The Poetic Sturdiness of Hank Williams

I got A New Literary History of America, the Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors-edited collection of cultural essays spanning from 1493 to Hurricane Katrina, with everything from the Lincoln-Douglas debates to "The Birth of Cool" in between, as a late Christmas present, and already I've found something to love: Dave Hickey's piece "The Song in Country Music." In it, Hickey talks to a few well-known country songwriters about the subtle poetry of Hank Williams:

When I asked him about Williams's songs, [Waylon Jennings] sang lines from two or three of them and showed me how the sounding of the consonants moved from the front to the back of the mouth so the vowels were always singable--so you didn't have to stutter or swallow the words. Billy Joe Shaver, whose junior high school English teacher sent him off to the navy with books by Robert W. Service and Dylan Thomas, admired the way Williams's figurative poetry virtually disappeared into the facts of the narrative. "'Melt your cold, cold heart' . . . 'Today I saw you on the street/And my heart fell at your feet' . . . 'The silence of a falling star/Lights up a purple sky.' Like that," Shaver said. "The closest I got was 'I'm just an ol' chunk of coal/But I'm gonna be a diamond some day,' which could descibe one of Hank's songs."

Harlan Howard, the most meticulous of country songwriters after Hank Williams, went into more detail. He sang the first verse of "Cold Cold Heart."

I try so hard my dear to say

That you're my everything

Yet you're afraid each thing I do

Is just some evil scheme

Some mem'ry from your lonesome past

Keeps us so far apart

Why can't I free your doubtful mind

And melt your cold, cold heart

Howard then pointed out what Roger Miller meant by hooked up. He explained that these eight short lines were invisibly held together by fifteen internal r phonemes. There are triples in the first two lines, four pairs, and the terminal "heart" that gives the verse closure. "Nobody notices this," Howard said. "That's the idea, but once these words are put together this way, they won't come apart. One follows the other as day the night."

Dave Hickey, "The Song in Country Music"

from A New Literary History of America

Oh, and if you didn't know, Hank could also sing them okay, too: