num_pages: 224
description: Hank Williams the quintessential country music singer and songwriter died alone in the backseat of his Cadillac on New Years Day 1953. He died much as he had lived: drunk forlorn suffering from a birth defect wondering when the bubble would burst. Having sprouted out of nowhere like a weed in the wilds of south Alabama he was gone at the age of twenty-nine. Now with his definitive biography of the man and his music Paul Hemphill takes the reader on a journey through Hank Williamss life and times: his dirt-poor beginnings as a sickly child learning music from a black street singer refining it in raucous rural honky-tonks during the Depression emerging as a star of the Grand Ole Opry. Uneducated virtually fatherless an alcoholic in his teens unlucky at love Hank mined his experiences to write songs that will live forever. Hemphill author of The Nashville Sound and the son of a long-distance trucker from Alabama brings his background to bear on a story that often reads like fiction. He has unearthed many fresh details in Williamss life but most importantly he has explained that life and given it the lively telling it deserves.
language: English
title: Lovesick Blues: The Life of Hank Williams
publisher: Viking Adult