn’t improved. His arms were freckled with track marks. His veins had mostly collapsed. Around Thanksgiving, he’d suffered a minor heart attack while visiting his sister Irene in Florida, and a few days later he stopped breathing on the way to a gig. Irene was convinced she’d never see him again.

Williams seemed to share his sister’s premonition. “Ol’ Hank needs to straighten up some things with the Man,” he told Billie Jean before leaving for Charleston. “Every time I close my eyes, I see Jesus coming down the road.” The next morning, he climbed into the Cadillac with his driver, Charles Carr, an 18-year-old freshman at Auburn University, and they were off.

Williams intake on the trip wasn’t unusual, for him: a few beers at a nearby hotel; a morphine shot from a local physician; a six-pack of Falstaff in the back seat; a handful of chloral hydrate tablets; a bottle of bonded bourbon. But at a hotel in Knoxville, he fell to the floor, convulsing and hiccupping violently. A doctor was summoned. He administered two more shots of morphine and declared the singer fit for travel. A pair of porters put him in a wheelchair, bundled him into the back seat, and covered him with a blanket and an overcoat. By the time Carr pulled over at 5:30 a.m. in Oak Hill, West Virginia, his passenger hadn’t spoken for hours. The driver reached back and felt Williams’s hand. It was stiff. The greatest artist ever to emerge from Nashville was pronounced dead at 7:00 am on the first day of 1953, at the advanced age of 29.

A few hours later, as reporters were conducting interviews, cops were gathering evidence, and family, friends, and lawyers were flooding in from across the South, the crew at N&W Motors in Oak Hill began cleaning out Hank’s Cadillac. Picking through a pile of empty beer cans, a worker spotted a crumpled piece of paper on the floor of the back seat. It was stained by a boot print and most likely scrawled on the drive:

We met, and lived
And dear we loved
Then came that fatal day
The love that felt so dear fades fast away
Tonight we both are all alone
And here’s all that I can say
I love you still and always will
But that’s the price we have to pay

Carr knew that Williams’s mother, Lilly, could be a handful. But even he was shocked by her first response when he called with the tragic news: “Don’t let anything happen to that car!” Then she hung up the phone. Within hours, Lilly was scrambling around Oak Hill, snatching up Hank’s possessions, including the lyric from the Cadillac. She knew it wouldn’t be the last one she’d find. Williams had been scribbling in notebooks with his little pencil stubs for as long as Lilly could remember, and he was always returning home with a billfold of half-completed songs and abandoned ideas under his arm. Her goal was to keep these nuggets of gold out of the hands of her despised daughter-in-law, who wasn’t scheduled to arrive in West Virginia until the following day.

Lilly didn’t discover any other treasures in Oak Hill. But Montgomery was more bountiful. On the morning of Hank’s funeral, Lilly waited until Billie Jean slipped into the bathroom to apply her makeup, then crept into her son’s quarters and started to snoop around. There, stuffed inside a shoebox—or a beat-up leather briefcase, depending on whose memory you trust—Lilly found what she’d been looking for: four bent, schoolboyish notebooks filled with handwritten lyrics.

···Legend has it that Billie Jean, who’d been overheard earlier that day accusing “the old gray-haired bitch” of “trying to steal all of Hank’s stuff from me,” returned to her room just as Lilly was claiming her prize, and the two kicked, clawed, and yanked at each other’s hair as they brawled over the notebooks. Assuming the story is true, Billie Jean was no match for her more experienced rival. Before the funeral, a triumphant Lilly handed Hank’s papers to his promoter, who in turn passed them to Fred Rose, co-founder of the legendary music publishing firm Acuff-Rose. When Rose returned to Nashville the next day, he locked the notebooks in a safe. Some of the lyrics were famous. Others were yet to be published or performed. As for the melodies, Williams had never figured out how to write them down, meaning they were gone forever, if they’d ever existed in the first place.

