Hank Williams' unfinished lyrics

[Saint_Cad]

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?

[jimbuff314]

Here’s a NY Times article from 2011 about Bob Dylan resurrecting the material, along with many singers.

[…]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,”

Stars Add New Tunes to Country King’s Lyrics (Published 2011)

Don’t know where you heard your Sony custodian story, but I’d say the onus is on you to legitimize it.

[Saint_Cad]

@jimbuff314

Here’s a NY Times article from 2011 about Bob Dylan resurrecting the material, along with many singers.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/arts/music/bob-dylan-assembles-the-lost-notebooks-of-hank-williams.html?referrer=
Don’t know where you heard your Sony custodian story, but I’d say the onus is on you to legitimize it.

The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams

Bob Dylan & Other Icons Resurrect the Unfinished Lost Songs of Hank Williams

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 also saw this story

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.

But wait!

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.

[Lucas_Jackson]

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.

[Saint_Cad]

@White SIFL

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.

[EinsteinsHund]

@White SIFL

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.

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!).

And why isn’t this in CS (reported)?

[engineer_comp_geek]

Moderator Action

Moving thread from General Questions to Cafe Society.

[DrCube]

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.