Send "Hank Williams " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Tasteofcountry |
 Hank Williams Sr.’s catalog just keeps expanding, even 58 years after his tragic death in West Virginia. On September 13, Time Life will release a three-CD box set called ‘Hank Williams: The Legend Begins.’The first disc includes rare and unreleased recordings from a 15-year-old Williams, and four others (including ‘Freight Train Blues’) recorded in 1940. All songs on the project were re-mastered using the process that gained recognition and a Grammy nomination for ‘The Complete Mother’s Best Recordings … Plus!’ earlier this year. “Talk about a discovery!,” Williams’ daughter Jett Williams said in a statement. “The first recording of my dad when he was fifteen was given to me decades ago, and then the 1940 home recordings followed a few years later. My husband Keith and I finally got up the nerve to get with the best sound people in Nashville to see if we could salvage these extraordinary recordings. It worked!” The second and third discs contain recordings from Williams’ 1949 syndicated radio show called ‘Health and Happiness,’ and a performance from a March of Dimes program that includes a heartfelt Williams monologue. “What a special treat for music lovers around the world to listen to the talent of an evolving genius,” Jett Williams added. “These recordings are a God send and very special to me and Hank’s fans.”...full text |
| Antimusic |
| The 3-CD box set offers Williams' first recordings at fifteen and seventeen years old, which have never been heard before, along with his first radio series, Health & Happiness. The recordings have been restored with the highly acclaimed technology that was used for the Grammy nominated project last year, The Complete Mother's Best Recordings….Plus!. Hank Williams: The Legend Begins will be available online at Amazon.com, along with other digital and retail outlets. "I am very proud that these recordings have been made available to everyone," says Hank Williams, Jr. "It was great to hear of their discovery, and then to share the treasure of daddy's music is wonderful! It really takes you back to a time when family meant something, where we would all circle around that radio and listen to those legendary shows. It is a rare find indeed and I'm so glad people will now have the chance to hear that part of history." "This might be the most rewarding component of this entire multi-year project," adds Jett Williams." I am just so pleased that I was able to obtain and preserve these early recordings of my dad. To think of him at 14 or 15 sitting at a kitchen table, in a garage or wherever, singing songs that would end up being a part of his legacy is truly remarkable." The music will take you back to 1938 when Williams was a 15-year-old teenager performing his first recordings of Fan It and Alexander's Ragtime Band. Then fast forward to 1940, and the rare home recordings show how much Williams' voice had matured in two years when he rocks out to four classics of American music; Freight Train Blues, New San Antonio Rose, St. Louis Blues, and Greenback Dollar. In 1949, Williams recorded his first syndicated radio series, The Health And Happiness Show. Forty-nine songs from the show have been restored on Hank Williams: The Legend Begins which gives superior quality to these historic CDs....full text |
| Popmatters |
| It’s hard to overstate the influence of Hank Williams on popular music. As Bob Dylan said on his show Theme Time Radio Hour, “One of the greatest songwriters who ever lived was Hank Williams, of course. Hank could be headstrong and willful, a backslider and a reprobate, no stranger to bad deeds. However, underneath all of that, he was compassionate and moralistic.” He was also one helluva singer: “The sound of his voice went through me like an electric rod,” is how Dylan put it in his memoir, Chronicles, Volume One. Like Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and Woody Guthrie, Williams’ impact transcends musical genres and defies easy description: His records are straightforward and colloquial, as far from Dylan’s frenzied, explosive lyricism and thin wild mercury sound as an Ansel Adams photograph is from a painting from Picasso’s cubist period. But what all those artists share is a raw honesty: Their work favors emotion over polish and sees beauty in imperfection rather than perfection. I consider myself a Hank Williams fan, but not a fanatic, which is to say that way back when, I bought a copy of the three disc Singles Collection but not the ten-disc set The Complete Hank Williams. I love Hank’s emotionally direct songs and his high lonesome singing, but I don’t need to hear multiple versions of the same song, and I’m not afraid of missing something essential if I don’t hear every note he ever sang. So keep that in mind—while I find the new three-disc set The Legend Begins an engaging and generally enjoyable collection, I don’t expect to listen to it again any time soon. The songs are great as ever, and Hank is in fine voice throughout, but what makes the set special — the fact that it consists mostly of old radio shows where Hank played his songs live — is also what makes it less than ideal: The between-song chatter and intros and outros are interesting as nostalgia, but they also interrupt the flow of the music. The first two discs of the set come from the 1949 radio program The Health and Happiness Show, sponsored by Hadacol, an alcohol-based cure-all that was used as both a laxative and a substitute for whiskey in dry counties in the deep South. The shows sound good, but they’re arranged more in the form of a historical record than a musical one, favoring completeness over judicious editing. Since there are eight episodes here, for example, we get eight different versions of the show’s theme song, “Happy Rovin’ Cowboy”, which is about seven too many for this catchy but insignificant track. Ditto fiddler Jerry Rivers’ signature tune, “Sally Goodin”, and the between-song patter, which sounds like outtakes from Hee-Haw without the attempts at off-color humor....full text |
Hank Williams lyrics
