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Honky Tonk Blues is an expanded director's cut of an American Masters television special about Hank Williams, and every minute of it illuminates Williams's importance as a seminal artist and American archetype. Produced with an understated fascination for the country legend's gifts and demons that shortened his career, played havoc with his marriages, and led to a haunting death at 29, Honky Tonk Blues builds a seamless profile from rare footage and rich interviews with (among others) Rick Bragg, Big Bill Lister (Williams's longtime opening act), Hank Williams Jr., and members of Williams's backup band, the Drifting Cowboys. Williams's story, including his mentorship in the blues by Rufus "Tee Tot" Payne, childhood loneliness, and emergence as a whole-cloth singer-songwriter "who taught people it's okay to bear your soul in everyday language," is thoroughly compelling and resonates with many American originals (e.g., Kurt Cobain) who followed him. An outstanding documentary.


Hank Williams was the first country music superstar. The first "hat act." A poor boy from Alabama, not a cowboy. But he made himself the world's greatest cowboy singer. This handsome young man, charming, a little crazy, wowed audiences and wooed women, and changed the face of country music forever.
This PBS-broadcast documentary captures a little glimpse of the comet that was Hank Williams. In his very brief recording career (a mere six years), he was the first hell-raiser, a hard-drinking and hard-living wild man who was too crazy for the staid Opry; too famous too fast for his own good. Williams' life was wrapped up in pain, a pain that came across in his music. His drinking was likely connected to an undiagnosed back problem which, many historians today agree, was very likely a mild form of spina bifida. Hank Williams drank himself to death on New Year's Eve 1952. On New Year's Day, 1953, he was gone and the world of country music went into mourning.

The tale is told largely by fellow Opry members, band mates, friends, and family (including grandson Hank III, whose eerie resemblance to his ancestor in both face and voice is chilling). This is a documentary worth watching, to listen to the music and watch those old movies and clips and realize"Old Hank" was really a very young man. It's agonizing and yet uplifting to see him struggling to come to grips with life's pain both physical and emotional, hating the icon he became while yearning to be a great songwriter. 


geluid: LPCM 2.0


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HAPPY LEECHING