A real treasure of a CD is Hank Williams Live at The Grand Ole Opry. On Mercury Records it's a memory not just of the famous WSM radio show, but also of one the greatest singers ever. Here Hank is captured in the raw at the very moment he first hit number one back in 1949 - with it seemed, many great years ahead of him. The quality of the recordings is surprisingly good - and we have that old fashioned idea of vital radio and the US military to thank for that.
It was American government music policy to entertain its troops. Initially radio stations had been set up in places like Alaska and Panama but in 1942 the whole system was re-organised as the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS). Part of it's brief was to record WSM's Grand Ole Opry Show, edit out the commercials and then distribute it on vinyl discs to various outposts around the world. And so these Hank Williams recordings have survived in perfect condition in both archive and private collections - Hank as he was first heard on so many American radios - live from the stage of the Opry.
The Opry show itself was essential radio and an important Saturday night ritual. It ran from 7.30 p.m. until midnight in four sponsored sections. The most important part was the network segment sponsored by R.J. Reynold's Prince Albert Tobacco and broadcast on NBC. This part of the programme, known as the Prince Albert Opry, was the segment re-broadcast by the AFRS. And it was here that Hank Williams debuted in June 1949. He was, on that very day, at number one with Lovesick Blues. Within months he was a regular. By 1952 he had been dropped. A year later he was dead.
Williams was kicked off the Opry because they simply couldn't depend on him. No star was bigger than the sanctimonious Nashville theatre, and after a few no-shows, the hard living Williams was expelled. He was, at the time, living at his mother's boarding house in Montgomery - drinking, shooting chloral hydrate and writing songs like I'll Never Get Out of this World Alive. In the early hours of New Year's Day 1953 he died in the back seat of a car on his way to a gig in Ohio. He had been, and remains, the greatest honky tonk singer of them all.
Born into a family of Alabama dirt-farmers, the young Hank Williams relocated to Greenville at an early age. Here in a much more urban setting, he first heard the blues - something which was to be at the core of his own pioneering music. As much a blues singer as a country singer, Williams was one of those extraordinary figures who blurred the lines between black and white - and came up with something wonderful in the process. Just like Elvis some years later, his songs mixed blues and hillbilly into a music which, as early as 1948, is recognisable as rockabilly or rock 'n' roll.
In fact, Williams's influence on rock'n'roll is often overlooked. His 1953 song, Kaw Liga, had an undoubted impact on the approach at Sun Records. Presley, Jerry Lee and Carl Perkins are all obviously under his spell. There is also a long standing rumour that Williams himself recorded a rhythm-and-blues album - held back in the interests of maintaining the notion of white country and black blues. That said, artists like Williams, Jimmie Rodgers and Presley himself have all forced the country fraternity to acknowledge both the existence of the blues and their shared roots. In fact there was more black in 1940s country than there was in mainstream pop.
But it was never easy for Hank Williams to do what came so naturally. For one thing, he had Fred Rose to contend with. Rose of Acuff-Rose Music was the A&R man at MGM when Williams signed with the label. This was a period when Rose and his business colleagues were setting about making Nashville the undisputed centre of a certain take on country music. The "western" and "swing" part was virtually wiped out. Drums which had already been banned from the Opry stage, were also almost eliminated from Nashville studios. In fact it seemed as if any traces of blackness were to be denied. Williams flew in the face of all of that - trying to get as strong a beat into his music as Rose would allow. It sounds ridiculous but those were strange days and Nashville was in many ways, a quite ludicrous place.
That said, the Opry sounds like the place to be on these remarkable recordings. The audience enthusiastically greet every yodel and twang and there's no doubt that Hank Williams was not just a country star - he was an actual pop star. Mainstream pop music knew it too and people like Mitch Miller began recording pop covers of country songs. The pop singers got some great material to sing and the country publishers like Acuff-Rose made a fortune. Tony Bennett hit number one with Cold Cold Heart and Rosemary Clooney had a number two hit with Half as Much. In fact, Miller wanted to sign Williams himself but fortunately it never happened. Ironically Williams went on to score a crossover pop hit with Jamabalaya in 1952.
It was inevitable that the early death of Hank Williams would confirm, if not create, the legend. In death he has been a soft touch - the subject of both romantic mythology and the worst of cheap and ugly exhumation. But whatever about the myths and legends, the voice and the songs are untouchable. And this CD proves it. His is a rare voice like those of Ella Fitzgerald or Luke Kelly - a voice which is at once real, human and believable. He may be singing through his nose but it's coming from his heart and soul, and it's so very obvious on even the briefest of listens.
As for the songs themselves, we hear Jambalaya, Why Don't You Love Me, Hey Good Lookin', Cold Cold Heart, Honky Tonk Blues and many more. All of them written by Williams himself - one of the finest lyricists ever and some would say a real poet. Even the songs he didn't write himself are now universally known as Hank Williams songs. And it's a rare tribute to any writer that just about everybody knows his work - that his songs really have entered the canon and the culture.
This is a great CD. Anything by Hank Williams is great. His music represents one of those very thrilling peaks of human achievement. He was beyond genre and beyond words. He really was that good.
Hank Williams Live at the Grand Ole Opry - Mercury Records.