The Bottom Line
Pros
- Excellent, well-constructed documentary.
- Tremendous amount of information, rare pictures, and music.
- Interviews with friends, family, and fellow musicians.
Cons
- None.
Description
- Quality documentary originally broadcast on PBS for the "American Masters" series.
- Director's cut, with over 30 more minutes, plus 15 minutes of bonus features.
- Haunting, fascinating story of country music's first real "outlaw wildman."
Guide Review - Hank Williams - Honky Tonk Blues DVD
Hank Williams was the first country music superstar. The first "hat act." A poor boy from Alabama, not a cowboy. But he made himself the world's greatest cowboy singer. This handsome young man, charming, a little crazy, wowed audiences and wooed women, and changed the face of country music forever.This PBS-broadcast documentary captures a little glimpse of the comet that was Hank Williams. In his very brief recording career (a mere six years), he was the first hell-raiser, a hard-drinking and hard-living wild man who was too crazy for the staid Opry; too famous too fast for his own good. Williams' life was wrapped up in pain, a pain that came across in his music. His drinking was likely connected to an undiagnosed back problem which, many historians today agree, was very likely a mild form of spina bifida. Hank Williams drank himself to death on New Year's Eve 1952. On New Year's Day, 1953, he was gone and the world of country music went into mourning.
The tale is told largely by fellow Opry members, band mates, friends, and family (including grandson Hank III, whose eerie resemblance to his ancestor in both face and voice is chilling). This is a documentary worth watching, to listen to the music and watch those old movies and clips and realize"Old Hank" was really a very young man. It's agonizing and yet uplifting to see him struggling to come to grips with life's pain both physical and emotional, hating the icon he became while yearning to be a great songwriter.