For most of the next 50 years, the notebooks drifted through Nashville like ghosts: unseen, unnoticed, unremembered. In 1969, when the young Hank Williams, Jr. was still making a living impersonating his father—Audrey Mae Sheppard, Hank, Sr.’s first wife, even had matching suits made—he’d raided the Acuff-Rose archives and knocked out an album of his own (lousy) collaborations; a few years later, Mickey Newbury, an Acuff-Rose artist, chose one or two lyrics to record. Neither made much of an impact. By the end of the century, the notebooks were so obscure that not even Holly Williams, Hank’s granddaughter and a gifted singer-songwriter in her own right, was aware they existed. But on May 16, 2003 Williams slipped backstage after a Bob Dylan show in Birmingham, Ala.—and Dylan handed her some typewritten pages. “He didn’t really say anything, so I started reading the lyrics,” Williams told me recently. “And I could just tell instantly they were Hank’s.”

Dylan had already spent several months wrestling with Williams’s unfinished songs. In late 2002, Peggy Lamb, an longtime executive at Acuff-Rose, and Mary Martin, the industry legend responsible for introducing Dylan to The Band and launching the recording careers of Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Emmylou Harris, and Vince Gill, had come to Sony/ATV on the recommendation of a fellow Hank fanatic who’d stumbled upon the notebooks while researching the Snapshots from the Lost Highway book. As Martin and Lamb paged through Williams’s private journals, they saw that some of the lyrics had dates. Many did not. Some were written in a dutiful script, as if to impress the grayhairs at Acuff-Rose. Others looked like hieroglyphics. To Martin, this trove of lost verses and choruses—words scribbled in a Cadillac after one too many whiskeys, or in a dank dressing room somewhere, after yet another a row with Audrey—”seemed a little bit like folk art.” Her first call was to an old friend: Bob Dylan. The idea was that he would choose 12 lyrics, add music, and record the results for a solo album. Dylan said he was interested.

But by the time the rock icon bumped into Holly Williams backstage in Birmingham, he was beginning to have second thoughts. “Bob mentioned something about maybe getting other people to put music to Hank’s lyrics,” Williams told me. “And I was like, ‘You should write the music yourself!’ But he just shook his head and said he didn’t want the responsibility.’”

Dylan’s apprehension might seem strange at first, because most Hank Williams songs don’t sound particularly difficult to simulate. But that’s an illusion: the apparent simplicity of Williams’s work—its near-primitive quality—is actually a product of relentless refinement. “Hank,” says Dave Hickey, the noted art critic and former Nashville songwriter, “was the fucking best. That’s the bottom line.”Williams had a remarkable voice, and he wrote, or borrowed, precisely the right kinds of melodies: modest enough to be memorable and dynamic enough to convey whatever emotions his words described. But the most revolutionary thing about his songs was the lyrics. Unlike his predecessors, Williams didn’t sing about emotions in the abstract; he revealed his own feelings, in real time, in song. “Somehow, Hank never succumbed to the oppressive reign of inarticulateness that Southern men have forced upon them,” Hickey says. “And so his songs meant a great deal to a great many inarticulate people. He was expressing the inner needs of a very hostile and repressed audience.” These days, every singer-songwriter is “confessional.” Williams was the first.

He was also the first country writer as careful and crafty with language as a Broadway pro, which is why his verses, as emotional as they are, read more like proverbs than diary entries. Some critics have speculated that Fred Rose, a former Tin Pan Alley songsmith, was responsible for the burnished gleam that Hank’s best lyrics give off. But while Rose encouraged Williams to organize and commercialize his scribblings—he taught his protege to “write bridges rather than simply string verses together” to “dispense with archaic folk forms like ‘ne’er’ and ‘oe’er’” in favor of “every day speech,” according to Colin Escott’s definitive biography, Hank Williams—he was as surprised as anyone by Williams’s sudden polish. “Don’t get the idea that I made the guy or wrote his songs for him,” Rose said after Williams’s death. “He made himself.”

How Williams “made himself,” lyrics-wise, is still something of a mystery. His earliest submissions to Acuff-Rose were undistinguished, and his first big hit, “Lovesick Blues,” was a cover. But starting with an MGM recording session in Cincinnati on August 30, 1949—the session that yielded “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” among others—Williams “came closer to hitting a home run every time at bat than anyone in popular music before or since,” as Escott (correctly) puts it.

