On NYE 1953, Hank Williams Sr. died in the backseat of a car near the VA/WV border. With him was a notebook of unfinished lyrics.
Flash-forward to 2006 and a custodian at Sony finds the notebook in a dumpster.
Why did Sony have the notebook?
Where was it those 50+ years?
How did it get thrown away?
I have actually seen a few different stories about “the notebook”. Seemingly left out are the lyrics in the backseat with him. The wiki page mentioned a lawsuit so I thought it had to be reliable but looking back I see the case wasn’t cited.
I love Hank Sr. but let’s be fair, his lyrics are just so so. It’s not like they found a lost Shakespeare play. Not sure how valuable they would be without music.
I get that. It just seems odd that 50 years later “Hey I found this in a trash bin.” and no mention of the lyrics that were with him when he died. You would think that paper would be a big souvenir or in a museum somewhere. But all references are “Meh, it was there next to the beer cans.”
@jimbuff314: maybe we are talking about different notebooks.
Funny, I’m quite sure that I’ve seen Hank Williams denoted as “Shakespeare of country music”, sorry can’t remember where. But there’s a truth to it: working in his special genre, he was the best you can get, with less flowery words. It’s just like Joey Ramone: he sure had a smaller vocabulary than the bard, but he WAS the Shakespeare of punk rock (so says I!).
How have I never heard of this? It sounds like the Mermaid Avenue albums of unfinished Woody Guthrie songs. Bob Dylan should by all rights have been given the songs to record, but the Guthrie family asked Wilco and Billy Bragg instead (great albums, I love Wilco, but even I can see that Dylan should have had a chance to record them first). In this case, I really think Hank III should have had a shot.
Merle Haggard? Bob Dylan? Jack White? Levon Helm?? I’m going to have to get this album soon.