This is brand new (shrinkwrapped/cellophane)

PLEASE LOOK IN OUR SHOP ON E-BAY

We have many other original, difficult to find DVD's and CD's - ranging from the Damned to Louis Armstrong. Also many genre's of music including Acid Jazz, Soul, Relaxation, Broadway & Musical, World Music, Latin American, Cult TV & Film Themes, Celtic, Blues, Country, Reggae, Ragga, Pop Greats...to name only a few.

Title The Essential Hank Williams Subtitle Hillbilly Legend Artist Hank Williams Format: Double CD Cat. No.: METRDCD519 Barcode: 698458701923 Playing Time: CD1-67.53 / CD2-72.25

Hank Williams remains the ultimate ‘live fast, love hard, die young’ American icon who rose from humble hillbilly origins to superstardom. His music: poignant and raucous, bittersweet and wry, changed country music forever and has gone on to influence a diverse range of country and rock artists. This 2CD compilation presents over 50 of Hank Williams’ greatest songs, and is sure to satisfy fans new and old. See Reviews

Track List CD1 1 Move It On Over 2 Honky Tonkin’ 3 Lovesick Blues 4 Wedding Bells 5 Lost Highway 6 I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry 7 Long Gone Lonesome Blues 8 Why Don’t You Love Me? 9 Moanin’ The Blues 10 Cold, Cold Heart 11 Mind Your Own Business 12 Gonna Change Or I’m Gonna Leave 13 I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still In Love With You) 14 Mansion On The Hill 15 I Just Don’t Like This Kind Of Livin’ 16 My Son Calls Another Man Daddy 17 Window Shopping 18 Settin’ The Woods On Fire 19 Hey, Good Lookin’ 20 Howlin’ At The Moon 21 Jambalaya (On The Bayou) 22 I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive 23 Your Cheatin’ Heart 24 Kaw-Liga 25 Take These Chains From My Heart CD2 1 I Saw The Light 2 I’m Satisfied With You 3 Rootie Tootie 4 I Can’t Get You Off My Mind 5 I’m A Long Gone Daddy 6 The Blues Come Around 7 I’ll Be A Bachelor ‘til I Die 8 My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It 9 They’ll Never Take Her Love From Me 10 Dear John 11 Never Again Will I Knock On Your Door 12 Pan American 13 Last Night I Heard You Crying In Your Sleep 14 Fly Trouble 15 My Sweet Love Ain’t Around 16 There’ll Be No Teardrops Tonight 17 Why Should We Try Anymore? 18 I Heard That Lonesome Whistle 19 I’d Still Want You 20 Crazy Heart 21 Baby, We're Really In Love 22 Half As Much 23 Honky Tonk Blues 24 I Won’t Be Home No More 25 You Win Again 26 Weary Blues From Waitin’ 27 Please Don’t Let Me Love You         Sleevenotes   More than anyone before or after, Hank Williams could write disarmingly simple yet moving songs about loneliness and betrayal that were fuelled by his own fatal relationships.” Marty Stuart “If you’re talking about hurting, Hank Williams can tell the story as well as anyone. He was damn good at it and you know he had to live it too.” Robbie Robinson “Hank knew how to write about life in terms all of us can understand” Willie Nelson “He was the bluest and lonesomest man I ever met.” Lefty Frizzell Hank Williams was the stuff of Southern Gothic - not that William Faulkner or Flannery O Connor could ever of invented Hank as a literary character – a country boy in love with the modern world, a honky cat honkin’ for all he was worth. Check the Hank who grins knowingly from photos: a long streak of feral Baptist in a sharp suit and Stetson, pure American idol. And as it is with idols, Hank became many things to many people. But to listeners, fifty years after his death, he’s the man who reshaped country music in his own image, a hillbilly genius and one of the great songwriters. Hank’s time at the top was brief – like Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix and The Sex Pistols, he shone with such brilliant intensity it now appears foreseen that he couldn’t stay long – yet his spirit hovers over country music’s collective psyche in a way no other artist (except perhaps Miles Davis in jazz) does. And as Peter Guralnick noted in Lost Highway, it’s not just his musical influence but the image of Hank Williams that has dominated the mythology of contemporary country music. Driven, desperate, haunted, Williams has come to symbolize both the lure and the nightmare of the honky tonk world (‘live fast, love hard, and die young,’ sang his contemporary Faron Young). Born in rural Butler County, Alabama, in 1923, Hiram King Williams suffered from a spine defect that would trouble him throughout his life and get considerably worse after he was thrown from a horse aged 17. His parents Lon and Lilly ran a general store until Lon entered a veteran’s hospital following a delayed reaction to the horrors he had experienced during World War 1. Hiram renamed himself Hank and in the town of Georgiana found his first teacher, Rufus ‘Tee-Tot’ Payne, a black street singer who entertained passers-by while the young Williams shone shoes. “All the musical training I ever had came from him,” Hank later said and a strong blues flavour is evident in his songs. Hank won a talent contest aged 14 and formed his band The Drifting Cowboys. Lilly handled his bookings and earnings and pushed Hank forward – she was a driven, domineering woman and when Hank married Audrey Sheppard he chose a wife with similar qualities to his mother. Indeed, Audrey learnt bass and began playing with Hank, even demanding she sing, unconcerned by the fact that she sang flat. In fact their conflicts would fuel many of Hank’s greatest songs. ‘Honky Tonks’ were Southern bars with a hard wood floor for dancers. They were rough, rowdy places – some had chicken wire across the stage to protect the band - and Hank’s first bassist Cannonball Nichols was a wrestler, hired for his physical rather than musical prowess. It was in these skull orchards and blood buckets that Williams developed an inimitable vocal style, his thin, cutting tenor so raw and aching it convinces the listener that Hank’s lived every line he sings. And he was writing songs, both wailing laments and up-tempo dance numbers. Country music historian Rich Kienzle notes that these two strands of the genre faithfully expressed the oscillations in mood at a typical honky tonk, the patrons swinging between alcohol-fuelled despair and cockiness. Across his brief career Hank Williams’ swung between these polarities giving country music a new and greater depth, a fatal poetic sensibility. Williams quickly became popular around Alabama’s capital, Montgomery, and performed on local radio. But it wasn’t until he went to Nashville to meet music publisher Fred Rose on 14 September 1946 that stardom beckoned. Rose, a former Tin Pan Alley tunesmith, signed Hank to a publishing deal and would also act as manager, occasional co-writer and record producer. He got Williams a deal with the small Sterling label - here Hank would cut his first recordings, ‘Callin’ You’ and ‘When God Comes And Gathers His Jewels’ on 11 December 1946. While this 78(rpm) and its follow-up Honky Tonkin’ sold poorly Rose was impressed by Hank’s talent and negotiated a deal for Williams with the much larger MGM Records. Williams’ first MGM release ‘Move It On Over’/ ‘Rootie Tootie’ demonstrated Hank’s gift for turning everyday speech into popular song alongside his ability to write proto-rock ‘n’ roll honky tonk stompers. It was a minor hit so Williams was invited on to the Louisiana Hayride, a live country music radio show, in 1948 and featured on its concert tours. His western suede suits, swaggering charisma and rocking band drove audiences crazy. When Hank returned to the studio in 1949 he insisted on recording ‘Lovesick Blues’, originally a hit for black face vaudevillian Emmett Miller in 1925 and again in 1939 for Rex Griffin. Rose strongly opposed cutting ‘Lovesick Blues’ – partly because Acuff-Rose didn’t own the publishing – but Hank insisted, knowing the response it received in concert. “I play this number, Oscar, so help me God, I get fourteen, fifteen encores,” Hank told promoter Oscar Davis. When MGM released ‘Lovesick Blues’ in early 1949 working class Americans reacted with fierce passion to the song, keeping it at #1 on Billboard’s Juke Box Folk Records charts for sixteen beautiful weeks. Thus making this quirky, almost novelty, song the biggest selling country single of the year and fully unleashing the honky tonk psyche. Nashville royalty all appeared on Saturday night radio programme The Grand Ole Opry. The Opry long wary of Hank’s hard drinking reputation, finally repented and invited him to perform ‘Lovesick Blues’. This lead to an unprecedented six encores – somehow the song’s weary lament combined with its hooky, yodelled chorus and Hank’s good humoured, throwaway delivery just hit. From then on Hank never stopped hitting. He and the Drifting Cowboys became Opry regulars and were soon commanding upward of $1000 a performance. In 1949 ‘Wedding Bells’ made Number 2, as did ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ – considered by many as the Greatest Country Song Ever – while in 1950 ‘Long Gone Lonesome Blues’, ‘Why Don’t You Love Me’ and ‘Moanin’ The Blues’ all topped the charts. The Hillbilly Shakespeare was on a roll. 1951 saw Hank continuing to hit and that year’s No.1 ‘Cold, Cold Heart’ was as melancholy a song as ever was writ. Hank started writing songs as a teenager. Even while suffering from severe back pain and battling alcoholism he kept writing. Songs that celebrated and songs that ruminated. Songs wry, bitter and pained, Songs you couldn’t get out of your head. Hank’s songs were clear and perfect, built out of the heart’s lumber, and America’s jukeboxes played them as honky tonk psalms. Fred Rose would polish some of Hank’s efforts and Hank liked to note that “between the Jews and the Blues the only redneck thing about my songs is me singing them through my nose”. Country star Lefty Frizzell spent two weeks playing dates with Hank and noted “all Hank thought about was writing” and various Drifting Cowboys recall Hank turning phrases of speech instantly into song and beating out rhythms on his Cadillac’s dashboard as he composed whilst in motion. When Tony Bennett had a No.1 pop hit with ‘Cold, Cold Heart’ in 1951 many others rushed to record Hank songs. Williams was the hottest musician on the planet yet his fist hovered over the self-destruct button, Hank being seemingly intent on burning himself out. The hits continued and so did the excess: he destroyed hotel rooms, missed gigs, maintained whiskey as his co-pilot, got so drunk he ended up jailed or stuck in sanitoriums, ingested industrial quantities of morphine, amphetamine and painkillers, threw money away, played with guns, was fired from the Opry, forced the Drifting Cowboys to quit, got divorced and remarried on stage to a paying public who called for more, more, more. Hank was white trash showing the world what Alabama flash was. In reflection, he appeared to know his time was limited: the man never rested, never cared for his health or material possessions, battling against the dying of the light he squeezed out classic after classic. And the songs just kept on getting better – ‘Jambalaya’, co-written with Moon Mullican, is a vivid celebration of Cajun culture while ‘I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive’ finds Hank laughing at his own despair. Appropriately, it was heading towards the number one slot as Hank turned to dust. Hank’s death – in the back of a long white Cadillac on New Year’s Day 1953 – is, like Bonnie & Clyde before and James Dean after, a classic American death. Overnight Hank passed from singing star to a blue collar icon – only Elvis Presley would ever match him. And today his songs still sound so fresh, so tough and so soulful. Which is why artists as diverse as Keith Richards and Johnny Cash, Alabama 3 and Lucinda Williams (and, of course, Hank Williams III), all cite Hank as an inspiration. Hank Williams – he did it his way. Garth Cartwright New Zealand born, South London based, Garth Cartwright is a writer and broadcaster. He has compiled several Americana CDs for Union Square Music including Country Outlaws and Lonesome Valley.