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Lonesome Hank’s Friends

HANK — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 22:17:18 +0000

By BARRY MAZOR –

You know you’re in Hank Williams territory. There’s a soul wilted “like a rose that never feels the dew,” a “wasted” love with endless costs, a heart that’s “blue as the sky” and, scattered throughout the album, more than anyone’s fair share of lonesome. But no one had heard the words in “The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams” sung until 12 writer-performers took a dozen of his rich but unrecorded lyrics and brought them to life.

A decade in the making, “The Lost Notebooks” comes out this week on Bob Dylan’s Egyptian Records imprint at Sony/Columbia, in cooperation with the Country Music Hall of Fame’s CMF Records. The songs were culled from four notebooks left behind when Williams died, on New Year’s morning, 1953, at age 29. They arrived shortly thereafter at music publisher Acuff-Rose, where catalog specialist Peggy Lamb kept the notebooks safe, despite corporate mergers and moves, and typed up Hank’s sometimes hard-to-read, handwritten lyrics for copyright.

As originally conceived by Sony Publishing and A&R executive Mary Martin—Mr. Dylan’s longtime friend who’d introduced him to The Band—the songs would have been completed and performed entirely by Mr. Dylan, a lifelong Williams admirer. But about eight years ago, Hank’s granddaughter Holly Williams recalled recently, Mr. Dylan told her that it was “kind of overwhelming” for him to take it all on and was looking for other artists to join in. Eventually, Ms. Williams would be one of the 12 performing writers who have cuts on the new release, including Mr. Dylan and his son Jakob, Merle Haggard, Alan Jackson, Nora Jones, Jack White and Lucinda Williams.

Ms. Martin explained in a recent interview at her Nashville home how the artists and lyrics came together: “Dylan was No. 1, and No. 2 was Alan Jackson. And then everything else was up for discussion! The artists approached were all songwriters; that, to me, was really important. And each artist received 25 lyrics, but not the ones already chosen, so there would be no kerfufflement. Peggy Lamb and I spent a wad of time writing proper letters to each artist saying what they could and couldn’t do, with the key phrase: ‘We understand the creative muse. So don’t be curtailed by any rules or boundaries.’”

That freedom led some of the songwriters to emulate William’s musical style; others to go in more explicitly contemporary directions. But despite the broad range of moods in which Williams wrote and sang—all represented in the notebooks—the majority of the artists were drawn toward his lyrics that expressed being alone and desperately lonesome.

Yes, there’s an up-tempo number from Patty Loveless, a religious ballad from Mr. Haggard, and a sly, catchy “peeved with my woman” song from Mr. White. But material in the “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” mode proved the main attraction.

Mr. Jackson’s love of this territory was evident in his Hank-haunted 1990 country hit “Midnight in Montgomery,” and his affecting traditionalist turn on the lyric “You’ve Been Lonesome, Too” starts off the new collection. He noted in a separate interview: “As far as Hank Williams goes, I guess for a lot of people his cheatin’, hurtin’, forsaken songs are the ones that stand out; I gravitate towards the sad, more emotional songs as a writer, myself. . . . I guess it’s easier to make pain sound honest than happy. I just took this lyric and sat down one day and started fiddling around with it, and that melody jumped out.”

Holly Williams chose perhaps the most desolate lyrics, adapted and extended for the record. “It was wild to have the opportunity,” she said. “And also very scary. Obviously, because I’m the granddaughter, I wanted to do a good job. Still, I got the lyrics in an afternoon, and by that evening I’d decided on ‘Blue Is My Heart.’ . . . It does remind me that journalists say of my own songs, ‘These songs are heavy.’ I am going to turn towards a song like that, even though in my own life I’m so outgoing, loud and rambunctious. Sitting down at the piano at night, something in me wants to play the slow heartbreaking songs.” (Ms. Williams’s father, Hank Williams Jr., sings harmony on the track.)

All involved in the project second Ms. Martin’s hope that “it adds to and honors Hank Williams’s legacy in a unique way, and makes an impression both with people who already know his worthiness—and others.” Mr. Jackson adds: “Hank Williams has always been just such a big part of what real country music is—and a poet. He showed how simply you can write; people still need to learn that from him. And he’s a reason I moved to Nashville.”

