THE BOSTON GLOBE (ARCHIVE)
REVIEW / BOOK\
HANK WILLIAMS: TROUBADOUR IN COWBOY BOOTS
YOUR CHEATIN' HEART: A BIOGRAPHY OF HANK wILLIAMS, BY CHET FLIPPO.
SIMON & SCHUSTER. 256 PP. $12.95.
Author: Allan R. Andrews Globe Staff
Date: October 25, 1981, Section: BOOKS
Moan.
It captures best an art form perfected by country singer Hank Williams. His musical style was the moan--as it was the style of his life. Of broken love or simple faith, Williams sang with a moan, and now Chet Flippo has chronicled the moans of his life. Flippo's biography is not a book of the heart; it reaches for the entrails and repeatedly peeks at the genitals.
This is a hard, sad book that tends toward iconoclasm, but it scratches away the gaudiness constructed around Williams by fan magazines and Nashville promoters.
But a sadness also lies in Flippo's lack of sympathy toward the mythology that surrounds Hank Williams. As with any folk hero, the myth is more important than the man, and Flippo borders on disservice to the legend of Hank Williams with his ruthless objectivity in detailing Williams' failings.
Williams is more than a country singer; he is an entire mythology: a prophet, complete with passion play, tragic ending and expression in sad songs of hope for the lost. Flippo's Williams is an immature neurotic, who found salvation less in a song than in a syringe.
By 1948, Hank Williams was the best-known country singer in the nation, and his songs--"Cold, Cold Heart," "Your Cheatin' Heart," and "Half As Much"--were picked up by popular singers and rendered into million-selling recordings.
In 1951, Williams' flaring career ended when he was found dead in his powder-blue Cadillac, a 29-year-old victim of his success and the psychic toll of the road, the bottle and their pharmaceutical companions.
Three decades later, country music has emerged from its barnyard roots to become the most widely sold music of the century, and Hank Williams remains its memorialized high priest. With a perspective of 30 years and a goldmine of correspondence released from the estate of Williams' first wife, Audrey, Flippo has written a definitive account of the life of Hiram (Hank) Williams.
In many respects, Williams is a prototypic rags-to-riches-to-tragedy story. Born into a poor white family in Alabama with a father who did little else than drink and a mother who did--quite literally--everything, Williams broke from his poverty and his maternal prison by playing the guitar, singing and by marrying. Williams' marriage proved a mere change of venue in his psychic trials, a brutal relationship between Williams and "Miss Ordrey" that is bared by Flippo.
If there was any solace in Williams' life, it came with the encouragement of Fred Rose, the urbane music publisher, who not only co-wrote many of Williams' songs, but also shepherded Williams' career until alcohol and drugs--enhanced by a congenital back disorder--made the singer's displays on stage and in the recording studio a tragic liability.
Fans of Williams will moan at Flippo's failure to strike any balance. For example, we are told Williams wrote country hymns in his meditative moments, but we are never shown those moments with the intensity that Flippo brings to the privacy of Williams' marital and sexual ponderings. Rather than trying to understand the "maudlin" nature of Williams' religious expression, Flippo brushes it aside and thus overlooks a major philosophical root--for weal or for woe--in the life of a singer who wrote more than a dozen religious songs, rarely ended performances without singing a gospel song and levied fines on band members--including himself--who took God's name in vain.
To be sure, Flippo is a sympathetic biographer, but he seems to relish taking us into the bedroom and the barroom where Williams showed his anger and violence while rarely leading us to the inner sanctum of self in the story of this gifted performer.
Flippo's is an almost clinical analysis of a mother and son love-hate relationship and of two marriages, one that seemed to run on greed and a second marked more by vaudeville than by vows.
We think we know Hank Williams better after reading Flippo, but despite the narrative style--which promises more than it delivers--we meet only a victim of the dominant personalities around him, and come away with the same answers that for decades have followed the question, "Who was Hank Williams?" He was a country singer who drank heavily, was abused by those around him and died too young.
But Williams has become more in death than he was in life, not because of the sentimentality or the industry that surrounds his memory, but because he is the encapsulation of the mythic troubadour in cowboy boots, and because he expressed so well the fundamental moans of our existence. Except for a brief concession to Williams as legend in his summary, Flippo neglects the myth, perhaps deliberately, for it is not the role of a biographer to perpetuate myths. But neither is it the role of the biographer to denigrate the dreams of adoring fans who found someone to teach them to moan melodiously.
