Some works of art--plays, songs, poems, novels, paintings, photographs--linger with me in ways that go beyond the skill and craft of their making and presentation. They linger because they connect some of the widely diffused dots that outline my life, or they revive or recast a memory that had lost some of its potency. I suspect Hank's songs have done that for a lot of people.
The set and the staging of the play were especially effective. Stage right, there's a Sinclair sign, the suggestion of the old-style service station, complete with a few bald tires that, maybe like ol' Hank himself, had seen too much of the highway. The service station area also provides a hangout for a black street singer from Williams' home town, a man known locally as "Teetot." In Hank's early years, Teetot teaches him to sing from his own heart, sing his own pain and sing it with conviction. It doesn't come instantly to the young and callow white boy, but it does get there, with a rare intensity.
At stage left, a waitress who dreams of Cadillacs and better places works behind the counter of a truck stop diner. She hears the news of Williams's death on the radio there, and we learn later of a brief encounter she shared with a very drunk Hank, whose appearance is enhanced by the presence on the parking lot of his new '52 baby blue Caddy convertible.
The diner is a little garish, too much chrome and neon, but offers a spot on the road brightly lit by electricity and the waitress's smile. The service station is dingy, dusty and greasy in a friendly sort of way.
The center stage area is an elevated platform, used mostly for Hank's performances, from the Grand Ole Opry to the seedy honky-tonks he played in, from crowds that loved him to those he was too drunk to perform for.
When I was a boy in the middle-to-late 1950s, I liked being in a car going down a highway, and my highway trips were mostly in the rural South. Sometimes, I think, Hank's songs were on the radio. Sometimes the windows were down. There were Sinclair stations along with Essos and Lions, and diners and other local cafes, it being a little to early for fast food franchises to have gotten pervasive enough to homogenize the American landscape as thoroughly as they now have. Oil companies were big business, but restaurants were still mom-and-pop. A landscape in transition, like all landscapes. You just have to wait until a later moment in time to see where a particular landscape is in a transition process.
I live in a world now that I would describe as wider and less provincial. But my ancestry in the rural South is close to my time, with my generation being the first in my family to be born in hospitals. My parents were both born in West Tennessee farmhouses where plumbing and electricity were things of the future. When my mother was born, my grandfather was a tenant farmer, and would remain one until he got a job as a carpenter building one of those hastily-constructed U. S. Army camps where World War II recruits were trained for subsequent adventures in Europe and the South Pacific. I remember my grandfather in most of the time our lives overlapped as a finisher of hardwood floors.
In childhood, I listened to the voices, the stories, the convictions, the delights and the dreads of my extended family. I suppose a lot of what I heard was similar to what Hank Williams heard. I learned to play the guitar when I was 14, but I was a rocker, at least in those days. Later, as an adult, I learned to play and sing some of Hank's songs, along with some of the old-time music he listened to and must have played at some time himself.
Hank was lost at an early age. He was lost for good at 29, but got on the highway that led him to that early death several years earlier. His brief adult life created an enduring body of work--the songs he wrote, his performances--that a lot of people find powerful, even beautiful. He poured his life into it. The pain in his back, the pain of his marriage, the pain of just not knowing what to do with his own life but sing it. Some artists burn themselves to ashes singing the timeless and classless pain of the human animal.
As for me, I'm sophisticated now. I went to university and graduate school. I've traveled a highway from a conservative Southern Baptist boyhood to what's getting to be a late adulthood as a progressive Unitarian whose mind and spirit flows freely across another phase of a changing landscape.
But the child who is father to this man won't die before the man.
