He Saw the Light

When the great country singer and composer Hank Williams died at age 29 in the backseat of a Cadillac on New Year’s Day 1953, he left behind a catalog of sleek, direct, endlessly coverable songs. He also left many more lyrics than he’d ever gotten around to recording. Over the decades, Williams’ unfinished works–found in a cardboard box and then locked away in a safe by his music publisher, Acuff-Rose–gradually developed a reputation as the lost treasure of Nashville. The prospect of a cache of tunes as glorious as “Hey Good Lookin'” and “Cold, Cold Heart” made for an irresistible legend.

Bob Dylan had been trying to get his hands on Williams’ unseen words since the ’60s, and around 2004, Acuff-Rose’s new owner, Sony Music, apparently tapped him to write music for some of them. That plan eventually mutated into The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams, on which Dylan reserves only one song for himself, the gruff, trudging waltz “The Love That Faded.” He turned over the rest to other disciples of the Stetson-hatted master: roots rockers, Nashville diehards, blood relatives (including Dylan’s son Jakob and Williams’ granddaughter Holly). The long-delayed result is a song-by-song tribute to an album that might have been: a testament to loss and heartbreak that Williams might have recorded if he’d lived a bit longer.

Most of the Lost Notebooks contributors wisely stick to Williams’ honky-tonking idiom (pedal steel and fiddle, yes; Auto-Tune, no), and it’s a treat to hear the likes of Levon Helm and Patty Loveless in a ’50s Grand Ole Opry mode. Still, there are a few nods to modernity, the sharpest of which is Jack White’s caustic “You Know That I Know.” And a couple of these songs were too good for the artists to keep under wraps: Norah Jones has been singing her graceful, mournful setting of “How Many Times Have You Broken My Heart?” onstage for years.

The lyrics are mostly lovesick Hank, not setting-the-woods-on-fire Hank. There’s nothing here as jubilant as “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)” or as cutting as “My Son Calls Another Man Daddy.” Williams’ chief strength as a lyricist, though, was expressing complicated emotional states in thrillingly direct language. These songs have plainspoken, Hankian variations on clichés (from “Blue is my heart, blue as the sky” to “Love, it’s true, can turn to hate/ You are the cause–don’t blame it on fate”).

In a modern context, Williams’ guileless sentimentality can come off as corny, although Vince Gill and Rodney Crowell’s recitative “I Hope You Shed a Million Tears” (“The Bible says forgive you/ But that’s something I can’t do”) is the only performance here that admits the hint of a smirk. Singing about “worries and cares” and “a heart that does nothing but pine” in the 21st century is tricky; Dylan and most of his associates get away with it by bearing down on Williams’ words as if these songs were already country standards. Some of them ought to be.