Heavy Hank: Songs of Hank Williams (2006)

The picture of Willie and Larry Butler from 1958 next to the one from 2006 is worth the price of this album. As with the last album I reviewed, Willie is clearly paying back an old friend. This album is very similar in all aspects to Memories of Hank Williams Sr. (2000). The band and Willie’s vocals are great, but I could do without Larry Butler. The opening song is a perfect choice for an album like this. “Since she left I’ve been half crazy. I feel some heavy Hank coming on.” Again, love makes you crazy, and it makes you need honky tonk and the blues. “Take these tears from my eyes and let me see just a spark of the love that used to be…take these chains from my heart and set me free.” These are chains of memories. And yet how can we ever be set free from memories? The steel guitar tears your tears right out of your eyes. The fiddle does the same. “All my faith in you is gone, but the heartache lingers on.” It appears that “May You Never Be Alone Like Me” is identical to the version on Memories of Hank Williams Sr. Hmmm. So what is this album? A re-hashing of the other album with a few new tunes? Identical versions of “Wedding Bells” and “Hey, Good Looking” also appear on both albums. “Jambalaya” is unique to this album, though, and the fiddle shines. Again, what I wouldn’t do to have an album of all these classic Hank tunes with just Willie and this band. Willie, steel, fiddle, Hank. Now that’s a recipe for Jambalaya or gumbo if I ever tasted one. Willie “can’t keep the tears from [his] eyes” in “My Son Calls Another Man Daddy.” Tears, tears, tears. No one cries like Hank and Willie and that weepy steel guitar. “Why Should We Try” is a great question that Willie seems to be asking in many of his songs. “We’ve been livin’ a lie…we were just victims of a half-hearted love.” “The vows we made are only to break.” Here we have the themes of lies, halves, and promises. “The dreams that we knew can never come true.” “False love like ours soon fades like the flowers.” Is he saying nature itself is a lie, a seductress, a fleeting, evanescent flirt? Is life itself a cheat? It makes us feel like we will live forever and then we get old. Sounds like Hamlet. To be or not to be? Why bother? Why try? Why live? This strikes at the existential core of Willie’s and Hank’s music. “My heart fell at your feet. I can’t help it if I’m still in love with you.” “A picture from the past came slowly stealing, as I brushed your arm and walked so close to you, and suddenly I got that old time feeling.” Funny how time slips away, but funny also how it sneaks up behind you and shouts “Boo!” When you want it to stay, it slips away, but when you want it to stay away, it shows up like an unwanted guest. Willie sounds great on “Mind Your Own Business.” The tune and the lyric fit his voice and his sensibility like a glove. Hank and Willie are clearly musical soul mates. I could do without the back-up singers. This collection ends with Hank’s “I Told a Lie to My Heart.” Which raises the question, why do we lie to ourselves about love? Lies, lies, and damned lies. How many of Willie’s songs (and those he covers) are about the lies we tell each other and ourselves? How much of art itself is devoted to this? Fiction?