The Lost
Notebooks Of Hank Williams
When Hank
Williams died, he left behind a scuffed, embroidered brown leather briefcase.
Like its owner, the briefcase appeared weathered beyond its years, yet it
retained a dignified bearing that abuse couldn’t erase. Hank used the briefcase
to carry bound notebooks, among other items, darkening their pages with lyrics
and song ideas. Some were fully finished, some just started. Once full, he
would place the notebooks in a cardboard box, where he also dropped lyrics written
on hotel stationery and other scraps of paper.
When it came
time to record, Hank would refer to the notebooks and pick a few to show his
producer, Fred Rose. By the end of December 1952, four of these notebooks
existed, all featuring songs not yet recorded or performed. When Hank took his
last breath, the promise and poetry of the unrecorded songs seemed to perish
with him.
This album,
The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams, breathes life into the haunted words left
on those pages. In doing so, the legacy of Hank Williams, only twenty-nine when
he died, further extends into a new century. The Lost Notebooks presents twelve
recordings of new, original songs that Hank had started writing prior to his
death late New Year’s Eve, 1952, or early New Year’s Day, 1953.
The history
of Hank’s notebooks is as complex as the legend himself. Yet, in the end, what
matters most are the songs, and these new works rise from the ether with
ghostly relevance. As with his many standards, these new recordings tap
straight into the soul of man. This is songwriting at its most artful and most
powerful.
Just as
bones remain unchanged with time, so do certain emotions. The emotions Hank
left in these notebooks needed expert excavators to dust them off and mine
their strengths. The project began with Bob Dylan, who has always expressed his
love for Hank Williams and the influence he absorbed from his work: “The sound
of Hank Williams’s voice went through me like an
electric rod,” Dylan wrote in his autobiography, Chronicles, Volume 1. “When I
hear Hank sing, all movement ceases. The slightest whisper seems sacrilege.”
Dylan was
the first artist to lift one of Hank’s notebook songs from its resting place,
finish it, put music to it, and record it. With help from veteran music
industry manager and A&R executive Mary Martin, who worked with Dylan’s
manager Albert Grossman in the 1960s, other artists were enlisted, most chosen
because of their songwriting and arranging abilities and their affinity for
delivering songs reminiscent of Hank’s earthy directness. The guest artists
tapped into Hank’s musical DNA to create something that is both his and their
own. These artists and these voices—some with decades of experience, some still
forging fresh paths—all found an essential truth in these songs, and then
embellished them with their talents and personalities.
The results
speak volumes. These new songs resemble rich farmland soil: Their strengths are
as old as the earth, expressing emotions that have always been and always will
be; yet at this moment they offer fresh fruit, creating a bountiful harvest
that is as universal yet as personal as a lonesome night or a good morning
kiss.
These
recordings underscore, yet again, the distinct brilliance of Hank Williams as a
songwriter. Hank wrote songs the way he drank whiskey: like there was no
tomorrow. For Hank, drinking was a private affair, done in dark corners and
hiding from the scowls of family, friends, and band mates. Drinking wasn’t a
communal, shared activity for Williams. It was a pain-killing pursuit exercised
alone.
He wrote
songs like that too: Hunched over, locked away in his mind, furiously scrawling
and crossing out words to pare a song to its essential emotions. He mostly
wrote alone, occasionally turning to his mentor Fred Rose or friends like Vic McAlpin and Ray Price to help him finish the mission.
That’s what happens on The Lost Notebooks too; like-minded writers, admirers,
and acolytes step up to help complete what Hank started.
Many myths
surround Hank Williams, myths that those who knew him best are quick to dispel.
He wasn’t a doomed, introspective genius anymore than he was a reckless rebel
tearing his way through honky-tonks and wild women. Instead, he was a
prankster, a man who enjoyed gathering friends for hunting and fishing trips,
and a doting father who called out to his son from radio shows and saddled up a
newly purchased horse to present to his stepdaughter at a front-yard birthday
party.
The
alcoholism, however, was always there. Born September 17, 1923, in rural
Alabama, Hank first lost his balance from a belly full of corn whiskey in his
grade-school years, when he and a few buddies knew where railroad employees hid
flasks to sip during work breaks. He lost his first job a month before his
eighteenth birthday by showing up drunk for his early morning radio show at the
Montgomery, Alabama, station WSFA. By that time, he had won a talent contest,
formed a band, and dropped out of school at age sixteen.
While the
drinking came and went, the songwriting, once it started, remained constant. In
1943, not yet twenty, Hank sold a song, “(I’m Praying for the Day That) Peace
Will Come,” to Grand Ole Opry star Pee Wee King after
opening a show for him. King had a contract with Acuff-Rose
Publications, Nashville’s first major country music publisher, a connection
that would prove vital to Hank’s career.
