Hank Williams

Hiram King Williams grew up in Alabama with a speech impediment and a spinal condition, learning guitar from Rufus Payne (Tee-Tot), a Black street musician in Greenville, Alabama, who gave him both the blues vocabulary and the melismatic vocal style that would become country music’s emotional core. He arrived in Nashville in 1946 already a mature artist — compact, devastating songs about love, loneliness and whiskey sung with a delivery that made every syllable feel personal.

His run of hits between 1947 and 1952 established the template for modern country music: “Move It On Over” (1947), “Lovesick Blues” (1949), “Cold Cold Heart” (1951), “Your Cheatin’ Heart” (1952), “Hey Good Lookin’” (1951), and the song he said he wrote in ten minutes, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” (1949) — forty-four words about desolation that Bob Dylan would later call the most painful human voice he had ever heard.

Williams was fired from the Grand Ole Opry for repeated intoxication and missed appearances, and died in the back seat of his Cadillac on the way to a New Year’s Day show in 1953, of a combination of alcohol, drugs and a congenital heart defect, aged 29. The five posthumous Number Ones that followed his death — including “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “Kaw-Liga” — demonstrated that his commercial reach had barely been tapped. His influence on country, rock and soul has never diminished.