"Hank Williams was the first country singer and songwriter whose songs consistently crossed over to the pop music audience, heartfelt songs like "Your Cheatin' Heart" and "Cold, Cold Heart" and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," with such undeniable emotional appeal that they transcend time and place and audience. Almost everybody, it seemed, could identify with the suffering that Hank Williams packed into a two-and-a-half-minute blues song. What everyone didn't know, as it turned out, was that Williams was privately suffering most of what he sang about so convincingly.
He was raised in the most abject poverty in Alabama; he had an absentee father and a domineering mother and an equally domineering first wife. He was the first Cadillac cowboy. Yet he never believed he had earned the astonishing success that was his; he felt success had been forced upon him, a bitter pill to be choked down daily. The pull Hank felt between God and Satan showed in his recordings: he recorded Saturday night "sin" songs; his alter ego, "Luke the Drifter," recorded Sunday morning messages of hope. In the end, Saturday night won the battle, and Hank lost it on a combination of drugs and alcohol." -Online tribute
My second offering in the series of ten is Hank's famous tune,
"I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry":
Hear the lonesome whipperwill
He sounds too blue to fly
The midnight train is whining low
I’m so lonesome I could cry
I’ve never seen a night so long
When time goes crawling by
The moon just went behind a cloud
To hide it’s face and cry
Did you ever see a robin weep
When leaves begin to die
That means he’s lost the will to live
I’m so lonesome I could cry
The silence of a falling star
Lights up a purple sky
And as I wonder where you are
I’m so lonesome I could cry
Did you expect anything less?
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