Within
months of marrying Audrey Sheppard Guy in December 1944, Hank published two
songbooks and entered a sanitarium for alcoholism. He was twenty-one at the
time. Sober for a period, he returned to the morning program on WSFA and, urged
by his new bride, contacted producer and songwriter Fred Rose at Acuff-Rose Publications. In December 1946, working with
Rose as producer, Hank cut his first four songs in a studio at radio station
WSM in Nashville.
From the
start, his distinctive style separated him from all others, no matter the
genre. A dyed-in-the-wool country boy, even when dressed in elegantly tailored
Nudie suits and crisp cowboy hats, he had a limited education and a similarly limited
view of the world. Yet he owned a preternatural gift for succinctly and
colorfully capturing the hopes and heartbreak of a generation of men and women.
Like Hank,
the people populating his songs were pulled between the Christian, small-town
values of the Depression Era South and the prosperous, rapidly changing postwar
world in which he came of age. When Hank wrote, “I left my home down on the
rural route / I told my pa I’m going steppin’ out,”
he summed up a newly mobile world of endless possibilities of the late 1940s
and early 1950s, when the rise of highways and automobiles allowed those born
in the agrarian South to seek opportunities in urban areas.
With these
shifts, values began to change. Soldiers from back-country areas returned from
Europe and the Pacific with worldlier ideas of pleasures and how to savor their
hard-won freedoms. Meanwhile, women also enjoyed newfound freedoms, brought on
when they were encouraged to take jobs during wartime, to fend for themselves while so many men were continents away, and to
deal with the uncertainties of whether family members, friends, and lovers
would return. When the men did come home, newly liberated women both enticed
and confounded them, and both sexes struggled to adjust to a changing culture.
Better than
any songwriter, Hank’s songs captured the joys, tensions, and heartbreak of
this evolving world: There’s “Ramblin’ Man,” which
conveyed the dark side of a man suddenly free to go wherever he wants without
the anchors or responsibilities of home; there’s “I Saw the Light,” about a
rambler who turns back to the moral values he had left behind at home; there’s
“Hey, Good Lookin’,” which joyously captures the
excitement of the possibility of hooking up with a new partner; and there’s
“I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” which describes the bottomless ache of feeling
as if there’s no friend or family member to turn to when life and love turns
cold.
The list
goes on and on. Hank’s songs could express an unbounded joy at the pleasures
available to him, or he could articulate the conflicting feelings of lust and
guilt that stirred inside him as he considered the temptations of this new
world. His songs contained an enormously wide variety of emotions and
perspectives. But much of his most memorable work delved into the loneliness of
a lost soul or the nearly unbearable pain that accompanies betrayal or a
relationship in turmoil. He could deal with this topic humorously, as in “Move
It on Over,” but it’s “Your Cheatin’
Heart,” “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love with You,” “Cold, Cold Heart,”
and many more, that expose emotions in ways no songwriter had done prior to
Williams.
Certainly, a
key to his becoming a hero to so many listeners came from how he articulated
the most difficult of emotions in an era when men, still molded by the war
years, were conditioned to hide their feelings and charge through any problem
with a steely-eyed swagger. Men of that era weren’t supposed to succumb to
heartbreak or suffer from personal conflicts. They didn’t openly wrestle with moral
questions or lonely nights. Hank gave voice to those who couldn’t admit to the
psychological quandaries everyone at some point had to endure. And listeners
loved him for it.
More than
any songwriter before him, Hank drew on real-life experiences and emotions when
crafting his great work. The indelible way he expressed his joy, his distress,
and his spiritual searching set the standard against which all songwriters now
measure themselves. Hank’s monumental legacy becomes even more notable when
realizing he issued only thirty singles in his lifetime—and five more
posthumously. Eleven went to #1. All were recorded in less than six years,
between December 1946 and September 1952. Yet that small body of work changed
the course of American music, forever altering the sound of country music and
motivating songwriters of all styles to dare to be as emotionally bare and as
unabashedly real as Hank had been.
Bare
emotions run throughout The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams, and these new
songs honor and extend the artistry and the legacy of the great Hank Williams.
In his
classic “I Saw the Light,” Hank wrote of a man who had wandered aimlessly
through a life filled with sin. But there was nothing aimless about Hank’s
songwriting. He shot straight to the heart. Even on the night he died, on a
scrap of paper found on the backseat floorboard, there were incredibly moving
lines written in a shaky hand, suggesting that even as he rushed to an early
end, Hank fought the darkness by expressing himself in short, impactful verse.
These new
songs, each in their own way, express something visceral and important about
individual experience, about our most intimate relationships, and about the
struggle between sin and redemption. Through the talents of several capable
acolytes, Hank Williams has risen yet again to peer into the darkness and to
help the rest of us see the light.
THE HISTORY
OF THE NOTEBOOKS
To explain
why this musical bounty has surfaced at this time requires tracing the tale of
the four treasured notebooks. These sacred scrolls have a story as complicated
as the man who once wrote them.
