The writer of this week’s “Sometimes a Song,” Hank Williams, is considered by many to be among the most influential people in the development of country and western music in the 20th century. Born in 1923 in small-town Alabama, Hank was in many ways an unlikely candidate for musical or any other kind of success. Suffering from spina bifida, a birth defect that went undiagnosed in his childhood (and for which there was then no safe or effective treatment), Hank Williams endured constant back pain for all of his life. When the Great Depression hit, Hank’s father had to move the family often in his search for employment. When Hank was only seven, his father was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm, and due to complications from that spent the next seven years in a nursing home, leaving his son with no father to turn to and the family to fend for themselves. Hank’s mother ran a boarding house and held other odd jobs, and for a couple of years traded children with her sister, taking her niece to help with the boarding house and sending Hank to live with his aunt. When Hank took up the guitar, his mother arranged for a street performer who had befriended young boy to give him basic guitar lessons in exchange for cooked dinners. Hank’s lessons from that man, Rufus Payne, formed the sum total of his formal musical training. But what a gift those lessons were: a brilliant introduction not only to blues guitar but to singing and performing. THAT little foot up set Hank Williams on the path to stardom.
The story of Hank Williams’ short life is — as we say nowadays — “complicated.” It’s also a sad tale of hardship, constant pain, moving from pillar to post, loss of his father to illness, and manipulation by his mother and later by his wife. In hope of finding relief for his back pain, Hank was the victim of a fraud perpetrated on him by a quack “doctor” with a phony medical certificate who freely prescribed hard drugs to which the young man soon became addicted and which in combination with his alcoholism could have cost him his chance at a career in music. And this killer combination did cost Hank his life, at age 29.
But somehow despite all the obstacles in his path, Hank Williams persevered in his music. He began composing songs, both music and lyrics, and he formed a band and “took it on the road” to small taverns and clubs and small theaters all over southern Alabama. In those early radio years, Hank hosted a local radio program, and when he and the Drifting Cowboys were not on the road, they were broadcasting their music on the air waves and building a following. They were going places, literally and figuratively.
There has to have been egg on more than a few faces at the Grand Ol’ Opry after Hank Williams, having first auditioned there and been turned down, went to audition for country music stars, Roy Acuff and Fred Rose, who were forming a new recording company in Nashville. Both men were so impressed with Hank’s talents and in particular with his songwriting that they signed him immediately to record for them. Roy Acuff was at that time managing the career of Chet Atkins, a soon-to-be famous guitarist, and he and Rose were developing what would come to be known as The Nashville Sound. Hank’s music was so successful for Acuff-Rose that Fred Rose decided to find a larger music production company to market and release his work, and he secured the young singer-songwriter a contract with MGM Records.
After some years of great recording success, Hank Williams was finally invited to join the Grand Ole Opry, and after his first performance there the audience called him back on stage for six encores. We could wish that Hank Williams had been healed of his painful disability, or that he had taken the advice of his wise friend and benefactor, Roy Acuff, to give up the alcohol and the prescriptions for morphine and other heavy pain medications. We could wish that Hank’s back trouble had been treatable. But it was not to be, and for Hank Williams the suffering was constant. And you can hear that suffering in many of the songs he wrote, songs which attracted audiences across the musical divide between Country, Pop, and Rock n’ Roll.
The idea for our song this week came to Hank when his mother was driving him and the band home after one of their performances. The guys were all asleep. When she drew nearer to home, and the lights of the Montgomery airport came in view, Hank’s mother called out, “I saw the lights.” What Hank heard that night inspired him to write a timeless song of gratitude and praise. And if Hank’s heart was really in his music, which it must have been for him to get as far as he did in the short time allotted to him, we surely can hope that he hoped to see the Light of his heavenly home and to receive the ultimate healing of body and soul.
Without further ado, here is the second song Hank Williams recorded for MGM, and one of his 55 top 10 hits on the Billboard Country & Western Charts, “I Saw the Light.”
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My daughter briefly lived in Oak Hill, West Virginia which is where Hank Williams died in the back seat of a car. It’s a poor town but they have a very nice memorial to Hank Williams.
Johnny Cash sang this song on a great Colombo episode. He sang it well.