When I was a kid my parents talked a lot about the era in which they grew up. Both Vera and Joe were born in 1931. Dad graduated from Wasatch High School in Heber City, UT, in 1949 and Mom graduated in ’50. I loved the stories they told me about those years, especially the ones about the summers they spent working as a young married couple at a sawmill in the Uinta Mountains for my grandfather.
My parents’ descriptions of those times sparked an interest in that era for me that persists today. When I was younger you could say I got a little obsessive about the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. I could tell you all about the politics – Harry Truman became a hero of mine – and about the popular culture. I knew the cars, the baseball players, the clothes, the movies, and especially – of course – the music.
My burgeoning interest in all aspects of the Truman/Eisenhower era coincided with the advent of compact discs. In the early days of CD’s, record companies began remastering and reissuing music that had not been available for forty years or more. I learned to appreciate the recordings Frank Sinatra made for Capitol Records and the music Louis Armstrong recorded for Columbia and Verve in the 1950’s. Most of all I finally heard Hank Williams in all his pristine, monophonic glory. In fact, Hank’s music got me through my years as a student at Utah State University.
Of course I later learned that the fifties in America were not necessarily the magical time I had invented in my imagination. Little things like the Korean War, McCarthyism, Jim Crow, life before the polio vaccine, the demise of EC Comics caused by bluenose fanatics, and many other major and minor calamities of the decade were brought to my attention by some excellent books, such as The Fifties by David Halberstam, Truman by David McCullough, and The Glory and the Dream by William Manchester. Still, the era fascinates me and I enjoy the music and movies of the time. I can still quote scenes line for line from The Searchers and On The Waterfront, two of my favorite movies produced in the 1950’s.
All of this is my roundabout way of briefly reviewing a new set of Hank Williams CD’s that I got in the mail yesterday. The album is called Hank Williams: The Unreleased Recordings and was released a few weeks ago by Time-Life Music. The songs on the CD’s were recorded as radio programs in 1951 to hawk Mother’s Best Flour. Most of the songs were not written by Hank, although there are a few familiar favorites, such as “new” versions of “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still In Love With You)” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” The majority of the music is made up of gospel tunes like “I’ll Fly Away,” or cover versions of songs made famous by others, such as “Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain."
Hank Williams: The Unreleased Recordings is outstanding. I have seen a few reviews that complained that the complete radio shows were not included in their entirety, but considering that the set contains fifty-four never before released songs sung by Hank Williams, that is a really petty complaint about an album this good. On a personal note, my brother Phil was a Hank Williams junkie as well, and it’s too bad it took nearly thirty years after the discovery of this music for Williams’s heirs and his record company to work out a deal to get it released. Phil would have loved this album, but because of the greediness of some of the people involved, he never got the chance to hear it. Of course, somewhere Phil is probably personal friends with Hank by now.
I have listened to Unreleased Recordings virtually every moment that I wasn’t teaching school, sleeping, or attending to husbandly or fatherly duties. The sound quality is excellent for its time, especially since the album was dubbed from acetates found in a garbage can in 1979. There are so many unfamiliar songs that listening to this album is never boring. It is very cool to hear Hank sing the words "Salt Lake City, Utah," in "California Zephyr," a song he never commercially recorded and that is only available on this album. I also especially like “Cool Water,” the old Sons of the Pioneers song that Hank turns into a mournful blues, and “The Pale Horse and His Rider,” a gospel tune based on the same scripture in Revelations that Johnny Cash quotes at the beginning of "The Man Comes Around." Hank and his band expound on the meaning of the song and the scripture in a little speech after they finish performing it.
As a Hank Williams fanatic, the existence of this album is comparable to finding a lost Hemingway manuscript that equals For Whom The Bell Tolls in quality. If you like authentic, American, un-Kenny Chesneyed Country music, you will enjoy this album.
So go buy it.
