A Love Letter To the Ghost of Hank Williams

by josh lerner

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Illustration by Shane Brennan
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Dear Hank,

You had been sleeping so soundly in the back of that blue Cadillac you adored. It was night and you were on your way to the tour-closer in Montgomery. After a few hours of silence, the teenage boy you had hired to drive you to that New Year's Day gig reached into the backseat. He wanted to cover you again with the blanket that had fallen off your body. But what he touched of you was lifeless. On the open road in Alabama, somewhere between a Bristol service station and a hospital in Oak Hill, your body had turned cold.

After hearing how this young boy, Charles Carr, drove your dead body for miles across the heart of the country that made you a star, I have often wondered what it must have felt like to look back and see you dead. I must admit that I sometimes feel as if I am that young chauffeur when I hear your songs. Listening to the youthfulness of some of your earliest recordings, I cannot escape the thoughts of you dying. In every picture of you—even the famous ones from the Opry, where the thin lips of your smile extend up to your eyeballs—I cannot help but see death. I feel like you had those same sad premonitions while playing and singing as I do while listening.

The sadness I hear in your music makes me want to pick up my guitar and play. But here's my problem: I cannot reproduce the beauty of your voice or the simplicity of your strumming. They say you brought "three chords and the truth" to popular music—the three chords were a sparse structure of the honky-tonk style you helped to define; the truth was the content of your poetry. Fifty years later, I've found musical and emotional clarity in your songs but I still can't do them justice when I try to sing them.

I need some advice, I suppose, so I'm turning to you. I've never felt as sorrowful as you must have felt when you wrote "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," but I want to know how that sorrow feels so that I can sing the song as it should be sung. Like many of your songs, there's no bridge, no chorus, just four verses ending with a lamentation that cuts clean and then disappears behind the sound of steel strings on wood. You end it all—after the parts about time crawling by, about robins weeping and leaves dying—with an image: "the silence of a falling star / lights up a purple sky / and as I wonder where you are / I'm so lonesome I could cry." You leave us with a surreal image from another world. Which is sometimes the way I think of you.

Then there's "Cold, Cold Heart." So many artists have played it—including Tony Bennett, of all people. Rumor has it you used to turn on the jukebox at all-nite diners to hear other singers covering your songs before you made them hits. Were you amused at how they couldn't quite get that pleading feeling down on vinyl? If you were around today, you might have heard the smooth rendition of "Cold, Cold Heart" performed by one of your followers, Norah Jones. I'm sure you would say the same thing about her rendition as you did about all the others: she missed the point. The song, as you intended it, is somber, not sultry. "Why can't I free your doubtful mind / and melt your cold, cold heart?" is not a question one asks lightly.

I first heard that song on a bridge overlooking the Seine, played by a group who called themselves, ironically, the Wedding Band. As I sat there with my girlfriend, to whom, a year later, I would ask many of the same questions that you do in that song, I could not imagine a more aching sentiment: "the more I learn to care for you / the more we drift apart." You took complexities like these and, instead of attempting to answer them—which was a talent you knew you could not claim—you put them down in rhyme with a few simple words. It is this communication of a pure state and feeling, without the grandiosity of suggesting a complete human understanding, that makes your songs hit me where they do. They are easy to swallow, but they're hard as hell to digest.

You were an alcoholic before you grew out of your teenage years. But in his new account of your life, Lovesick Blues: The Life of Hank Williams, Paul Hemphill says it wasn't just your body and mind that were under the influence; it was your songs, too. You pumped out tunes during the times in your life when you were having the experiences that inspired them: heavy drinking, late-night carousing, and shouting matches with your wife. Then there were the feelings that came with them: guilt, jealousy, and an inevitable but naïve determination for change and self-renewal. The songs were sad because you led a sad life, and Hemphill says that when you were riding high—for the few sporadic months when the money was rolling in but you weren't spending it all on booze—your inspiration was left to dry on the wagon.

But it must be more complicated then that. Those songs, to which I often fall asleep, cannot be the sole byproduct of hard times and hard drinking. Where, then, does that leave me? I've never had to sneak alcohol into a hotel in my boots so I could get a hit before the night's show. I've never shot a gun at anyone, let alone at my wife. I want to write songs like you, but I don't want to have to live that way in order to get what I want. I'll take the sadness—that poetic version of despair—but I don't know if I can handle experiencing the events at the root of these feelings. Then again, you couldn't either. You were dead by age 29.

There's a song by Elvis Costello called "Wave a White Flag." It first appeared as part of his late-70s Honky-Tonk demo sessions (which must have been inspired, at least partly, by the honky-tonk style you made famous). The level of abuse and marital violence in this song is absurd, almost comic: "Meet me in the kitchen / and I'll beat you in the hall / there's nothing I love better than a free-for-all." But all this gets me thinking: is Elvis really that violent, or is he merely satirizing the violence in your lifestyle? What makes this song smart is his keen awareness of the abusive relationship you had with your wife, and the violence and drunken misery inherent in the lives of all prototypical country-western stars ever since. At the Grand Ole Opry, you put on the biggest grin to hide the drinking, the abuse, and the loneliness—these things that were your greatest sadness.

You were a traveler. As a young Alabama boy, you were always out of the house, following around that old blues musician and mentor, Tee-Tot, stealing licks from his guitar as well as swigs from his bottle. You gave birth to some of your most creative ("Kaw Liga") and popular ("Hey, Good Lookin") songs while traveling on the highway; the backseat was where you took your final breaths. You represent the midpoint in what I see as a glorious tradition of American traveling musicians. It started, perhaps, with that other WSM Radio star Uncle Dave Macon, who used to pass his days driving his truck across the Southern countryside, advertising his songs. Then came you and Woody and Leadbelly, and the progression continued up north through Dylan and, arguably, Springsteen.

"Lost Highway" was your metaphorical take on the road of life. You claim it was the women, the gambling, and the drinking that did you in—now we know where these country-western stereotypes come from—but maybe it was simply the road: your deformed spine couldn't manage those bumpy rides; your marriage couldn't withstand your coming and going; your consciousness was dulled by the bars and the drinking offered within.

There's a scene in D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back, where we see a road-weary Dylan playing "Lost Highway." Most of the movie depicts Dylan in a daze, surrounded by black coffee and cigarettes as he and his entourage drift from city to city. It's only in this hotel room scene, however, that I truly understand what his life on the road (albeit a European one) must have been like. His voice is scratchy and uneven and it looks as though his sickly thin form (like yours) might, at any moment, keel over and fall asleep from exhaustion. Ironically, perhaps obviously, a band mate has to remind him of the opening lines of the song, which also contains the title words of what was soon to become Dylan's most popular record: "I'm a rolling stone all alone and lost / for a life of sin I have paid the cost."

As much as I look up to Woody and Leadbelly, to Costello and Dylan, I am more strongly and weirdly infatuated with you, Hank. There are these images: Hank the simple songster; Hank the miserable, abusive drunk; Hank the wandering poet. None of these things will ever be mine, and so I have put them in a letter to you because their acknowledgment might be the closest I ever come to achieving them. I suppose I still hold out hope, too, that you might respond with some advice. But I know that I cannot accept the gift of your music without the burden of your life. Maybe the most I can hope for, then, is to continue listening to your songs—all 66 of them—and sing along. If I don't want to travel the Lost Highway, then I can at least hitch a ride on it every now and again.

JOSH LERNER B'07 will never get out of this world alive.

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