by Robert Gordon

Muddy Waters is, in many ways, the archetypal bluesman. He was raised as a sharecropper in the Mississippi Delta, where he learned to play an acoustic guitar. He went to Chicago in 1943, and the band he assembled established the electric blues sound. Over the next three and a half-decades, his band became a springboard for many of his sidemen, launching a prominent school of blues performers.

Early Years

Muddy Waters was born McKinley A. Morganfield on April 4, 1913 at a small enclave in Issaquena County, Mississippi known as Jug’s Corner. The nearest town on the map, where the family went for commerce and mail, was in neighboring Sharkey county, a small place called Rolling Fork that was on the train tracks. Muddy usually cited Rolling Fork as his home. The area, near the Mississippi River, was wet, and his grandmother nicknamed him because of the mud puddles in which he played.

Muddy’s mother died when he was very young, and her mother raised him. She moved north to the Stovall Plantation outside of Clarksdale before Muddy was three years old. He stayed there, for the most part, until he was thirty years old. Muddy had cousins in the area, including Eddie Boyd, who would later have hits in Chicago.

Around five years old, Muddy started playing music on a harmonica. He beat on a kerosene can, then squeezed an old accordion around his grandmother’s house, and fooled with the limited sounds of a jew’s harp. The guitar was popular, and he bought his first around 1930. Muddy always had a strong voice, and a regional string band, the Son Sims Four, enlisted him as a vocalist. Sims, a multi-instrumentalist, gave Muddy some guitar instruction. However, seeing Son House perform set a fire under Muddy. House played with a bottleneck slide, and Muddy began learning the style.

From an early age, Muddy hustled to earn extra money. Sharecroppers earned a subsistence wage at best (though conditions at Stovall were better than on many other farms), and Muddy collected bottles for the bootlegger as a kid; later he ran his own whiskey, trapped furs, and when he learned to make music, he performed for tips and hosted house parties. Another sideline indicates Muddy’s willingness to embrace technology. At a time when horses were as fast as cars, and as dependable, Muddy bought a 1934 V8 Ford. He earned extra money driving neighbors to and from towns, but more than anything, the car’s importance is indicative of a mind open to change. In a few years, he would effect a musical revolution.

First Recordings

Muddy’s first recordings came about through his growing reputation as a musician. As he’d become more accomplished, he traveled with the Son Sims group, including a performance in nearby Farrell when the Silas Green traveling tent show came through (contrary to myth, he did not travel with the show). In August of 1941, two field recordists showed up in Coahoma County, where Clarksdale and Stovall are, on a mission to research the role music played in African-American daily life. The project had begun with John Work III, an African-American musicologist at Fisk University; in his appeal for funds, he encountered Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress. When asking about talented musicians in the area–they were seeking someone in the style of Robert Johnson–they were repeatedly referred to Muddy Waters at Stovall.

When Muddy heard a white man was looking for him, he assumed it was a revenue agent there to bust his whiskey still. Only after Lomax drank water out of the same cup Muddy drank out of did the bluesman trust him. The recording equipment was set up at Muddy’s cabin, and among the sides he cut that day were “Can’t Be Satisfied” and “Feel Like Going Home,” which were soon issued by the Library of Congress as part of a folk music collection.

It may have been the confidence gained by this session that inspired Muddy to travel to St. Louis within the year. Chicago seemed too far away, and St. Louis proved too intimidating; he returned to Stovall. The Fisk-Library of Congress trip returned in July of 1942, and Muddy recorded several more sides for them, some alone and some with the Son Sims group.

Chicago

In the summer of 1943, after a fight with the plantation overseer, Muddy left the south for Chicago. He had friends and family there, and he got a factory job the day after he arrived. He never sought any real jobs in Chicago, devoting himself instead to developing his musical reputation by performing at house parties. His reputation grew quickly; by 1944, he was meeting established musicians like Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim, and Tampa Red. Muddy’s uncle, who preceded him to Chicago, gave him an electric guitar soon after he arrived. The acoustic guitar had been fine in rural Mississippi where the only sounds at night were the shallow breathing of God at rest, and the steady percussion of crickets and cicadas. In Chicago there were the clanging streetcars, trains, and automobiles out late on a party. Muddy took to the new instrument, even incorporating thumbpicks into his style to further increase the volume.

By 1946, Muddy had come to the attention of record producers. He cut one side for J. Mayo Williams, an African-American independent producer. The side was “Mean Red Spider,” and it was released with someone else’s name on the label. He also recorded for Lester Melrose, a publishing giant and talent scout for Columbia and RCA (which controlled Bluebird, the popular blues label). Muddy’s three tracks were for Columbia, and remained unreleased for decades.

His next session was for Aristocrat Records, owned in part by Leonard Chess. This session, though not particularly successful, inaugurated a relationship that would continue past Leonard’s death, into the early 1970s when Chess, as Aristocrat became known, had undergone two ownership changes. At the third session with Leonard, as they were preparing to wrap up, Muddy asked if he could do one his way–which meant without the piano. Leonard obliged and Muddy reprised “Can’t Be Satisfied” and “Feel Like Going Home,” though on the electric guitar, and with the rhythm of city life. The songs had a new feeling. The single sold out its first weekend and Muddy Waters had his first taste of stardom.

As early as 1946, Muddy had met Jimmy Rogers, who would become his guitarist, and Little Walter, his harmonica player. The trio developed the urban blues sound, and became popular in the clubs. Calling themselves the Headhunters, they’d rove the South Side on their off nights, sitting in on peoples’ gigs, winning new fans. They enlisted Baby Face Leroy Foster on drums, but the group didn’t have the opportunity to record together until 1950. By then, Muddy had further built his reputation with songs like “Train Fare Home” and “Screamin’ and Cryin’.” With his band, Muddy returned south in late 1949, triumphant, with their own show on KFFA; for many in the delta, it was the first time they saw an electric guitar.

In Chicago, however, Muddy’s sound was just what the large population of southern expatriates were awaiting. When Aristocrat became Chess Records in 1950, Muddy’s “Rollin’ Stone” was one of its first releases. (It later named a magazine and a band.) “Rollin’ Stone” is a song about power, about rootless — and ruthless — independence. Muddy doesn’t tell all. His pause asks us to fill the emptiness; it draws out our emotions, feelings, fears, compelling us to add meaning. Lyrically, most of Muddy’s songs were about sex — sex with someone else’s wife, someone else’s girlfriend, sex and trouble. But it was always a trouble he survived, a scrape he escaped. Sex was sex, but sex also became an analogy for a kind of freedom, a freedom to serve himself, to damn the torpedoes, the shift supervisor, and the overseer’s big gun. The sound of the songs reflected the newfound ebullience: Muddy, near the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, corralled the sense of post-war possibility and excitement. The have-nots were finally having — not having much, but even a little was a lot. The muscle of his electric guitar and the force of his ensemble sound and the fierce assertiveness of his voice unleashed the exuberance of a people. There was cause for celebration, and Muddy was the vehicle.

Burning up the Charts

Muddy’s classic band lineup was rounded out in 1951, with Elgin Evans replacing Foster on the drums, and by the addition of Otis Spann on piano. These five players defined the blues–and rock and roll–band template, and created many of the licks that are still emulated and repeated by bands around the world. The whole band didn’t get to record together until 1953; Leonard Chess was enjoying success with smaller combos and didn’t want to change a good thing. Between 1951 and 1956, Muddy had fourteen songs on the national charts, including “Still A Fool,” “Hoochie Coochie Man,” “Just Make Love To Me,” “I’m Ready,” and “Mannish Boy.”

When Check Berry came to Chicago in 1955, he asked Muddy Waters where he should record. Muddy directed him to Leonard Chess and, after hearing “Maybellene,” told Chess, who was hesitant, that he should release it. Chuck Berry’s success, and the new rock and roll sound, diminished the popularity of the blues. The national tours grew scarce for Muddy in the latter 1950s, and he mostly stayed in Chicago.

In 1958, when Muddy accepted an invitation to perform in England, he was unaware they were expecting him to play an acoustic guitar. One critic wrote that each time Muddy touched the knobs on his electric instrument, the volume got louder, forcing the critic further back in the audience until he was out the door. Those that left became the old school; the kids stayed, and many soon bought electric guitars and amps. Muddy returned two more times in the early 1960s, solidifying his role as an instigator of the British Invasion.

In the US, Muddy had a similarly electrifying effect on the white audiences through his 1960 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival. The budding love generation responded to his rock and rolling versions of “Got My Mojo Working” and “I Feel So Good,” and Muddy had a new audience. His work in the 1960s was marked by experimentation and manipulation, as Chess Records tried to broaden his audience. While many songs were successful, the album concepts were less so, especially the pairing of Muddy’s blues with a large horn section on Muddy, Brass, and Blues and the psychedelic blend, Electric Mud.

The beginning of the end of Chess Records occurred with the sale of the label in 1969, from the family to a corporation, followed by the sudden death of Leonard Chess. Muddy stayed with Chess, famously stating that he’d be with the label as long as a Chess was there. He recorded The Woodstock Album with members of the Band, produced by Band drummer Levon Helm. But when the label was sold again in 1975, Muddy terminated the nearly thirty-year relationship.

In 1976, Muddy made an album for the Blue Sky label, in association with CBS Records. The larger company gave him a boost, as did working with blues/rock star Johnny Winter as producer. The resulting album, Hard Again, won a Grammy and initiated a comeback for Muddy that lasted 6 more years, and had him opening arenas for Eric Clapton and jamming with the Rolling Stones. Muddy lived to record three more albums, the next two also winning Grammy awards. In addition to strong album sales, he settled a lawsuit with Arc Music, his publishing company, allowing him to live his final years in financial comfort.

Legacy

In Chicago, a stretch of 43rd Street has been renamed Muddy Waters Drive. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, and given the Record Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992. A guitar has been made from a plank off his Stovall cabin, and the cabin itself has been dismantled, sent on a tour, and then placed in the Clarksdale Blues Museum.

Playing in Muddy’s band proved a springboard to a solo career for many of his sidemen. Both Jimmy Rogers and Little Walter became stars in the 1950s. Later, Otis Spann, James Cotton, Paul Oscher, Luther “Georgia Boy” “(Creepin’) Snake” Johnson, Luther “Guitar Jr.” Johnson, Jerry Portnoy, Bob Margolin, and Willie “Big Eyes” Smith, among others, enjoyed careers of their own.

Discography

* Waters, Muddy His Best 1947-1955 (MCA CHD-9370)
* Waters, Muddy His Best 1956-1964 (MCA CHD-9380)
* Waters, Muddy Hard Again (Blue Sky/Sony ZK 34449)
* Waters, Muddy Hoochie Coochie Man (Laserlight 17 101)
* Various Artists, The Aristocrat of the Blues (MCA CHD2 9387)

Further Reading

* Gordon, Robert. Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters. New York: Little, Brown, 2002
* O’Neal, Jim, and Amy Van Singel. Voice of the Blues: Classic Interviews from Living Blues Magazine. Routledge Press, 2002.
* Rooney, James. Bossmen: Bill Monroe and Muddy Waters. New York: Dial, 1971. Reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1986.
* Tooze, Sandra. Muddy Waters: Mojo Man. Toronto: ECW Press, 1997.

Filmmakers Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville were kind enough to answer some questions about their film.

Q: What first got you interested in doing a film of Muddy Waters?

Robert Gordon: I was writing Muddy’s biography for Little, Brown and, in order to get closer to Muddy, I began hunting up film and video performances and interviews. The more I found, the more apparent a documentary became, especially when considered with all the interviews I was conducting. I was four years into the book and not really seeing the end, and couldn’t take on a documentary by myself. I’d met Morgan when he came through Memphis making the Sam Phillips documentary, and the Muddy documentary grew from our mutual interest.

