Hillbilly Shakespeare

The name Hiram means benevolent brother and high-born, and according to the Old Testament was a name given to the king of Tyre who helped build the palace for David in Jerusalem, and it was given as the Christian name to Hank Williams, Sr. in September of 1923.

The son of Hank Williams, when he was coming up, would visit the father of Hank Williams and shoot up the battery of his tractor with a 22 shotgun only “to get his ass worn out” afterwards.

Hank Sr. died from heart failure when his son was three years and left behind a complicated legacy, shrined in golden horror, like a ghost painted underneath the sun’s halo. Among his lines considered to be popular Southern poetry are, “Hear that lonesome whippoorwill/He sounds too blue to fly/That midnight train is whining low/I’m so lonesome I could cry.” In the same song he writes and sings, “I’ve never seen a night so long/When time goes crawling by/The moon just went behind the clouds/To hide its face and cry,” and, “Did you ever see a robin weep/When the leaves begin to die/That means he’s lost his will to live,” and finally, “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.”

Photographs of him depict him in a great shining suit, matching a godly and heavenly bright smile, hands on his guitar as it were his tools and he a carpenter, mouth drawn over the microphone as though it were an instrument to speak directly to God.

He learned to play the guitar at age nine from a local bluesman who had migrated from New Orleans to the town where Hank would grow up in Georgiana, Alabama, and he learned to sing in the church, where else. He related to both the redemption and hope of gospel music and the lonesomeness and down-hearted honesty of the blues. Most of all, he refused failure and wore a cowboy hat while on stage and the year after World War II ended, he was in Nashville and becoming a star and spearheading country music as a legitimate form of American art. He wrote and recorded profound lyrics that touch the heart and when he sang the words, they touch even deeper, down to the soul, and wrote over thirty songs in his lifetime that were among the top ten singles on Country charts.

This gift he had did not come for free. He suffered intellectually and emotionally, likely a myriad of different mental illnesses, just being of the earth in itself raised the questions for him of the beyond and the infinite, total darkness, and so he suffered in his genius, and was born with a defect in his back called spina bifida which causes severe and chronic pain along the thirty-three vertebrae forming the spine, as though he inherited the agony of the entire world and was made to carry it upon the plates of his back, and he self-medicated heavily with whiskey and prescription drugs and it finally killed him at 29 years old, the same age as Jesus just one year before the apostles began to write about his life.

One of his first jobs was playing for a radio broadcast in which he was fired for constant drunkenness, to the point where he could not even function and he’d drink this way until he died. He was a poet and brilliant, and probably incredibly sick. He had a talent that was beyond earth and if you listen to him still, when a song hits you how it’s intended, you’ll look up and breathe again and blink and realize that stained upon your own cheeks are tears.

It is likely he did not want to drink out of choice, but from a desperate effort for escape. Hank Sr., I reckon, only ever wanted freedom from torture and pain and misery that made up his bloodline just as much as his poetic and weeping heart. One can look at the photographs of him nailed up on the walls of Meat & Three’s and houses across the Bible Belt next to portraits of Jesus and hanging up too in the halls of The Grand Ole Opry—that angelic smile guising all the demons underneath—and wonder if he ever was released from earth, if he finally saw that great light of the universe before passing on, or if his soul still haunts the dust of the material world wandering forever on down a lost highway.