Rounding Out the Collection: Hank Williams as "Luke the Drifter"

One of my favorite things about country music is that, even as the music (and its audience) has changed drastically in the last 25 years--away from being the actual purview of the Southern working class, and towards a suburban music sung by performers as familiar with rock idioms as with "classic" country, it has become a fertile site for academic research and commentary. Country music is now a means for getting at American culture more generally. Books about Country's role in shaping/defining notions of class, it's theological implications, and as a bellweather of Southern history and the South's mainstreaming into American culture are all available (if not necessarily widely read),and the Journal of Country Music is one of the best publications available on American popular music.

So, when I decided to talk about Hank Williams' gospel-singing alter-ego, Luke the Drifter, I discovered pretty quickly there's little to say that hasn't been said. I could write at lenght about the contrast between Hank's secular work, which is some of the darkest popular music ever set to wax, and the Drifter work, which is often at least marginally uplifting (although not in the same way as most of even the most dire of country gospel--to wit:

The Monroe Brothers - What Would You Give in Exchange for Your Soul?
The Louvin Brothers - Are You Afraid to Die?
The Carter Family - No Depression in Heaven

As hard as it is to believe, the messages in these songs at least provide for some sort of eventual salvation, no matter how bad the world is--David Fillingim's Redneck Liberation makes a similar point).

I should talk about why he chose to record these track under a pseudonym (or at least a more elaborate one than "Hank," his real name being Hiram, or course). It was a commercial choice--he and his handlers were concerned that disc jockeys and jukebox operators would be less likely to play these tracks than ordinary Hank records, and they did not want to see the Hank brand's marketability affected.

I could talk to you about the parallels between Hank's own blues-influenced tales of woe, providing both reassurance and catharsis for his audience and the "secular preaching" of blues singers like Charlie Patton and Son "I'm Going to be a Baptist Preacher so I won't have to work" House (but Steve Goodson did just that in the April 1993 issue of the Alabama Review). I could even tell you about how the deeply personal nature of Hank's tales of relationship disasters presage that most golden-voiced and personal of all major country singers, George Jones--who's "Window Up Above" or "Good Year for the Roses" are the next logical step from Hank's "My Son Calls Another Man Daddy" and "You Win Again."

George Jones - Window Up Above
George Jones - Good Year for the Roses

But the Luke the Drifter material, while being an important part of the overall Williams' worldview, is not necessarily exceptional country music on its own terms (which, you should recognize, is not an argument against adding it to your collection or playing it often). In terms of both country gospel and country music more generally, it sounds to me like a step sideways--a development that dead ends with Hank. Now, obviously, these were popular enough that Hank jr. was compelled to record three albums worth of material in the early to mid-60s as "Luke the Drifter, jr.)

Hank Williams, jr. - The Dream that Woke Me Up (as Luke the Drifter, jr.) (eerie, isn't it?)

The most acclaimed of the tracks, "The Funeral," is (to my ears) maudlin and sentimental, clumsily rhymed and less incisive about the human condition than, say "Your Cheatin' Heart" and less poetic than say, "Long Gone Lonesome Blues." an honestly, late in his career he made more conventional country gospel recordings under his own name, free of both the dated racism and incomplete sense of salvation of "The Funeral"--it's more Louvin Brothers, if you will.

Hank Williams - When the Book of Life is Read

The recitation song most similar to the dire (but cathartic) work he recorded under his own name is the exceptional "Men With Broken Hearts," a cheery little ditty that fits well alongside most of his best work about relationships. Hank was the first major county star to tackle the male condition for young, poor southerners. In a society where adulthood and respectability was tied far more than it is today with being able to earn enough money and gain enough stability to marry, the plight of a sensitive man--emotionally fragile, challenged by strong women he can't have, unsure of where he can fit in such a society--it lacks the false bravado of so much later country, less the equally emotional, but far less fragile (and frankly self-pitying) cheatin' songs of, for example, Conway Twitty.

(The Car Hank was in when he died, January 1, 1953)

Hank Williams - The Funeral (Luke the Drifter)

You'll meet many just like me upon life's busy street
With shoulders stooped and heads bowed low and eyes that stare in defeat
Or souls that live within the past where sorrow plays all parts
Where a living death is all that's left for men with broken hearts
You have no right to be the judge to criticize and condemn
Just think but for the grace of God it would be you instead of him
One careless step a thoughtless deed and then the misery starts
And to those who weep death comes cheap, these men with broken hearts
("Men With Broken Hearts")

Hank Williams - Men With Broken Hearts (Luke the Drifter)

The only example of a latter-day country song by a major artist that channels the same perspective is Merle Haggard's "Carolyn," which we'll save for another day.

We also have a sardonically funny spoken word piece that's far more direct about the realities of poor white rural life than almost anything else that came before it, in "Everything's Okay." Far from the nostalgia of "My Clinch Mountain Home" or "Coat of Many Colors," Hank gives us farmer for whom the bottom has genuinely fallen out--the corn's rotting, the canned food has gone bad, and his mother-in-law has moved in to stay. But, as he thows of at the end of every new travail, "We're still a-livin', so everything's okay."

But the only reason we're getting to have this little one-way conversation is because of the fundamental wonder of the interwebs. Thanks to the "Jake and Elwood Greatest Hits' Blog," I was able to take on the entire ten disc "Complete" Hank Williams box set (which as I have come to understand is likely nowhere near complete--country music fans are apparently pretty unhappy with Mercury's treatment of the Williams catalog). The amount of Hank Williams material I had never heard, not to mention the quality of the radio transcriptions on this compilation, has kept me thoroughly busy for the last week.

