Narratives aren’t just for fiction and history buffs; they help define and classify our friends, acquaintances and public figures. Overlay a known character arc, and you’ve taken all the difficulty out of truly getting to know someone. She’s a know-it-all. He’s a player. It’s reductionist and ugly, but we all do it from time to time. The antidote often comes when the subject flips the script; the know-it-all shows humility, and the player finally settles down.
This dynamic is magnified when it comes to celebrities. Since we don’t know them personally, we’re forced to rely on the information that comes from the press, whether in a controlled, PR-sterilized environment, or in a torrent when a public misstep becomes front page news. Especially once the celebrity has passed out of the public eye, the reputation that they’ve built is usually the one that will follow them into the history books. But one famous musician has the opportunity to alter a persona sixty years in the making.
Hank Williams was the template, not just for the modern conception of the rock star as heroic flame-out, but for the merging of disparate strands of American music into one. His combination of musical genius and premature death has been repeated time after time in the years since his death in 1953. It would be quite easy to leave the story there, to be content to recognize his influence and the music he left behind, but his daughter and a new collection of his music are forcing a revaluation of that narrative.
Jett Williams never knew her famous father personally. She was born just days after he died of heart failure in Oak Hill, West Virginia, and she fought a protracted legal battle to be recognized as his daughter. On the majority of his records, Hank was recorded in-studio, and his one surviving live record did little to capture the essence of a live performer who played almost five hundred shows a year. Fortunately, hundreds of those shows were preserved and re-mastered, providing Jett with a lively connection to her father.
The Hank Williams: The Complete Mother’s Best Recordings… Plus! recordings encompass fifteen discs worth of previously unheard recordings, re-mastered and probably sounding better than they did when they were sent out to the radios of post-war America. Long thought to be lost to history, the tracks on this set were caught in legal limbo for decades before Jett and her brother Hank Jr. (the all-my-rowdy-friends one) were determined to be the proper heirs of Hank Sr.’s estate.
Listening to these new tracks, culled from Williams’s regular hosting gig on a radio show sponsored by Mother’s Best flour, it’s hard to think of him as the drug-addled hell-raiser. Even on a show that aired, usually live, at 7:15 AM, he’s lively and cheerful, clearly in his element behind a microphone. He cracks on his bandmates, hoots when his fiddle player nails a solo, and dutifully plugs the product. And his voice. Oh his voice. This isn’t just the nasal croon familiar from “Your Cheating Heart”; his instrument floats effortlessly from gospel hymns to soaring torch songs, darting between genres in ways that modern musical chameleons wish they could.
At the outset of each radio show, he’s introduced as “that lovesick blues boy, Hank Williams,” followed by a snippet of “Lovesick Blues”. Upon the many repetitions of this refrain, combined with the country and folk standards he sang for the show, you begin to hear the way that Hank represented the coalescing of so many disparate kinds of American roots music. Mississippi blues meets mountain music, and together they swing and even rock, almost a full decade before that last category earned its name. The other half of the “rock star dead in his/her prime” narrative is a clearly recognized musical genius, and these new recordings only serve to bolster this part of the story.
Though it’s unlikely that you or I will change the course of musical history, this aspect of Hank’s story holds some appeal for us, in the sense that we all want to be seen and remembered for our achievements rather than our weaknesses and failures. But in situations where our reputation precedes us, we don’t have the luxury of introducing ourselves on our own terms. The unwanted labels resurface. Now you’re fighting uphill against not just your reputation, but every other person with that same label. I’m not like them, you see.
The terrible irony is that overcoming an entrenched perception of yourself is hardest with the people you’re closest to; they’re the ones who’ve been the victims of (or accomplices to) your sins, and the ones who have to forgive most often. Fortunately, they’re also the ones who see high points most clearly.
Grace is not to forget that the hurts and mistakes of the past don’t exist, but to deliberately choose to see the goodness and truth instead. We can’t demand grace; by definition it must be given freely. Our reputations and labels don’t disappear by cutting off the tags. Instead, we must live in the hope of grace, and with a mind to make our strengths at least as memorable as our weaknesses.
Hank Williams never got the chance to receive that grace in his lifetime. And while history has no doubt been kind in its recognition of his accomplishments, the long shadow of his early death has colored every mention of his name. So for Jett Williams, the salve of these new recordings doesn’t remove the sting of growing up without her father, but it serves as a reminder that her father’s fans miss him too. “Sixty years later, hearts still break,” she reminds me. They surely do. Thankfully, the redemption of a fallen hero is a story even older than the blues.