Morgan Neville: Robert had been working on his Muddy Waters book for a few years and had been telling me how well the story would work in a documentary. We got together in Memphis one Labor Day weekend and watched old Muddy Waters videos and talked about the possibilities for a film. After that, we were decided, this documentary had to be made.

Q: When did you first become aware of Muddy Waters?

RG: I came to Muddy late in his career, 1977, when his comeback began. I’d been into blues for several years by that point, but being Memphis-based, I was into Memphis and Mississippi Delta blues. I didn’t follow the music up to Chicago until I had a good grounding here, and Muddy was my exposure to Chicago blues. I fell for him big, and saw him over a dozen times.

MN: I had long been a fan of Muddy’s music, but I didn’t know much about the man until Robert started telling me stories. I knew much more about Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker. Musically, each of those artists seems to have a distinctive take on the blues. However, Muddy’s music IS the blues, if that makes sense. It strikes me as the most seminal and purest articulation of the music.

Q: While making the film, did you learn anything that surprised you about the subject?

RG: I researched Muddy for six years for the film and the book, and there were lots of surprises. He wasn’t from the town he said he was from, he wasn’t the age he said he was-these biographical details were new. But also learning about the man-from his granddaughter whom he raised, from his brother who stayed in Mississippi, from his mistresses-some of whom still loved him and some of whom most definitely did not. I guess I was surprised by how many different things he was to different people. A complicated man.

MN: I always like learning the small details about a subject. In Muddy’s case, I love to know that he sat around watching Chicago White Sox games and eating Grape Soda mixed with Cherry Walnut ice cream. Muddy’s music tells you so much, so those details seem like the only thing left to fill in.

Q: Are there any interesting anecdotes about the filming or the interviewees?

MN: Making this documentary was an incredibly interesting experience. We probably drove close to 4,000 miles making this film, zigzagging the south. We went WAY off the beaten path to find both interviewees and locations. At various times we found ourselves flying across Mississippi in cropdusters, hunting for interviewees for days on the streets of Chicago’s South Side, and sharing a beer with Keith Richards at his New England mansion. You can’t beat that.

RG: It was 3300 miles in 11 days-and that was just one field trip. It took us from Chicago to Gainsville, Florida-including a 50 degree temperature change in one driving day.
One of my favorite interviewing moments was at Keith Richards’ house. Just after we arrived, he marched us outside, showed us where he’d had two statuettes built into the side of his house-Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson. (I also liked the sign on his library door: “Rehab is for quitters.”)
We knew we were documenting something that was disappearing-the original blues players who made the migration north-but it was shocking to see the world disappearing before our own eyes. For example, we filmed Jimmie Lee Robinson on Maxwell Street, and he walked and drove among the buildings that were left and told us what used to be. Next time, ALL the buildings were gone, and the visit after that Jimmie Lee was gone too. Those sorts of instances gave the show an added urgency.

Q: Please describe your approach to the film.

MN: Muddy’s power was in his music and the multitude of ways in which it resonated with emotions, with history, with place. Muddy himself was not one to elaborate on his craft, or for that matter, much of anything. We knew from the start that the power of our documentary would have to come from the same place that Muddy’s power came from, the music. Muddy’s personal story-from Mississippi sharecropper to underappreciated Northern blues act-was in many ways archetypal. We didn’t want to dwell too deeply in facts, because if you were to tell Muddy’s story with just facts, he would disappear.

RG: Exactly. We knew a strictly chronological, biographically linear approach would kill our story. And in a way, too, we knew being too musical would hurt us-note that we don’t dwell too much on musical stories, instead letting the music speak for itself. We decided on a capsule approach to storytelling, listing the major topics we wanted to cover, and dividing our material into these capsules. It let the sections of Muddy’s life become more vivid and strong, a better representation of the compartmentalization of his life.