---The Complete Luke the Drifter---

1. Too Many Parties and Too Many Pals
2. Beyond the Sunset
3. The Funeral
4. Everything's Okay
5. Help Me Understand
6. No, No Joe
7. Just Waitin'
8. Men With Broken Hearts
   
9. Ramblin' Man
10. Pictures From Life's Other Side
11. I've Been Down that Road Before
12. I Dreamed About Mama Last Night
13. Be Careful of Stones that You Throw
14. Please Make Up Your Mind
    

(make a commitment to honky tonk gospel--grab all 14 tracks here. It's also available as the CD reissue to the original Luke the Drifter compilation, Beyond the Sunset.)

Posted by Brandon

They're with you, in that Long, Black Limousine...

(Elvis's own Long Black Limousine, a 1960 Lincoln Mark V)

One of the once common but now largely forgotten motifs of early 20th century American music is the journey to the graveyard, accompanying a family member/loved one on their "final" journey. The most famous of these songs is the Carter Family's "Can the Circle Be Unbroken," which Mark Zwonitzer (in his excellent Carter Family bio Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone) tells me was re-written by A.P. Carter from an old "mother's funeral" song, another common theme in British balladry and American folk and early popular music. It's a mourning song, but the message is one of praise to a welcoming God--a God who has brought mother close to His bosom, and will be bringing the singer home someday (soon, probably), as well.

Lord, I told the undertaker,
"Undertaker, please drive slow;
For this body you are hauling,
Lord, I hate to see her go"

Can the circle be unbroken,
By and by, Lord, bye and bye?
There's a better home a-waiting
In the sky, Lord, in the sky.
("Can the Circle be Unbroken")

(Of course, despite having been their biggest hit in one of their biggest years--1935--it is most widely known nowadays as the title track from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's 1972 album of the same name.)

Similar songs by possibly even more significant (if musically transitional) artists--Hank Williams and Elvis Presley--look, alternatively, backwards and forwards on the ballad tradition. Hank's "Six More Miles (To the Graveyard)," his own composition, followed the storyline of the graveyard trail as directly as the Carters', but the lyrics themselves are just a shadow of A.P.'s. The narrator has lost his "darling," but other than hearing the train a 'coming to carry her home, we don't get much insight into what he's going through. The song isn't, despite its title and chorus, really about the journey. It's about Hank's tenor, and the steel guitar, and the way that Hank was moving the country music tradition forward with his songwriting--deeply personal stories of love lost and vulnerability, the sort that men of an earlier moment did not sing. Notably, this song is about the loss of a lover, rather than a mother, and evokes God and religion only obliquely. It is a song exclusively about the narrator's loss, with only the faintest hint of a better home a 'waitin. Like most of Hank's best work, the loss he feels is unmitigated by the hope of salvation.

Elvis's "Long Black Limousine" started as a second-tier single on Crest Records out of Hollywood, CA--best known as an early home of pre-Rhinestone Cowboy (or even pre-Beach Boys!) Glen Campbell. It was written and performed by Vern Stovall (and Bobby George, about whom I can find absolutely nothing), who had a couple songs placed with Hank Snow and Ray Price. Eventually, Wynn Stewart picked up "Long Black Limousine," inching it stylistically towards where Elvis would end up in '68 by making it a little less archetypically honky tonkin' and making it swing in that Bakersfield way. From there it showed up on Merle Haggard's Branded Man, with a spoken-word interlude in place of a sung verse. All great songs, but none particularly revelatory in light of the Carter Family/Hank tradition.


Elvis's version, naturally, is a cosmic kick to the skull.

It's not just the Chips Moman production, with the fabulous but subtle backing vocals, or the American Studios session hands, some of whom had just played on Dusty in Memphis. The man had Dan Penn on guitar, for god's sake! More than anything else, it's the eeriness of listening to Elvis sing a song to an imaginary dead ex-lover--a song that sounds as if it was written for the sole purpose of being sung by some girl Elvis had bragged to about how he'd be a star (back in the Lauderdale Courts public housing development where he spent his teenage years) as she watched his funeral procession.

There's a long line of mourners, winding down through our city
Their fancy cars are such a sight to see
They must be your rich friends that knew you in the city
And now they've finally brought you back home to me
...
You said the day you left me that you would be returning
In a fancy car, for all the town to see
Well now you've finally come back, yes you've finally got your dream
Now you're riding in that long black limousine
("Long Black Limousine")

Listening to "Long Black Limousine," I can't separate Elvis the performer from Elvis the man--just another hick kid who talked big and went to the big city, but after all the high living, the traveling, the fame, and the women, ended up back where he started, having let so many down. The Memphis '68 special and the subsequent album was the last time Elvis would rise above self-parody as an artist, and this was the last great song he ever recorded.

(None of this takes into account the recently uncovered Flying Burrito Brothers live version from '69, which soulds like it's rooted in Merle's take. Since this is so widely available elsewhere, y'all can find it elsewhere.)

The Carter Family - Can the Circle Be Unbroken
Hank Williams - Six More Miles (To the Graveyard)

Vern Stovall - Long Black Limousine
Wynn Stewart - Long Black Limousine
Merle Haggard - Long Black Limousine

Elvis Presley - Long Black Limousine

Posted by Brandon