Paul Hemphill
Hank Williams, the quintessential country music singer and songwriter, died alone in the backseat of his Cadillac on New Yearâ€™s 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 Williamsâ€™s 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 Williamsâ€™s life, but most importantly, he has explained that life and given it the lively telling it deserves.
Music,Biography,Nonfiction,History,Literature,American,Biography Memoir
Lovesick Blues: The Life of Hank Williams