Hank Williams: Greatest Songwriter/Shittiest Human Being of All Time

Cafe Society
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As long as I can remember, I’ve loved Hank Williams’ music. Usually classified as country, it could just as easily be described as blues, especially ones like “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”. I’m a singer/guitarist, and not a gig goes by that I don’t play something by Hank Williams. To borrow from Lennon, if there is such a thing as a genius, Williams was one.

It was painful for me to learn, as a young adult, the truth about his trainwreck of a life. The biopic starring George Hamilton is hilarious in retrospect, masking a drug/alcohol addled death at 29 with something approaching martyrdom. Country music glosses over the misdeeds of its icons in a way that rock and jazz are more open about.

Williams is in rare company as someone whom I always believe I can’t think any less of, only to have this belief shattered every time I learn more about them (others include boxing promoter Don King and bootlegger/patriarch Joseph Kennedy, Sr.)

“Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone”, the biography of the Carter Family, details the relationship between Williams and the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle, who performed with Williams on the Grand Old Opry in the late 40s/early 50s. Williams’ marriage was on the rocks, and he did a lot of crying on Maybelle’s shoulder about how mean his wife was to him. Maybelle and her daughters were often called upon to mediate between Williams and his wife. In the process, Williams got the hots for the beautiful young Anita Carter, and tried to convince Maybelle that his intentions were good. Fortunately, Maybelle was shrewd enough to protect her daughter from the off-the-rails Williams, whose substance abuse brought on terrifying violent rages. He tried to run a car off the road that he thought contained Anita (it was actually June), and once, incredibly, shot a pistol at June. When she screamed and hit the floor, the panicked Williams thought he’d shot her, and gallantly ran off without learning that he’d missed her by inches. His baleful apologies to Maybelle and her daughters were the typical reaction of abusers, incapable of seeing themselves as responsible for anything they do. It’s that mean old world that’s to blame for that black eye I gave you, honey.

A Jewish friend once asked me how I could admire famed aviator Charles Lindbergh in the face of clear evidence that he was an anti-Semite. I replied that it was because I’m a musician: when you have childhood idols like Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, and, yes, Hank Williams, you damn well better learn how to separate a person’s achievements from their flaws.

I am having, for the first time, trouble doing this with Hank Williams. The reason: the very heartbroken quality that makes his music so great is starting to sound like the accomplished lying dished out by shits like him the morning after blowing up. Because the “Hillbilly Shakespeare” is way better at spinning things his way than the average wifebeater, we only hear one side of the story. When Williams sings “I’m So Lonesome I could Cry”, I can’t help but wonder whether he’s out in the woods wondering “where you are” because the cops are wondering where he is. When Williams makes us think that he got dumped by a golddigging tramp in “Mansion on a Hill”, I wonder if the woman simply decided she had to live somewhere safe.

But I cannot deny how great the music is, and I can’t bring myself to give it up. So a few nights a week, I’ll continue to down a few drinks and get all weepy singing the works of the “Hillbilly OJ”, trying not to remember what an asshole he was.

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Great post, F.U. Shakespeare

I, too grew up on his music and didn’t learn until later on in life about what you so aptly termed his “trainwreck of a life”.

Have you considered, however, that those “heart-broken” songs of his are a way of acknowledging what a shitty human being he was?

Rightly so, you mention the songs in which he chides his lover for leaving him lonely, etc., but I wonder if there might have been a “real person” underneath all that shittiness?

Maybe he created the “Luke the Drifter” persona to try to show remorse?

Just throwing this in for discussion’s sake, not to criticize.

Thanks

Q

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Worse than Hitler, Stalin, Attila the Hun & Dick Cheney? Really?

Hank Williams came up very poor, with his father hospitalized for many years. He apparently suffered from mild spina bifida–the drugs & booze were self-medication for the constant pain. Then, of course, they became habits. And his first wife was a real piece of work.

Gosh, that George Hamilton movie was highly fictionalized? Who knew? (Just about everybody, for many years now.)

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Even if we just limit ourselves to great musicians, Williams was still a better person than Ike Turner.

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Musicians are humans too, with flaws. The fact that Williams was a drug-addled misanthrope does not mean that he wasn’t a BRILLIANT musician, with the power to touch lives for many generations to come.

Musicians can be antisemitic (Wagner), racist (virtually every early country and rock n’ roll star, plus many today), wife-beaters (Ike Turner, etc.), druggies (seriously? You need a cite?), cheaters (see also, groupiereport.com), etc.

Shrug. It’s both perfectly understandable to want your musical heroes to be paragons of virtue, but they ain’t.

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Bing Crosby was a fall-down drunk who beat his kids. Okay, edit, I wouldn’t classify him as a great songwriter, though.

