His discussion of Freemasonry, which he describes as a cult, and the Southern Baptist Church still has me scratching my head. This gives Hank an awkward feel throughout and leads to such mistakes as referring to the influential Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers as a Texas band when in fact it was a Georgia outfit. In general, Ribowsky seems out of his element in dealing with country music of the 1940s and '50s and the forces that forged it. Sometimes he vomited on those Texas stages. He’d been chronically ill since birth, likely an undiagnosed case of spina bifida, and he compounded it with his severe alcoholism and drug addiction. His final weeks on this earth, he traveled around Texas just a breath away from death, attempting to play at venues a fraction of the size of those that had hosted him when he was at his peak. Hank breathed his last without a speck of rust on him. Not his words either, but he honored the notion. It’s better to burn out than it is to rust. Those weren’t his lyrics, but they certainly fit him. Live fast, love hard, die young, leave a beautiful memory. Terrible as it must have been for family and friends at the time, his adios became the stuff of American myth. He died at 29 in the back seat of a Cadillac as New Year’s Eve gave way to New Year’s Day 1953. Hank: The Short Life and Long Country Road of Hank Williams, by Mark Ribowsky.īorn in a desperate place (Alabama) during desperate times, Hank’s life flamed out before it really got started.
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