Hank Williams III never met his famous grandfather, but in one simple soliloquy he offers up a slice of heartache as true and personal as any country song: My granddaddy died in the backseat of his powder blue Cadillac sometime before dawn broke on New Years Day 1953. He was 29 years old. He was the biggest star in country music, but most of the last year had been one long unanswered phone call. Big city music people called him a hillbilly, when they called him anything. But they, like everyone else, would be singing his songs in the end. The appearance of Williams grandson, a country singer known as Hank Three, is the most poignant narrative thread woven through Hank Williams: Honky Tonk Blues, a one-hour documentary airing on PBS August 10, 2005, (check local listings) on AMERICAN MASTERS, the Peabody Award-winning series that garnered the 2003 Emmy for Outstanding Primetime Non-Fiction Series the fourth time it has earned that top honor in the past five years. Along with the singers widow, son and grandson, the programs filmmakers spent long hours in Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Florida with members of Williams band, The Drifting Cowboys, men now in their 80s, whose stories about the shaky climb to the top make clear why Williams once said of his promoters, Theyre slicing me up and selling me like bologna. One of the greatest songwriters in the history of country music, Williams released 66 songs under his own name and half became hits, all within a five-year period. Im So Lonesome I Could Cry, Your Cheatin Heart, Cold Cold Heart, Jambalaya, Hey Good Lookin and Move It on Over continue to play on jukeboxes around the world, helping to sell a half-million albums a year, 50 years after Williams death. In his lifetime, Williams released just two LPs, but his songs are recorded by artists across the musical spectrum, including Norah Jones, Beck, Bob Dylan, Lucinda Williams, Willie Nelson and Ray Charles. Hank Williams was a sickly nine-year-old when he met Rufus Tee-Tot Payne, an elderly black musician who taught him guitar for 15 cents a lesson. Pushed by his mother, the strong-willed, hard-hearted Lillie, Williams got his first break at the Montgomery, Alabama, radio station WSFA, where he played five mornings a week as the Singing Kid. By 21, the lanky, big-eared kid and his band were playing juke joints, churches and theaters all around Montgomery. But as friends and family recall in Honky Tonk Blues, Williams personal and professional life was one long series of jagged jerks between highs and lows periods of darkness that inevitably led to hit songs. Within a single year, Williams enjoyed his first hit with Move It on Over, his drinking landed him in a sanatorium, his band left him and his wife filed for divorce for the first time. The happiest period of Williams short life was in Shreveport, Louisiana, when his hillbilly music started reaching worldwide audiences via KWKH radio. His wife was pregnant with Hank Jr., his mother was far away and he was sober. But the songs wouldnt come until Williams found inspiration in Lovesick Blues, a song he recorded but did not write. When he hit that yodel, they came out of those chairs, says Merle Kilgore, a country artist and Hank Williams Jr.s manager. They threw babies in the air. Despite his growing reputation as a drunk, Williams voice which combined the Appalachian intensity of Roy Acuff with Ernest Tubbs laconic understatement finally secured him a spot at Nashvilles Grand Ole Opry. In 1951, Tony Bennett covered Cold Cold Heart and from that point on, there was a constant stream of requests from the big pop stars of the day Bing Crosby, Jo Stafford wanting a Hank Williams song. The band played 300 dates a year, traveling from show to show in a 1948 Packard limousine with a bass fiddle strapped on top. But countrys first superstar remained a deeply unhappy man, broken by divorce. Soon, hed gotten one girlfriend pregnant and jumped into a quickie marriage with another, Billie Jean Horton. That is the soul that I know, Horton says in her first on-camera interview in Honky Tonk Blues, gesturing to her wedding photo. Not the one that sings Hey Good Lookin and stuff like that. I knew Luke the Drifter ... Hes trying to understand, to get there, to be grown up. But he hadnt got there yet. Fired from the Opry, and in constant pain from an undiagnosed back problem that may have been spina bifida occulta, Williams was flying fast into destruction on an impending fatal mix of alcohol, morphine and prescription drugs. There was nothing smooth and symmetrical and complete about Hank, says author Rick Bragg in Honky Tonk Blues. He was all rough edges and ragged parts and a puzzle that didnt quite fit together and somehow it was vivid and powerful and poignant. According to the Alabama Associated Press, 20,000 people attended the singers funeral. Hank Williams, the AP reported, a top folk singer and songwriter was given Montgomery's biggest funeral yesterday to the tune of scraping fiddles, weeping, and the hillbilly hymns of his buddies.
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