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British SF writer Keith Roberts was, by all accounts, a trainwreck of a human being - paranoid, misanthropic and unable to deal with any sort of relationship.

Meh, people are people. Doesn’t stop me liking his books.

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Yep - he was a shit all right. But for whatever reason, he could take his emotions - however twisted and rationalized they might’ve been - and turn them into polished jems of songs.

As all of the other posters have said, I wouldn’t be able to to like 95% of the art I like if I had to confine myself to artists I also had to admire as people…

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Maybe he was just the unluckiest guy who ever lived, and everything really was everybody else’s fault.

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Bridget, we’re in CS. I’m entitled to some poetic excess. I didn’t say ‘worst’, I said ‘shittiest’. And yes, Cheney is certainly up there, be is he really shittier than Hank, or just a better shot? :smiley:

The George Hamilton movie was *not *considered fiction by people in West Virginia when I grew up there. If I had told them that Hank was a junkie like the Beatles, I would have probably gotten my mouth washed out with soap. Yes, I’ve known for a long time that Williams had drinking and drug problems, but I still found the allegations in the Carter family biography shocking.

MeanOldLady, I’m not an authority, but I heard Bing Crosby’s alleged child-beating had been disputed by some credible people. Is this the case?

Little Nemo, I have heard that Ike Turner was a grade-A wifebeating jerk, but wasn’t familiar with many details.

quasimodem, that’s interesting to consider that his songs were a way of acknowledging his misdeeds.

I’ve always distinguished though between songs that basically say, “You’ve treated me bad and I was completely good to you”, and more nuanced perspectives. E.g., “She treated me bad, but I shouldn’t have taken her for granted”. But to be honest, I don’t find many of the second kind in HW’s repertoire. It’s like in real life (and as bup parodies in his post), people who claim that everyone treats them poorly are often in denial about some of their own behavior. It may also be that more nuanced songs don’t sell as well to country music audiences as clear-cut morality plays.

You are correct that the Luke the Drifter persona is more charitable and enlightened. “Men With Broken Hearts” is incredible, and does show signs of a humility not present in the non-LtD stuff.

And it’s not LtD, but I find “Rambling Man” brutally honest, and chilling: it’s about as close as you could get to putting out a suicide note on the radio back then.

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That’s because he wasn’t a songwriter. He was a vocalist. Anyway, while we’re on the subject of great vocalists, Frank Sinatra wasn’t exactly a model citizen either.

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He didn’t write most of his music, but he did co-write some, which is why I wouldn’t put him in the great songwriter category. I wouldn’t put him in the doesn’t write songs category either.

The only people who know for sure if Bing beat his kids are his family. One son said he was physically abusive, the other said he was not, although he did acknowledge that he was strict, and used several other words that loosely translate to “not nice,” but not necessarily abusive. Two of his three children committed suicide, so whether or not Bing beat the crap out of them, they were damn unhappy about something.

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Probably the unfair way their father is portrayed these days.

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Well I think he beat his kids, but I never witnessed any of the rumored beatings, so I could have been hoodwinked by numerous sacks of damned, dirty lies here. Anyway, Hank Williams, yes, stand-up songwriter, but not too nice of a chap.

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My mom refers to Sinatra as a “hoodlum”.

Another one that became mythical in status, though not songs or music, is JD Salinger. Now we learn he was a bit of a nutjob.

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I didn’t know anything about Hank Williams before your post, but I found it really informative and well written. On that same subject, two of my favorite figures in music, Phil Spector and Michael Jackson, have lived fairly controversial lives but still made great music. Though not exactly the same for me–I already knew about all the horribleness and whatnot before I started listening to their music. Still, sometimes it is hard to reconcile the personal life with the creative output.

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In 1956 the American Medical Association declared alcoholism a disease. And the debate continues on that.

It also continues on whether addicts are “shitty” human beings. Certainly they carry a large share of mistaken choices that lead to disaster for those around them. And which then then furthers mistreatment by those others.

And that’s how one creates a train wreck regardless of the vagaries of fate. Add those in and you have a recipe for early death.

At any rate it’s plain that Mr. Williams knew about the loneliness which accompanies alcoholism and reflected it in his music. Drinking to his music seems appropos, if some ironic.

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Would you believe I read this whole thread up to here before I realized I was conflating Hank Williams with Roger Miller? :o :o :o

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I have heard several times that Wagner personally had no problems with the Jewish people, and that the connection between the Nazi’s and Wagner’s music was thru his younger sister, who apparently was pro-Nazi herself and apparently urged Hitler to use her (by that point dead) brother’s music in their rallies and propaganda.

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You may be confusing Wagner with Nietzsche.