Fans who've read Escott's biography Hank Williams will treasure the new material: an extensive collection of informal photos, long-sealed court depositions, the accounting ledger with the $30,000 payoff to his naïve teenaged bride Billie Jean to abandon her claim to his estate, etc. Among the handwritten copies of 30 unpublished songs and song fragments ("I Wish I Had A Dad," "The Broken Marriage") is "Then Came That Fatal Day" found on the floor of the Cadillac where he died en route to a December 31, 1952, concert. The newly revealed lyrics capture his love-hate relationship with his first wife, Audrey. Meanwhile, a draft of "Cold Cold Heart" accompanies Hank's and Audrey's conflicting accounts as to whether it was "inspired" by an abortion.
Numerous details emerge in the book, like Billie Jean's humor, and Hank's problems with excess measures in song lines. Letters from his publisher/co-author/editor Fred Rose (a recovered alcoholic who tried to curb Hank's substance abuse) find Rose trying to help the volatile marriage to Audrey while - like many others - harshly assessing her.
Audrey, who died in 1975, was an ambitious woman who attempted plenty of spin on her exhusband's legend, but she was probably right in saying, "If some woman, equally as strong as I am, had not come along, there never would have been a Hank Williams. He did not want to live when I met him."
It's an intriguing cast of characters, which build upon the already colorful Hank Williams legend. Check it out today!
He was just twenty-nine years old and had beena recording artist for less than six years when he died on New Year's Day 1953. Yet the songs Hank Williams left behind-including "I Saw the Light," "Cold Cold Heart," "Your Cheatin' Heart"-transformed him into a legend whose influence is felt as strongly today as ever. But for all that Hank Williams's music seems to reveal, his fans have been given remarkably little of the man himself. Now Colin Escott and Kira Florita present a previously undiscovered wealth of private family snapshots, letters, unpublished interviews, and other ephemera-including his final lyric, found in the backseat of the car where he died. Most extraordinary, though, are the previously unseen handwritten lyrics-almost thirty songs altogether. In paperback for the first time, this is a windfall of memorabilia for his fans everywhere.
