Synopses & Reviews
The first definitive biography of one of America's finest and most enigmatic songwriters.
Hank Williams, the quintessential country music singer and songwriter, died alone in the backseat of his Cadillac on New Year'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 Williams'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 Williams's life, but most importantly, he has explained that life and given it the lively telling it deserves.
Review
"Like his subject, Hemphill keeps the story lean and simple." Chicago Sun-Times
Review
"Paul Hemphill comes by his love of Hank honestly, having grown up in Birmingham in the 1940's, the son of a truck driver, and he tells the familiar story with economy and grace." Garrison Keillor, New York Times
Review
"Readers of this concise and insightful biography should be grateful, for it takes them inside the music legend's heart and soul." San Antonio Express-News
Review
"[A] country music fan's dream. You'll have Jambalaya running through your mind for days, and you won't mind one bit." Dallas-Ft. Worth Star Telegram
Review
"[F]ans new to the Hank Williams story will get most of the high and low points of his remarkable, meteoric career." Library Journal
Review
"[An] absorbing traversal of the life of the single greatest figure in country music....[T]this is the finest work of literature about Williams yet written." Booklist
Synopsis
Hank Williams, the quintessential country music singer and songwriter, lived a life as lonesome, desolate, and filled with sorrow as his timeless songs. From Williams's dirt- poor beginnings as a sickly child to his emergence as a star of the Grand Ole Opry,
Lovesick Blues is the definitive biography of the man and his music.
About the Author
Paul Hemphill is the author of four novels and eleven works of nonfiction, all of them dealing with the blue-collar South.