Hank Williams‘ “I’m So Lonesome, I Could Cry,” was the first Sunday Song Lyric. Appropriately so as Hank Williams is easily one of the greatest American song writers of all time. He died at only 29, and yet left one of the most impressive songbooks of any song writer. Bob Dylan (no song-writing slouch himself) observed that “in Hank’s recorded songs were the archetype rules of poetic songwriting.”
One Williams song I hadn’t heard for some time is “Cold, Cold Heart,” which topped the country charts in 1951. It’s not the sort of thing I listen to much, but it’s still an incredible song. It begins:
I tried so hard my dear to show that you’re my every dream.
Yet you’re afraid each thing I do is just some evil scheme
A memory from your lonesome past keeps us so far apart
Why can’t I free your doubtful mind and melt your cold cold heart
Here are the full lyrics and a TV performance.
One of these days we may get treated to even more Hank Williams songs, in a way. Dylan reportedly came into possession of 20 to 25 unfinished Williams songs, mostly lyrics without music, and has asked noted artists to record them for a tribute album.
COLD COLD HEART Lyrics
Artist(Band):Hank Williams
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I tried so hard my dear to show that you’re my every dream.
Yet you’re afraid each thing I do is just some evil scheme
A memory from your lonesome past keeps us so far apart
Why can’t I free your doubtful mind and melt your cold cold heart
Martinned says:
I wonder if that is a widely shared view (apart from Dylan). Not that I’m any kind of expert, but neither his music that I’ve heard in the past, nor this lyric here, particularly impresses me of the man’s talent.
October 11, 2009, 10:01 amDavid Chesler says:
I don’t know if I’ve every heard Cold, Cold Heart before. I didn’t think they knew about emotional abuse back then. Not two days ago I was afraid that I was hurting my intended because of a small kindness I gave to a co-worker of the opposite sex, on account of how I’d had to treat my late wife for the time I knew her, in turn on account of how her ex-fiance had treated her: in other words some guy I’ve never met was now getting inside my head regarding a relationship with someone else he’d never met. It’s like trying to recover feathers set loose in the wind.
October 11, 2009, 10:33 amgw says:
Williams was a genius. Being a country music guy, he never really gets his due respect since so many folks have a gag reflex when it comes to country music.
October 11, 2009, 10:42 amCDR D says:
Thanks for posting that, Professor.
I’m old enough to remember when it was topping the charts.
October 11, 2009, 10:53 amHWC says:
Nora Jones has a great cover of Cold, Cold Heart.
[It's here. JHA ]
October 11, 2009, 11:22 amtherut says:
Brings back my childhood. Riding with my father in the truck dringing a RC coke with peanuts and listening to music like this on the scratchy radio. No air conditioner so the vents on the side windows blew my long hair around and around. Add in a few horse flies buzzing around and I get all weepy for my childhood. I can still smell the oil and cattle feed aroma of the old truck. Not to mention the nights spent with grandma sleeping on the sleeping porch in a feather bed listening to the Grand Ole Oprey on a very old big red radio with the chamber pot brought upstairs for the night. I wish I could go back and stay about 9 years old.
October 11, 2009, 11:57 amArthurKirkland says:
I enjoy some country music — Hank Williams, Waylon Jennings, Bob Wills — but popular country is the worl’-wide rasslin’ tour of music.
The problem seems to be not the instruments, phrasings or the like — Mark Knopfler, the Rolling Stones and many others have shown what can be accomplished with pickin’, pedal steel and the well-timed warble — but rather the popular tastes of country music consumers. Had the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Bruce Springsteen, Janis Joplin, Chuck Berry and Pink Floyd had never been popular — and, instead, the rock world had been dominated by the likes of KISS, Poison, boy bands, Twisted Sister, Styx, Loverboy and Motley Crue — the common perception of rock ‘n’ roll would resemble the current state of country music.
I suspect country music has its current gems, but the country consumer’s preference for Gretchen Wilson, Big ‘n Rich, LeAnn Rimes, Lee Greenwood, Hank Williams Jr. and Kenny Chesney obscures them.
October 11, 2009, 12:09 pmMalvolio says:
“Don’t sell yourself short Judge, you’re a tremendous slouch.” — Ty Webb
I think Bob Dylan is a terrible song-writer and that sentence alone shows why: “In Hank’s recorded songs were the archetype rules of poetic songwriting.”
His “recorded” songs? Why would the fact that a song gets recorded affect its inherent quality? “The archetype rules”? I don’t think Dylan knows what the word “archetype” even means — he just heard it and now he’s throwing it into the sentence as an adjectival equivalent of “really”. And “poetic songwriting”? Is there some other kind?
OK, this was extemporaneous speech, but it’s the extemporaneous speech of someone with no love for language. The only lyrics of Dylan’s (and I used to know all his songs) that I still remember is from “Hurricane”:
Dylan apparently had a lot of problem with that first line. Why is the health of the witness mentioned twice, and inconsistently at that, in the same sentence? If he’s just “wounded”, why is eye dying? Was it hit worse? What happened to his other eye? And there’s the overarching question of why you bring up the poor eyesight and distracted state of your only exonerating witness.
Dylan, imho, is a terrible singer and a mediocre songwriter who, by a process utterly mysterious to me, has been elevated to the status of “unquestionable artistic icon”. Well, the emperor has no clothes, buddy, and Dylan sucks.
Hank Williams? I don’t listen to country much.
October 11, 2009, 12:24 pmgw says:
Why not?
October 11, 2009, 12:40 pmSandy MacHoots says:
Sorry, I don’t get this. During the period that the Stones, the Who, Springsteen, etc., were playing, country had Hank Snow, George Jones, Ernest Tubb, Tammy Wynette, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Jim Reeves, Dolly Parton, Freddie Fender, Patsy Cline, Charlie Pride, Kitty Wells, Webb Pierce, Conway Twitty, Johhny Cash . . . . Those were the golden ages for both kinds of music, with Elvis the man who bridged Hank Williams to Chuck Berry.
October 11, 2009, 2:27 pmFub says:
Amen. I wore some Hank 78s right down to nothing but scratches. I know I’ve still got Jambalaya / Honky Tonkin’ buried somewhere, but I’m not sure if I still have Cold, Cold Heart / Dear John. If I still do, It was worn out over 50 years ago too.
Hank Williams inspired my general interest in music, and a lifelong love of good country music (most of which doesn’t come from Nashville).
Only many years later, when I met a smalltime country musician several years older than I, did I learn that Hank Williams endured intractable chronic pain throughout his short lifetime, from spina bifida occulta and scoliosis. Some photos of him in performance make that condition glaringly obvious. His back was bent so far to one side it looked like he had difficulty just standing up.
The common perception at the time was that he was just a hopeless drunk and morphine addict who died young from too much booze and drugs. Fact is, he was self-medicating intense and intractable pain most of his adult life.
October 11, 2009, 3:24 pmhattio says:
Malvolio says;
Well, gee. Maybe it’s because if a song was never recorded, Bobb Dylan hasn’t heard it and therefore has no way to judge it? I mean, you really do have to hear a song to know whether it’s well-written, no?
October 11, 2009, 3:45 pmMatt says:
In my opinion, Hank Williams was the greatest economist in the history of English-language songwriting. He told realer, more memorable stories with fewer words and simpler language than anyone else I can think of.
I can’t help it if I’m still in love with you and You win again both cover similar territory.
There’s a lot of hurt there, whether from his chronic pain, his broken hearts, or both. Many country songwriters have been able to approach the place where he lived, but none seem to have been able to stay there for more than one or two songs.
October 11, 2009, 4:01 pmBT says:
Count me in as one of Hank’s many fans. He is truely an American original like Louie Armstrong. I believe that Tony Bennett’s first hit was Cold Cold Heart in the early 50s. I may go out and sit in with a band tonight. I don’t do any Hank but there is a song by Charlie Walker that has a wonderfully cynical opening line that goes “Not long ago you held our baby’s bottle, but the one your holdin’ nowz a different kind…”
October 11, 2009, 5:32 pmThank God for Country music.
Malvolio says:
Truth be told, country seems lyrically sentimental and musically stereotyped. Consider two fairly recent (cross-over) hits, “Picture” and “Before He Cheats”. “Picture” portrays a woman lamenting her lover’s unfaithfulness, whereas “Before He Cheats” portrays a woman lamenting her lover’s unfaithfulness. Snippets of either song could be inserted into the other as bridges or change-ups without too much modification. They just seem cookie-cutter.
Perhaps I could, with more investigation, find country music that is lyrically or musically innovative as, say, R.E.M. or P!nk or Talking Heads (to pick my favorites from several decades) but from this distance, it doesn’t look promising.
Well, I read an blog-post that suggested Dylan had access to “20 to 25 unfinished Williams songs, mostly lyrics without music”. Oh, right, that was this post!
