Book review: Hank: The Short Life And Long Country Road Of Hank Williams

(Liveright/Norton, £22.99)

Reviewed by Keith Bruce

THE memoir of JD Vance, Hillbilly Elegy, is still sitting at number two in the New York Times bestseller list, half a year on from publication. The author’s story of his dirt poor upbringing in America’s Rust Belt, looking back at the people among whom he grew up from his present comfortable position – he went to Yale and his website says he is “a principal at a leading Silicon Valley investment firm” – would likely have done well at any time, but its enormous success has been substantially down to the belief that he is describing the constituency that elected Donald Trump. The dysfunctional family he came from, the resentment of immigrants and benefit claimants that he reports and partly shares, marked him out as a describer of another America that those in the coastal cities (who buy more books) struggle to understand.

There is a lot wrong with this analysis – not least the high proportion of college-educated Americans who voted for Trump – but the people who bought Hillbilly Elegy might care to follow up their consumption of a tale of 21st-century poor white America (Vance’s road out was via the Marines and service in Iraq) by revisiting the story of one of the first superstars of country and western music, and certainly its first great songwriting talent, Hank Williams. Much has of course changed in the United States since his death, at the age of 29, on New Year’s Day 1953, but the people in Williams’s dysfunctional life look much like those in Vance’s memoir. And, by the by, the insult inherent in the liberal middle class’s use of the word “hillbilly” and the defiant pride with which those branded with it wear the badge appears to survive intact.

The word “genius” is bandied about carelessly in popular music, but the timeless, much covered, recorded, and performed songs that Hank Williams wrote permit us to brand him with that too. It is still possible that many don’t know that Cold, Cold Heart, Jambalaya (On The Bayou), Hey! Good Lookin’, and Your Cheatin’ Heart all come from the pen of the one man. His work has long transcended the genre he knew and worked within, and his songs are as entitled to the description “standards” as anything in the Great American Songbook by Gershwin, Berlin and Porter, as contemporary singers like Norah Jones amply prove. That they are not usually mentioned in the same breath as those show-tunes is surely partly a class thing, although complicated, as ever in the States, by race issues as well. Among his many other character flaws, it would not be inaccurate to describe Williams – and a good few of the rock’n’rollers who followed his lead in creating rockabilly music – as a white supremacist. He supposedly learned his guitar playing from a bluesman nicknamed Tot Tee, but he referred to him as “an old nigrah”, and one of the nicknames he bestowed on one of his own (white) band, the Drifting Cowboys, was “N*****head” on account of his frizzy hair.

He was also a violent sexist boor, whose own lack of constancy as a musician on the road did not mean that he could overlook the infidelities of his women. Amidst the hand-wringing after his death, Ribowsky admiringly reports the dissenting voice of pedal-steel player Jerry Byrd, who responded to the platitude “we’ll never see the likes of him again” with “I hope not”. Byrd’s view was that Williams had a great chance and he blew it, damaging country music forever by setting an arrogant, drunken, pill-popping template for stars that followed.

Williams is also one prototype of the live fast, die young 27-club tendency that claimed Amy Winehouse as a recent victim. As such it would be good to report that Ribowsky gets under his skin, but reporting is as far as the author of the latest Hank biography really goes in a book that is ultimately no more than a cuttings job, albeit a thoroughly researched one. Two factors undermine it further. One is the author’s incessant affectation of the idiom of the South in his own narrative throughout. It sounds fake, and as he is a New Yorker whose music books on Stevie Wonder and Otis Redding sit alongside as many on sports in the US, probably is. That is just irritating, however, while the lack of any informed analysis of the music itself is rather more serious. Surely the only really interesting question about Hank Williams is how this under-educated backwoods product of a dysfunctional family with no real musical education – or indeed skill by many accounts – came up with such classic songs? You will finish this “Hank” none the wiser.

Where the book does come into its own is at the end, with a concise, well-structured account of the court battles over his copyright legacy and income fought by his wives and offspring. Clumsily entitled Of Myth And Men (it is mostly about women), that closing chapter takes a story many music fans will know at least the bones of and brings it up to date. It is, sadly, a story that is only about one thing, and it is not music, or fame, or love, or life and death. It is just about money.