Q: What were some of the obstacles in achieving your vision of the film?

MN: Frankly, money was the main obstacle. We started this film as a labor of love (i.e. we had no funding). That meant that we had to work on this while we did our more gainful work. It took us four years to make, but we stayed pure to our goal. We had decided to put every dollar we had for the film on the screen. We made our cut of the film without thinking of rights or budgetary issues. In the end, we didn’t have to lose anything because of money.

RG: Instead of having a narrator, we decided early on that we’d find enough interviews with Muddy-audio and video-to have him tell his own story. To our surprise, there were not a lot of very clean sounding interviews. Print journalists who did great interviews with Muddy seemed to have decided as a group to use the cheapest, lowest fidelity tape recorders. So it was a very time-consuming hunt in the US and UK for good quality interviews with Muddy.
We also had the ongoing problem of people dying on us. I’d been fortunate enough to get a great audio interview with Jimmy Rogers, Muddy’s guitarist, just before he got sick and died. We’d loved to have included him in the show-or Little Walter or Otis Spann or Junior Wells-but these people were not well documented in their lifetimes. Fortunately, the surviving bandmembers were excellent characters themselves, and we had no problem including them.

Q: Please describe your background credits, how maybe they led to this film.

MN: I have made many documentaries about American popular music, including “Hitmakers,” about pop songwriting in the Brill Building, and a film about Sam Phillips and Sun Records (”The Man Who Invented Rock”). I was shooting that last documentary in Memphis in 1998 with our mutual friend and (great music writer) Peter Guralnick and he introduced us. Robert lives in Memphis, the gateway to the Mississippi Delta. I love Memphis and just being there affects one’s outlook. A sense of place is instrumental to everything. I think that helped inform our decisions. We decided early on that we had to make people feel the places Muddy lived.

RG: I was born and raised in Memphis, got exposed here not only to blues music but to the people who made the music. In high school, I regularly brought a pint of Ten High bourbon to Furry Lewis’s house, and didn’t know that was unusual until I moved away for college. My first book, “It Came From Memphis,” was about how race, economics, and geography created Memphis art. My first documentary, from 1990, was about Memphis blues; “All Day and All Night” featured B. B. King and Rufus Thomas. I spent most of the 1990s writing and making shorter videos (my music videos have appeared on MTV, BET, and CMT-I’m proud of the range), but I was real glad to get back into the longer form.

By: Colin Escott

More than fifty years after his death, Hank Williams ranks among the most powerfully iconic figures in American music. Iconic to the point that man and myth are inextricably entwined. He set the agenda for contemporary country songcraft and sang his songs with such believability that we feel privy to his world, despite the fact that he left no in-depth interviews and just a few letters. His brief life and tragic death have only compounded his appeal.

Born in the tiny settlement of Mount Olive in south-central Alabama on September 17, 1923, Hiram “Hank” Williams grew up with a sense of apartness that never left him. A spinal condition, in all likelihood spina bifida occulta, ensured that he couldn’t work in the same occupations as his contemporaries: logging or farming. When Hank was six years old, his aloneness was compounded when his father, Lon, went into a veterans’ hospital; Hank would see him just twice in the next seven years. His mother, Lilly, ran rooming houses, first in Greenville, Alabama, and then in Montgomery.

Local influences shaped Hank’s music more profoundly than the big stars of the day. The gospel songs of both the black and white communities taught him that music, whether sacred or secular, must have a spiritual component. He learned traditional folk ballads and early country songs from neighbors and friends, and blues from a local African-American street musician, Rufus Payne (also known as Teetot). Payne not only taught Hank how to play the guitar, but helped him overcome his innate shyness. The blues feel that suffuses much of Hank Williams’ work is almost certainly Teetot’s legacy.

