Google Earth Community: Hank Williams' last ride

Spellbound by the music, I started off tracking the country music legend's December 1952 Cadillac sprint to doom and ended up following his whole life. It's here in 53 illustrated posts.

The father of contemporary country music, Hank Williams was a superstar by age 25 and dead at age 29. He recorded 129 tunes and wrote many more, and about him there have been something like 700 tribute songs.

Among the No 1 hits, "Lovesick Blues", "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry", "Why Don't You Love Me?", "Moanin' the Blues", "Cold, Cold Heart", "Hey Good Lookin'", "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)", "Take These Chains from My Heart" and the true enough "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive".

As a live performer, he was an unprecedented show-stopper, regaling audiences from the stage in tailored cowboy outfits from Nudies. He missed a lot of shows because of his drinking, but he was usually there, everywhere, with bells on.

Hank's legacy lives on not just in many of the places you'll see on this tour but in his descendants – in legend-in-his-own-right Hank Williams Jr, in his grandson Hank III, born Shelton Hank Williams in 1972, a punkabilly performer with almost as many fans as the patriarch, in Jett Williams, his daughter by a mistress who won her way to acceptance, and most recently in Holly Williams, Hank Jr's daughter, whose debut album came out in 2005.

The younger generations have followed their own paths but, musically, they've found in turn that the roots run deeper than they'd ever imagined.

UPDATE DEC-07: "Rhodes in Alabama", a visitor to my blog, has sparked two revisions in this post, one absolutely crucial, that the Mount Olive where Hank was born was not the city of Mount Olive in north central Alabama but a village in southeast Alabama, sure enough, right in Butler County next to his boyhood home in Georgiana, and right on Hank Williams Road too. I've been able to mark the church in Mount Olive where Hank Williams first sang when he was still a young'un.

Rhodes also runs a summer camp one week a year on Lake Martin in Alabama where Hank and Audrey had their getaway cabin and where Hank wrote "Kaw-Liga", so he was able to give me the correct coordinates, moving the original placemark slightly.

For real fans of Hank Williams, my blog post, based on the Google Earth tour, has drawn several very interesting comments, including some fascinating claims about Hank's last ride that suggest the whole truth about what happened is not yet known.

CLICK FOR FURTHER READING:
The official site
Hank Williams Boyhood Home & Museum
The Hank Williams Museum in Montgomery currently has two addresses, here and here.
The Hank Williams Appreciation Society and its lively forum
Joey Allcorn's "Complete Website"
An excellent chronology
Newspaper clippings at the Alabama State Archives
A terrific reconstruction of and commentary on the last ride from The Tennessean
And yet another good account of the last ride at Metropulse.com
The Wikipedia entry

Edited by Dorseyland (12/06/07 11:14 AM)

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