Upon Hank Williams’s death, his mother, Lillian Stone, contacted Acuff-Rose Publications to alert them to the existence of a
cardboard box containing lyrics Hank had written but hadn’t recorded. In early
1953, Acuff-Rose took possession of the box, finding
four notebooks of songs, as well as other lyrics scrawled on hotel stationery
and other scraps of paper.
As time
passed, company president Wesley Rose made sure the notebooks were treated as
the treasures they were. Copyrights were applied to the unrecorded songs,
sixty-six in all. Peggy Lamb, a longtime Acuff-Rose
employee, kept tabs on the notebooks in a locked, fireproof safe next to her
desk, along with other items highly valued by the publishing firm.
As the music
industry consolidated into bigger corporations, Acuff-Rose’s
catalog of classic songs became valuable property. Each time the Acuff-Rose copyrights were purchased, the notebooks found a
new home —and, each time, Peggy Lamb moved with them.
When Gaylord
Broadcasting (now Gaylord Entertainment) bought Acuff-Rose
Publications in 1985, the notebooks at first remained in the longtime Acuff-Rose offices on Franklin Road in Nashville. But in
1986, Gaylord moved its various publishing and recording companies to new
headquarters on Seventeenth Avenue in the heart of Nashville’s Music Row. The
notebooks were put in two large, fireproof vaults along with other important
historical Acuff-Rose documents.
Years later,
then-Mercury Records executive Kira Florita began working with the Country Music Hall of Fame®
and Museum on what became a Grammy-winning box set, The Complete Hank Williams.
During her research, Florita learned about the
notebooks from Lamb. Florita remembered the notebooks
when co-authoring, with Colin Escott, Snapshots from
the Lost Highway, a book filled with images of Hank Williams memorabilia.
Published in November 2001, the book included photographed images of several
unrecorded songs from the notebooks.
At the same
time, Florita led the Mercury / Lost Highway Records
marketing effort for the album Timeless, a multi-artist tribute to Hank
Williams. That album, released in September 2001, also won a Grammy Award.
Veteran music industry leader Mary Martin, who co-produced the Timeless album,
first learned of the wealth of unrecorded Hank lyrics when she saw the
Snapshots book.
“I didn’t
know the notebooks existed until I saw the photographs in Kira’s
book,” Martin said. “I began to think something should be done with these
songs. We had just won a Grammy for the Timeless album, and it seemed like a
good time to keep a light shining on Hank Williams. The interest was obviously
there.”
In 2002, as
Martin’s interest in the unrecorded songs grew, Sony / ATV Music Publishing
bought the prized Acuff-Rose catalog. Of forty-eight
Opryland Music employees, only six were retained; Peggy Lamb was one of them.
Once again, the notebooks were relocated and stored in fireproof vaults where
the company’s most valuable materials were kept.
After the
sale was finalized, Martin forged ahead. In late 2002, Florita,
Lamb, Martin, and Sony / ATV president and chief executive officer Donna Hilley had lunch to discuss possibilities for the songs.
Eventually the four women decided to find a well-known, well-regarded
artist—one who considered Hank Williams a hero and influence—to record an
album’s worth of the unheard songs.
The first
artist approached, Bob Dylan, showed a strong interest. As discussions
continued, it was decided that Dylan’s Sony-related company, Egyptian Records,
would become involved. It also was decided that, instead of recording a full
album himself, Dylan would pick one of the songs to record, and other
compatible artists would be invited to choose a song to record, coming up with
the arrangement and, if need be, finishing the lyrics.
Martin came
up with a list of artists to consider, with help from Dylan and his
representatives. The next artist invited, country star Alan Jackson, jumped at
the opportunity. From there, the focus zeroed in on artists who were also
established songwriters and, more specifically, on those who had demonstrated
an affinity for Hank’s songs. Eventually, the list came down to the thirteen
artists heard on The Lost Notebooks.
As recording
started, the story of the notebooks took a bizarre turn. A Chicago Sun-Times
article surfaced in 2006 that two of the notebooks, unbeknownst to Sony, had
been purchased by two country music collectors. At the Sony / ATV offices, a
search into a locked vault found that, indeed, two notebooks were missing. A
police investigation was launched, and ultimately Sony regained possession of
the notebooks and the handwritten songs.
With the
release of The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams, not only do these historically
treasured notebooks endure, but now a dozen songs from within can be heard for
the first time.
Michael
McCall
Country Music Hall of Fame®and Museum
1. You’ve Been Lonesome, Too – Alan Jackson
2. The Love That Faded – Bob Dylan
3. How Many Times Have You Broken My Heart? – Norah Jones
4. You Know That I Know – Jack White
5. I’m So Happy I Found You – Lucinda Williams
6. I Hope You Shed a Million Tears – Vince Gill and Rodney Crowell
7. You’re Through Fooling Me – Patty Loveless
8. You’ll Never Again Be Mine – Levon Helm
9. Blue Is My Heart – Holly Williams
10. Oh, Mama, Come Home – Jakob Dylan
11. Angel Mine – Sheryl Crow
12. The Sermon on the Mount – Merle Haggard