October 12, 2009, 12:54 amDiversityHire says:
It’s a short trip from Talking Heads to good country music and it goes through Al Green to Willie Nelson. Nelson is the Paul Erdos or Kevin Bacon of popular music, he’s a good jumping-off point from stuff you know to stuff you might like. From Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Neil Young, Paul Simon, Diana Krall, Elvis Costello, or Peter Gabriel, through Willie to Bob Wills, Asleep at the Wheel, Merle Haggard, Norah Jones, Kermit the Frog, or Snoop Doggie Dogg.
October 12, 2009, 3:24 amWiley Quixote says:
A lot of musicians (of all stripes) have paid tribute to Hank over the years. I can’t remember which of his songs it is, but he apparently penned one of the most covered songs of all time?
Here’s a clip with the song performed by Sneezy Waters as Hank from Hank Williams: The Show He Never Gave (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084048/), a movie I can’t recommend enough for fans and non-fans alike (it appears the whole thing is on youtube!)
October 12, 2009, 5:21 amgw says:
Truth be told, country seems lyrically sentimental and musically stereotyped.
Modern Nashville country is dreadful to be sure, but REM has hasn’t done anything interesting in 20 years, Pink is awful, and Talking Heads had only 4-5 decent songs.
October 12, 2009, 9:21 amFub says:
And The Bobs cover of Psycho Killer is better anyway.
October 12, 2009, 12:05 pmMalvolio says:
I didn’t even realize REM was still around, but when they were good, they were very, very good (“The End Of The World” is the greatest unsingable song every written). And you can hardly criticize them for the hiatus on a thread about a country singer who hasn’t produced anything good for 56 years, admittedly with a iron-clad excuse. The Talking Heads had at least six terrific songs, which may not sound like very much but is six more than I’ve written and I’m guessing the same is true for you.
Pink is great.
October 12, 2009, 12:51 pmrichard says:
Anybody who doesn’t idolize Hank (and isn’t familiar with his work) doesn’t know s___ about American music.
October 12, 2009, 12:52 pmWith regard to the Williams lyrics that Dylan acquired several years ago, there are You Tube videos of the Lucinda Williams and Norah Jones contributions to the project (Norah did her song on the Elvis Costello Spectacle tv series). I’m told the project should be released sometime next year.
hattio says:
Malvolio,
October 12, 2009, 2:02 pmYou may want to look up the meanings of the words “unfinished” and “lyrics.” A song with only lyrics, and no melody isn’t really a song. Therefore, you can’t really judge whether or not it’s a good song. After all, there’s a reason that music-writing and lyric-writing credits are given separately in songs where they are written by different people. It takes both to make a great song.
Malvolio says:
I don’t claim to be any kind of expert but I’ve spent the last hour or so listening to Hank and …
Not impressed. It all sound like “Git Along, Little Doggies” to me. The same pacing, the same chords. It isn’t terrible, it isn’t bad, it just sounds the same. It might have been innovative in 1951 but I don’t think it still stands up. (By comparison, a lot of mid-60s rock still works: Stones, Joplin, the Animals)
October 12, 2009, 2:58 pmFub says:
Not surprising really, for any composer or songwriter in any genre. A friend worked his way through college as piano accompanist for recitals. He rarely rehearsed more than once through a piece, to familiarize himself with the soloist’s idiosyncracies. He was typically sight reading at rehearsal, and sometimes at performances without rehearsal. He told me Mozart’s work was by far the easiest to sight read, “because I figured out the formula early.”
October 12, 2009, 3:52 pmMalvolio says:
As I said, I’m not an expert, but I meant that country in general and even Williams in particular seems monotonous, compared to other genres and other musicians I’m familiar with.
And even if I were willing to listen to the same song over and over again, I think it’s less likely to be “Cold Cold Heart” or “Hey Good Lookin’” than say, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or “Psycho Killer” or “Crimson and Clover” or “Kryptonite” or “Disturbia” or “Bleeding Love” or “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” or “Satisfaction” or … well, pretty much anything.
It’s odd. Country music is American music; rock is American and British and South African and Caribbean and a bunch of other places. Somehow, though, rock feels authentically and universally American to me, while country feels, I don’t know, ethnic, like Klezmer or reggae or throat-singing, the representative sound of some subgroup, a genre I can appreciate (or not) as an outsider but never really get. YMMV, of course.
October 12, 2009, 4:34 pm