Entering local talent talent contests soon after moving to Montgomery in 1937, Hank had served a ten-year apprenticeship by the time he scored his first hit, “Move It on Over,” in 1947. He was twenty-three then, and twenty-five when the success of “Lovesick Blues” (a minstrel era song he did not write) earned him an invitation to join the preeminent radio barndance, Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. His star rose rapidly. He wrote songs compulsively, and his producer/music publisher, Fred Rose, helped him isolate and refine those that held promise. The result was an unbroken string of hits that included “Honky Tonkin’,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Mansion on the Hill,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love with You),” “Honky Tonk Blues,” “Jambalaya,” “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” and “You Win Again.” He was a recording artist for six years, and, during that time, recorded just 66 songs under his own name (together with a few more as part of a husband-and-wife act, Hank & Audrey, and a more still under his moralistic alter ego, Luke the Drifter). Of the 66 songs recorded under his own name, an astonishing 37 were hits. More than once, he cut three songs that became standards in one afternoon.

The fourteen “Luke the Drifter” recordings were narrations and talking blues. Luke the Drifter walked with Hank Williams and talked through him. If Hank Williams could be headstrong and willful, a backslider and a reprobate, then Luke the Drifter was compassionate and moralistic, capable of dispensing all the sage advice that Hank Williams ignored. Luke the Drifter had seen it all, yet could still be moved to tears by a chance encounter on his travels. Although little known in comparison with the hits, the “Luke the Drifter” narrations were the closest Hank Williams came to bearing his soul.

As a songwriter, Hank Williams matured surprisingly quickly, and his fractious relationship with his first wife, Audrey (whom he’d married in 1943), provided him with much of the raw material. After Tony Bennett covered “Cold, Cold Heart” in 1951, his songs found a broader market, a market that Hank himself would have found it hard to penetrate. To the end, he was unapologetically Southern, unable to make the compromises that Elvis Presley would make just a few years later. But Williams’ songs went where he couldn’t, and from 1951 onward, there was a rush to reinterpret them for the pop market. Ironically, those pop versions, which comfortably outsold Williams’ originals in the early Fifties, now sound over-ornamented and outdated, while Williams’ spare and haunting versions sound ageless.

It all fell apart remarkably quickly. Hank Williams grew disillusioned with success, and the unending travel compounded his back problem. A spinal operation in December 1951 only worsened the condition. Career pressures and almost ceaseless pain led to recurrent bouts of alcoholism. He missed an increasing number of showdates, frustrating those who attempted to manage or help him. His wife, Audrey, ordered him out of their house in January 1952, and he was dismissed from the Grand Ole Opry in August that year for failing to appear on Opry-sponsored showdates. Returning to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he’d been an up-and-coming star in 1948, he took a second wife, Billie Jean Jones, and hired a bogus doctor who compounded his already serious physical problems with potentially lethal drugs.

In late December 1952, Hank Williams returned to Montgomery, attempting to recuperate, but decided to meet two prearranged showdates on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. He died en route, aged just twenty-nine. Contrary to myth, Williams did not die with his star in the ascendant. “Jambalaya” had been one of the best-selling records of 1952, but while his records were topping the charts, he was so unreliable that he was reduced to playing beerhalls in Texas and Louisiana. There’s a persistent myth that he would have returned to the Opry had he not died on New Year’s Day 1953, but surviving correspondence suggests nothing more than a few more beerhall gigs. On a record released after his death, Williams sang of being pursued by the “Pale Horse and His Rider.” On a home recording made shortly before his death, he directly addressed “The Angel of Death.” It’s impossible to escape the feeling that he lived with the spirits every day, and drank in part to escape them.

Timing is everything and Hank Williams came and went at precisely the right time. Country music was a cottage industry at the time of his arrival, yet, just a few years after his death, it was shaking off its “hillbilly” image. An artist as unapologetically rural as Hank Williams would have been shown the door. Elvis Presley appeared on the Grand Ole Opry just two years after Hank was dismissed, and Nashville’s response to Elvis was to nurture artists who could cross between country and pop, leading to the birth of the Nashville Sound. Hank Williams didn’t belong in the Nashville Sound era, but his tragically early death spared him the indignity of trying. Instead, his songs have lived on, reintrepreted by artists as diverse as Bob Dylan, jazz diva Norah Jones, crooner Perry Como, R&B star Dinah Washington, and British punk band, The The.

WITH DIRECTOR MORGAN NEVILLE

What got you interested in this project? What drew you to Hank Williams?

Everything about Hank Williams interests me. His music, his life. His death. His impact. It’s the kind of subject that one hopes to find. Although there is a cottage industry in books about Williams, there has never been a thorough documentary. That made me feel there was room to do something.

Did you learn anything that surprised you about Williams while making this film?

He is one of those rare American figures who seems to elude simple description. The longer we spent working on Hank, the more his character refused to be pinned down. During his life Hank wrote virtually no letters, gave few interviews and often gave people conflicting ideas about who he was. This has allowed people to project fifty years worth of mythologizing upon him. We went looking for the human side of Hank in the myth and was surprised by many things we found — he was a friend to African Americans in a time and place where that was not the norm, he loved guns and was an avid fisherman, he was a mischievous prankster to his friends, and a voracious reader of both romance and horror comic-books.

Are there any interesting anecdotes about the filming or, interviewees?

We drove eight thousand miles making this film, spent months shooting throughout the South, not only tracking down the people who knew Hank who were still around, but mostly spending time in the places he did. So much of his world has been erased. Most of his homes in Montgomery and Nashville have been torn down. Most of the clubs he played at and studios he recorded in are gone. We had to look hard to find traces of Hank’s world, but they were there. We found it in places like the Sacred Harp singing in Alabama churches and at Arkey Blues’ Silver Dollar Saloon in Bandera, Texas.

Could you describe the production process, anything about how you chose to shoot the film?

We were determined to do make Hank a multi-dimensional character. This meant that we had to mount a vast research campaign. We talked to hundreds of individuals. We flew all over the country going through collectors’ dusty, forgotten storage spaces. We placed ads in magazines and on TV looking for fresh material on Hank. In the end we did find well over 100 photos of Hank that have never been seen. We also found never-before-seen footage of Hank that even his family and longtime collectors had never heard about. I felt this was extremely important to make Hank come alive even to people who felt they knew everything about Hank.

In addition we talked to over twenty people who new Hank and had never spoken on camera before. Obviously, Hank’s widow, Billie Jean, was at the top of the list and she gave us a run for our money. There was a reason nobody got to her for fifty years. Finally, through a nine-month campaign of letters, 2am phone calls, flattery and two trips to Shreveport, we managed to get her on camera and she was worth the battle.

Were there any additional interviews you picked up along the way, and why you picked them up?
We were surprised to discover many people who knew Hank almost everywhere we went. We interviewed several of them and one or two ended up in the final cut. In Alexander City Alabama, we found a pair of sisters from a black gospel group whom Hank had tried to get to tour with him, over the objections of his management. In Knoxville, we found a porter who helped Hank to his room the night he died. In the end we did about forty interviews, only half of which are in the film. I always feel bad about this. We have, however, placed a copy of everything we shot at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum for research.

Were there any problems along the way with the production that you had to deal with?

Hank died half a century ago and many of his friends and bandmates are of advanced age. We felt that we had to hurry to make sure that we got all of the voices we could for the film. Five years from now, it just wouldn’t be possible to make the same type of film — an intimate one — about Williams, and we knew it.

What do you think is Williams’ legacy? Is he as influential now as he ever was?

Hank’s influence is only growing. Hank wasn’t even the biggest star in his day, but he’s the one people are still listening to. Fifty years after his death, his records still sell half a million copies a year. I think it’s because of more than his larger than life persona. His songs are both deeply personal and universal. Just about every major singer/songwriter owes Hank something. And most of them will say it. His influence is there in Bob Dylan, Beck, Neil Young and Elvis Costello, not to mention every country singer. He’s become a symbol of many things, particularly, purity and soul in country.