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The Lost Notebooks CD Release

HANK — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:07:31 +0000

The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams – tracklisting:

1. You’ve Been Lonesome, Too – Alan Jackson
2. The Love That Faded – Bob Dylan
3. How Many Times Have You Broken My Heart? – Norah Jones
4. You Know That I Know – Jack White
5. I’m So Happy I Found You – Lucinda Williams
6. I Hope You Shed a Million Tears – Vince Gill and Rodney Crowell
7. You’re Through Fooling Me – Patty Loveless
8. You’ll Never Again Be Mine – Levon Helm
9. Blue Is My Heart – Holly Williams
10. Oh, Mama, Come Home – Jakob Dylan
11. Angel Mine – Sheryl Crow
12. The Sermon on the Mount – Merle Haggard

‘Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams’ finds good company in Bob Dylan

HANK — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 17:44:41 +0000

The singer-songwriter’s long-in-the-works tribute to Hank Williams nears release, with kindred spirits like Holly Williams, Merle Haggard and Jack White tapping into the country legend’s unreleased archive.

At a time when country was still widely labeled “hillbilly music,” Hank Williams brought a new level of haunting personal storytelling through disarming poetic lyrics using deceptively simple language. The beauty and power he brought to songs now considered country classics — “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love With You” among many, many others — continue to resonate today.

He forged fans in all areas of pop music. Columbia Records A&R man Mitch Miller famously persuaded Tony Bennett to record “Cold, Cold Heart” in 1951, introducing Williams’ music to audiences across the country who never would have listened to the Grand Ole Opry’s radio broadcasts.

Williams’ songwriting also had a powerful influence on younger folk and rock artists including Dylan — perhaps second only to Dylan’s primary songwriting hero, Woody Guthrie, the subject of a similar restoration project a little more than a decade ago by Wilco and Billy Bragg. “The sound of Hank Williams’s voice went through me like an electric rod,” Dylan wrote in “Chronicles, Vol. 1.”

The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville inducted only three figures when it opened in 1961: country pioneer Jimmie Rodgers, songwriter-publisher Fred Rose and Williams, of whom the institution declared: “His is the standard by which success is measured in country music on every level, even self-destruction.”

He was born in rural Alabama with a deformity, spina bifida occulta, that caused him intense pain throughout his life. He turned to self-medication with alcohol for relief, the result being his erratic behavior as a performer, as a husband and father and as a businessman.

Alcoholism was the primary cause of his death, and despite his burgeoning stack of masterfully written hits, his unreliability made it harder for him to earn a living. He was banned from the Grand Ole Opry for “drunkenness.” He wrote and recorded prolifically during the six years from when he first stepped into a recording studio until he died, leaving more than 200 recordings behind.

Falling into place
After Dylan first approached Holly Williams about the lost notebooks material nearly a decade ago, it was years before she heard anything more. A few years later, A&R executive Martin brought the subject up again. Holly went through the songs and song fragments and honed in on “Blue Is My Heart,” for which her grandfather had written just eight lines. She wrote two more and added a bridge. “My dad ended up singing on it with me,” she said. “It was great to have him involved. It really just fell together.”

Vince Gill played with the father-daughter team on their track, in addition to the one he finished writing with Rodney Crowell, “I Hope You Shed a Million Tears”:

I gave my heart and soul to you
You done me wrong for years
I hope someday you suffer, too
And shed a million tears

Crowell added spoken-word verses akin to what Williams did on recordings under the name of his alter ego, Luke the Drifter. “We wanted to do it in the Luke the Drifter period,” Gill said, “where Rodney spoke the lyrics in the verses, and I sang the choruses. It’s fun to listen to. I’ve heard a few of the other things [from the 'Lost Notebooks' tracks] and I’m really proud of this because it does hark back to those days.” Gill calls it one of the most memorable recording sessions of his career because it was the final studio appearance by Williams’ original steel guitarist, Don Helms, before he died two months later.

Lucinda Williams chose “I’m So Happy I Found You” for her turn at bat. She composed an anguished melody in the tradition of Buck Owens’ “Together Again,” marrying a lyric describing joy born of despair to one of the saddest melodies imaginable. “I just got lucky,” Williams said. “I know some people only had six lines to work with. All I had to do was come up with a melody.”

