Country Music evolved out of the Folk Music brought across from Europe by the early settlers. The English, Irish and Scottish barn dances, Folk songs, jigs and reels were the mainstay. They were played on fiddles, guitars, banjos and dulcimers. The Hawaiian steel guitar got added later.
Back in the early days there was a lot of cross-over between Black and White musicians. There was also a lot of religious and cowboy music played by the likes of the Carter Family and the Sons of the Pioneers. Jimmy Rodgers was producing blues and had introduced this yodel element.
This was the music of family get togethers and community dances where everyone let their hair down. In the 1930s it started getting recorded and there was a regular radio broadcast from the Ryman Theatre in Nashville which went out as ‘The Grand Ole Opry’.
In the 1940s Country & Western began to evolve into different genres. Jazz was incorporated to produce Western Swing by the likes of Bob Wills and then there was Bluegrass with the likes of Bill Monroe. A lot of this was good lively dance music with the fiddle being much to the fore. Around Tupelo and Memphis there was a lot of this upbeat Hillbilly music that had an impact on the young Elvis. Sam Philips set up Sun Records to record both White Hillbilly and Black R&B. They’d grown quite separate.
A number of drinking holes had sprung up in the South with jukeboxes and live acts. They were called Honky Tonks.
Hank Williams was a prolific songwriter who started off playing the Honky Tonks and made numerous radio appearances in which he performed mainly religious songs. He started producing secular material and slipping them into his act and found that they became incredibly popular. His style became known as Honky Tonk after the venues he played in.
Hank stood out from the rest. His songwriting was unique and his voice full of expression. He expressed the life around him along with songs of relationships that went wrong and life on the road. A number of his numbers deployed humour effectively. It made Hank a big name and a regular at the Ryman on that Grand Ole Opry.
By the early 1950s Hank had begun putting more of a beat to his songs and can claim to have produced one of the earliest Rockabilly records with ‘Move it on over’.
Hank had a huge influence on later Rock singers with haunting songs like ‘Lost Highway’, ‘(I heard that) Lonesome Whistle blow’, ‘I’m so lonesome I could cry’ and ‘You win again’ resonating with generations of performers.
Hank had problems with alcohol and prescription drugs that blighted his performances and radio shows. He was labelled unreliable and sacked. His death was as tragic as the sorry state he’d got into leading up to it. He died in a car, in a snowstorm being driven to a show in Virginia. When the crowd were told of his death they booed. They thought it was just another excuse made up because of his unreliability. The cause of death was put down to heart failure from alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs though there was evidence that he had suffered a recent severe beating. He was only twenty nine years old though he looked a lot older than that.
It was a sad end to a great man. He should have gone on to have found a niche in Rock ‘n’ Roll. He added a lot to that lexicon before it had even begun.