Stars Add New Tunes to Country King’s Lyrics
Hank Williams
By ALAN LIGHT
Published: September 23, 2011
BOB DYLAN has long claimed Hank Williams as an influence and an inspiration. In his 2004 memoir, “Chronicles Volume One,” Mr. Dylan recounted his discovery of that country giant’s music in the 1950s. “I became aware that in Hank’s recorded songs were the archetype rules of poetic songwriting,” he wrote. “The architectural forms are like marble pillars.”
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ArtsBeat Blog: Popcast: Opening the 'Lost Notebooks' of Hank Williams (September 23, 2011)
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Bob Dylan, assembled various singers to put unrecorded lyrics by Hank Williams, to music.
Mr. Dylan added that when he got word of Williams’s death at the age of 29 on New Year’s Day, 1953, the news “hit me squarely on the shoulder.”
“Intuitively I knew, though, that his voice would never drop out of sight or fade away,” he continued.
With a new project titled “The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams,” Mr. Dylan is doing his part to keep the work of one of America’s greatest songwriters — the author of