“I knew the album had to end with that one,” Martin said. “There’s enough material left to do another album. We’ll see how this one does.”

randy.lewis@latimes.com

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Hank Williams’ Unfinished Thoughts, Finished

HANK — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 23:52:27 +0000

October 1, 2011

“When Hank Williams died, he left behind a scuffed, embroidered brown leather briefcase. Like its owner, the briefcase appeared weathered beyond its years, yet it retained a dignified bearing that abuse couldn’t erase.”

So begin the liner notes for a new compilation titled The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams. Michael McCall, who wrote the notes, goes on to explain that the briefcase contained a stockpile of unreleased — and, in some cases, incomplete — music from the mind of the country legend, who died at 29 on New Year’s Day 1953. His mother, Lilian Stone, discovered even more of his notes in a cardboard box in his room.

“She took that box and called [Williams' publisher] Acuff-Rose and said, ‘We have these songs — what should I do with them?’ ” McCall says. “And they said, ‘Send them to us. They’re largely our property, and we’ll take care of them.’ And they kept them in locked vaults to make sure they were cared for the way they should be.”

The catalog was sold several times over the years and eventually came to the attention of producer Mary Martin. Now, Martin has organized an all-star cast to finish some of those lost songs and record them. Bob Dylan, a Hank Williams superfan, was one of the first artists she approached.

“At that time, the idea was to have one particular brave singer-songwriter view the lyrics and choose 12,” Martin says. “Bob Dylan held those lyrics for over a year and a half, and I do believe that it was too mighty a task. So he suggested that he would do one, and then we decided it should be a compilation record.”

Martin says it was important to her that the participants be songwriters, not simply arrangers or interpreters. The roster of talent on the disc includes Jack White, Alan Jackson, Norah Jones and many others. One standout is “Blue Is My Heart,” which was recorded by Holly Williams — Hank’s granddaughter.

“I think she really discovered a lot about herself, and I think she gained a huge appreciation for who her granddad was,” Martin says. “She worked so, so very diligently to get it right.”

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Stars Add New Tunes to Country King’s Lyrics

HANK — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 00:05:11 +0000

By ALAN LIGHT

BOB DYLAN has long claimed Hank Williams as an influence and an inspiration. In his 2004 memoir, “Chronicles Volume One,” Mr. Dylan recounted his discovery of that country giant’s music in the 1950s. “I became aware that in Hank’s recorded songs were the archetype rules of poetic songwriting,” he wrote. “The architectural forms are like marble pillars.”

Mr. Dylan added that when he got word of Williams’s death at the age of 29 on New Year’s Day, 1953, the news “hit me squarely on the shoulder.”

“Intuitively I knew, though, that his voice would never drop out of sight or fade away,” he continued.

With a new project titled “The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams,” Mr. Dylan is doing his part to keep the work of one of America’s greatest songwriters — the author of classics like “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Cold Cold Heart,” and “Hey Good Lookin’ ” — in the spotlight. The album collects the lyrics for a dozen unrecorded songs by Williams, set to melodies and recorded by an array of rock and country stars, including Jack White, Norah Jones, Merle Haggard and Sheryl Crow. “The Lost Notebooks” is being released on Oct. 4 on Mr. Dylan’s imprint, Egyptian Records, in conjunction with the Country Music Hall of Fame and Columbia Records. (The only previous release on Egyptian was a 1997 group tribute to the country pioneer Jimmie Rodgers.)

Artists who participated in the album, which has been in the works for almost a decade, expressed their sense of honor at being asked to complete the work of such a monumental musician. “There’s a lot of magic still left in these songs,” said Alan Jackson, who opens the album with “You’ve Been Lonesome, Too.” Ms. Jones, who sings the bluesy, melancholy “How Many Times Have You Broken My Heart,” said she found the idea behind the project “really daunting,” but that “the people who were putting it together were doing it with respect and love and creativity, and I had trust in that.”

Lucinda Williams — whose poet father met Hank Williams the month before the singer died and Ms. Williams was born — felt such an emotional connection to her selection, “I’m So Happy I Found You,” that she sang it immediately before she and her husband exchanged vows at their onstage wedding in 2009. The seeds of the project were planted in 2002 when the all-star Hank Williams tribute album “Timeless” (also with Mr. Dylan, Ms. Williams and Ms. Crow) won the Grammy for country album of the year. One of that record’s executive producers, the veteran manager and A&R executive Mary Martin, was approached by Peggy Lamb, the Hank Williams authority at Williams’s publishing company, Acuff-Rose. Ms. Lamb told her about the cardboard box containing four notebooks and scattered scraps of paper full of Williams’s unrecorded lyrics (66 songs in all) that was locked in a vault in her office. Williams’s family had passed the material to Acuff-Rose soon after the singer died, but its existence wasn’t widely known until a few of the pages were reprinted in the book “Hank Williams: Snapshots From the Lost Highway,”

“Nashville is a small community,” said Ms. Martin, who worked with Mr. Dylan’s legendary manager Albert Grossman and first introduced Mr. Dylan to the members of the Band. “If three of us have a passion, we’re bound to end up in a bar together.”

Initially Ms. Lamb’s idea was to ask one artist to record a full album based on the manuscripts. Ms. Martin approached Mr. Dylan, sending him 27 of them; he weighed the idea for “about a year and a half,” she said, before replying that “the task is too mighty.” He chose one song, “The Love That Faded,” for himself — setting lines like “Vows that we made turned into lies/My life is empty, my lonely heart cries” to a chugging waltz with a pedal-steel guitar refrain — and they started coming up with a roster of potential contributors and sending them lyrics to consider; Mr. Jackson was the first artist asked.

Ms. Martin said that some of the choices — Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young — opted not to participate and laughed as she described Mr. Dylan’s wondering why they weren’t involving Luciano Pavarotti.

The finest of the “Lost Notebooks” lyrics offer the economy and precision that characterized Williams’s work. Given the range of styles in which Mr. Williams wrote, from the spiritual revelation of “I Saw the Light” to the physical joy in “Jambalaya (on the Bayou),” the selections of each artist can be telling. Though there were a number of gospel songs among the lyrics, only Mr. Haggard chose a religious theme, the album’s closer, “The Sermon on the Mount.” The sly humor of “You Know That I Know” feels like familiar territory for Mr. White. The tradition-minded country singers Vince Gill and Rodney Crowell utilize a recited section, like those on the records Williams made as the street preacher character Luke the Drifter, in “I Hope You Shed a Million Tears” (and called on Williams’s pedal steel player, Don Helms, for what turned out to be his final recording session; he died in 2008).

Ms. Crow said she didn’t feel intimidated by the idea of finishing a master’s work. “It’s meant to be a project honoring him and his legacy,” she said. “It’s not really a contest, so I didn’t feel there would be any judgment.”

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Bob Dylan, Jack White and Norah Jones Record Unheard Hank Williams Songs

HANK — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 23:59:41 +0000

New compilation will also feature Levon Helm, Alan Jackson and Sheryl Crow
by Rolling Stone

The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams, a new collection of previously unheard songs by the country great recorded by artists such as Bob Dylan, Jack White, Norah Jones and Levon Helm, will be released on October 4th. The set, which will be issued on Dylan’s imprint Egyptian Records, was originally conceived by veteran A&R executive Mary Martin as a Dylan-centric project, but eventually evolved into a multi-artist tribute to the late singer-songwriter.

The songs featured in the set were rescued from notebooks left behind in a leather briefcase by Williams after he died in 1953 at the age of 29. The notes contained lyrics and song ideas that were finished by the 13 artists who contributed to the disc. The full story of Williams’ notebooks will be told in the album’s liner notes, which were penned by Michael McCall of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

The full tracklisting for The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams is as follows:

Alan Jackson “You’ve Been Lonesome, Too”
Bob Dylan “The Love That Faded”
Norah Jones “How Many Times Have You Broken My Heart?”
Jack White “You Know That I Know”
Lucinda Williams “I’m So Happy I Found You”
Vince Gill and Rodney Crowell “I Hope You Shed a Million Tears”
Patty Loveless “You’re Through Fooling Me”
Levon Helm “You’ll Never Again Be Mine”
Holly Williams “Blue Is My Heart”
Jakob Dylan “Oh, Mama, Come Home”
Sheryl Crow “Angel Mine”
Merle Haggard “The Sermon on the Mount”

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