Colin Escott > Quotes

“Hank’s music was called “hillbilly music,” and the little respect it had could be attributed almost entirely to Roy Acuff”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“His songs now accompany television commercials and have been reinterpreted across the musical spectrum, from the British punk acts to jazz divas like Cassandra Wilson and Norah Jones. Hank’s songs, in fact, are almost everywhere. As the records grow smaller, Hank Williams grows bigger.”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“The paradox of Hank Williams was that he was easygoing on the outside, yet tense and querulous inside. He pretended that he’d just ridden into town on a mule, yet had a lively intelligence combined with what Minnie Pearl described as a “woods-animal distrust” of anyone who appeared to have any more learning than he did.”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“Hank was happy to cash the checks as the palm court orchestras played his songs, but on a far deeper level he was suspicious of the trend, seeing it as a dilution of his music. “These pop bands,” he told an interviewer in Charleston, South Carolina, “will play our hillbilly songs when they cain’t eat any other way.”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“Like many entertainers, Hank always needed an audience. Nothing unsettled him more than his own company.”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“Jumbalaya,’ [sic] ‘Cold, Cold Heart,’ ‘You Win Again,’ and ‘Lovesick Blues”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“The year with the McNeils also marked the beginning of Hank’s drinking. He was eleven at the time.”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“In 1950, there were four hundred thousand jukeboxes on location serviced by fifty-five hundred jukebox operators.”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“If Hank had started his career a few years earlier, he would have lived and died in almost total obscurity because the social and market conditions that brought about the wider acceptance of hillbilly music weren’t in place, and the country was mired deep in the Depression. If he had lived a few years longer, he would have become an embarassment to the changing face of country music—too hillbilly by half. But, in arriving when he did and dying when and how he did, he became a prophet with honor.”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“Hank, like most other songwriters, kept his song titles to fewer than five words so that they would fit onto the jukebox cards, and made sure his records timed out at under three minutes and twelve seconds, the time at which a record would automatically eject from a jukebox turntable.”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“The Grand Ole Opry formally hired Hank on Monday, July 11, 1949,”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“It was probably in Georgiana that Hank met his first acknowledged musical influence, a black street musician, Rufus Payne. Because Payne was rarely found without a home-brewed mix of alcohol and tea, Payne’s nickname was “Tee-Tot,” a pun on teetotaler”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“The combination of his traveling position, his drug intake, and his already weakened heart probably killed him.”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“The official cause of death was listed as heart failure, aggravated by acute alcoholism.”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“Remember that women are revengeful and do all in their power to wreck a man when they separate from him and the only way to win is for the man to become successful.”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“In Acuff’s hands, country music was just that: music for the country people of the South and Southeast. He bridged the gulf between ancient string band music and the modern era, and came to epitomize country music’s innate conservatism.”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“The hokiness, in which the Opry took a great deal of inverted pride, disguised ruthlessly aggressive management and shrewd organization.”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“Audrey was the first of many who found Hank more lovable dead.”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“In general, those from outside the southern culture built a style around exaggerations of southern music, and missed the lonesome hillbilly and blues feel that was its core. In the quest for abandon, they also failed to understand that southern music is lazy music—at any tempo.”
― Colin Escott, Good Rockin' Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock 'N' Roll

“Move It on Over” was released on June 6, 1947, and, two months later, it became Hank’s first Billboard hit.”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“Helms had probably figured out that the steel guitar was the crucial instrument for Hank; its notes were the wordless cry that completed his vocal lines. The steel guitar sustained the mood and took most of the solos”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“Grand Ole Opry appearances were a loss leader. Like”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“Lonesome Whistle.” Credited to Hank and Jimmie Davis, it was one of a long line of prison songs.”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“every night as he performed. The reception even surprised Hank. He knew he was the king of the honky-tonks, but now he had stadium crowds eating out of his hand, and legit entertainers working as his supporting acts”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“Hank was barely influenced by country music’s first superstar, Jimmie Rodgers, who succumbed to tuberculosis in 1933”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“Like Lilly, she saw the alcoholism in terms of self-control, a view that was reinforced by the fact that there were times when Hank could control it”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“Knowing himself to be a backslider, and knowing that he had been weighed in the balance and found wanting in so many ways, he seemed to find rare peace in the hymns of his childhood.”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“Hank was half tanked, and Acuff admonished him: “You got a million-dollar voice,” he told him, “and a ten-cent brain.”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“The second Sterling session saw the birth of one of Hank’s trademarks, the “crack” rhythm: an electric guitar keeping time on the deadened bass strings. Without drums in his lineup, Hank used the electric guitar to emphasize the pulse. It was the sound that Johnny Cash later made into a trademark, adding a little rhythmic flourish to make “boom-chicka-boom.”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams

“Hank drank. It was a behavior he had acquired in his youth—before Audrey, before his back gave him much trouble, before his career took him over. It was a behavior to which he turned at moments both predictable and unpredictable. It was a behavior that took him over and acquired its own momentum as his personal and professional problems mounted.”
― Colin Escott, I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams