All the Honky-Tonk Babies Have Broken Hearts

Drew Bratcher considers the career of Hank Williams Jr. and the anxiety of his father’s influence.

By Drew BratcherNovember 11, 2024

• Music

OF ALL THE country songs lodged in my brain (the blessing and curse of growing up 10 miles north of Nashville), the one snatch of lyrics I find myself rehearsing the most is the final chorus of Hank Williams Jr.’s 1979 single “Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound.” In the song, a bluesy roadhouse bull session that’s equal parts indulgent and appalling, the singer traces his rabid impulse toward drunken barbarity to a number of sources. Life on the road, he says, leaves him vulnerable. He’s a grown man but lacks self-control. Anonymous sex doesn’t deliver. In the light of dawn, his delusions are laid bare. The last thing he mentions, the trigger he flags with the greatest insistence, is honky-tonk music. “But don’t play ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart,’” he sings as the number comes to a close, “’Cause that’ll tear me all apart […] Yeah, Ol’ Hank’s songs always make me feel low-down.”

In a head full of country lyrics, those are the lines I can’t seem to get past. The reasons, I suppose, are various. First, there’s Hank Jr.’s decision to call the singer of “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” (mentioned earlier in the song) by the moniker “Ol’ Hank.” He’s talking, of course, about Hank Williams Sr., the patron saint of country music, Alabama’s finest, Tee Tot’s sidekick, Jimmie Rodgers’s heir, the Hillbilly Shakespeare, poet laureate of jilted love and bad pain, the world’s most incessant walker of floors, Mr. “Lovesick Blues” himself, Hiram King Williams, good ol’ Hank!

To Hank Jr., though, Ol’ Hank was Daddy, his father and namesake, and “Daddy” is what he’d called him more often than not in the many, many songs he’d written about him up to this point in his career. Just four years earlier, in “Living Proof,” a hit single off his 1975 record Hank Williams, Jr. & Friends, Hank Jr. had referred to the same music he was singing about in “Whiskey Bent” as “them old songs of Daddy’s.” His father’s sound, to hear him tell it, was already bothering him back then—“I’m gonna quit singin’ all these sad songs,” the song begins, “’Cause I can’t stand the pain”—but he saluted Daddy’s music nonetheless, and, in so doing, linked himself to his father’s songbook, an inheritance that “Living Proof,” as careful a study in steel guitar, swing fiddling, and delirious crooning as you’re liable to find in the canon of 1970s country, shows and proves.

But in the four years between “Living Proof” and “Whiskey Bent,” Hank Jr. had put mileage between his father’s music and his own. Out of compulsion or obligation, sometimes against his better judgment, he had been, to hear him tell it, still covering his father’s songs in concert and cueing them up in crowded bars. At the honky-tonk where “Stoned at the Jukebox,” another single from Friends, takes place, he finds recourse for his broken heart in another of his father’s standards, “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love with You).” “Lord, I love that hurtin’ music,” he pronounces in the chorus, “’cause I am hurtin’ too.”

In “Whiskey Bent,” however, Hank Jr. doesn’t want to hear, let alone perform, hurtin’ music at all. It’s as if the sound of the pedal steel and his father’s heartsick yowl has become intolerable to him, both emotionally overpowering and spiritually precarious, a booby trap sure to fry his nerves and leave him feeling like one of those pitiful characters from his father’s cast.

In addition to that business with his father’s name, the song Hank Jr. singles out at the end of “Whiskey Bent” as being particularly painful is also beguiling. “Your Cheatin’ Heart” was one of the last songs Hank Sr. recorded before he died. Released posthumously, it spent six weeks at the top of the Country & Western charts. The seven-inch single (side B to another hit, “Kaw-Liga”) sold a million copies. An eon of letdown and resentment distilled to two and a half unforgettable minutes, the song is a morose and anguished notice about the consequences of fooling around. Hank Sr. wrote it about Audrey Sheppard Williams—Hank Jr.’s mother—while on a drive with his new fiancée. Indeed, it has the feel of a comeuppance. “You’ll walk the floor the way I do,” he sings in the closing lines of the chorus. “Your cheatin’ heart will tell on you.” But Hank Sr. was writing from experience. He had been unfaithful too. In the duet “The Conversation,” Waylon Jennings speaks for us all when he asks Hank Jr., “Do you think he wrote ’em about your mama / Or about the man who done her wrong?”

No doubt the circumstances surrounding “Your Cheatin’ Heart” must have made it a tough listen for Hank Jr. His parents divorced when he was three. His father died a year later, at 29 years old. And yet, of all Hank Sr.’s songs, “Your Cheatin’ Heart” was the one that figured most prominently in his own launch. He first performed the number at the Grand Ole Opry in 1963, when he was 14 years old. He recorded the song for his 1964 debut album, Hank Williams Jr. Sings the Songs of Hank Williams, and that same year it was the title track for the Hank Williams biopic starring George Hamilton, for whose performances Hank Jr. supplied the dubs.

Those early recordings, however historically meaningful, are hardly convincing. Despite his obvious talent, Hank Jr. had not yet lived the song’s experiences, and it shows in his labored yet dispassionate vocals, which take more inspiration from his father’s original than from the bitter sentiment that powers the song. Even so, as he sings about his parents’ infidelity, he makes his own loyalties clear. When he was a toddler, his father had nicknamed him “Bocephus” after a lap doll that was a fixture of Opry shows. Like a puppet come to life in the hands of a nimble ventriloquist, Hank Jr., early on, was happy to be his father’s medium, the channel through which the family music stayed in circulation. Given what “Your Cheatin’ Heart” had once meant to him, to hear him at the end of “Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound” refuse to listen to the song really does come as a shock, as if Prince Hamlet had avenged the king’s death and survived the sword fight only to abdicate the throne.

“Whiskey Bent” was released in the fall of 1979. By that point, Hank Jr. had already begun to turn the page on his father’s kind of music. With the exception of “Living Proof,” Friends is more influenced by the Allman Brothers than by the Drifting Cowboys. Hank Jr. had just turned 30. He had thus outlived his father, but not by much and almost not at all. He had survived a suicide attempt in 1974. The next year, he nearly died while on a hike in Montana, when the snow collapsed beneath him and he fell more than 500 feet. Rather than chastening him or calling him back to his roots, the accident only intensified his rebellion.

To cover the scars left from dozens of reparative surgeries, he grew a beard, put on aviator sunglasses, and donned a black cowboy hat. He looked standoffish, slightly menacing, like someone you wouldn’t approach unless summoned. The shift in style, indicative of larger transformations, was every bit as individuating as Willie’s bandana, Waylon’s goatee, or Johnny’s funereal black.

The albums that followed the accident, 1979’s Family Tradition and Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound chief among them, embrace Southern rock, the blues, and a certain shamelessness. Hank’s singing, lost and then found again in his post-fall recovery, is looser, wilder, self-ridiculing at times, involving his belly as much as his vocal chords. He’s a born country singer flouting the form but letting fly maybe 10 years past due. Freighted at 30 with considerable baggage, he has none of the insouciance of a rebel, having missed out on that teenage tradition while playing Ol’ Hank’s dutiful son. The result is a run of songs that are ribald and defensive, rowdy and simmering, music that projects less fun than it swears it’s having even as it exults in a newfound devil-may-care.

The dynamic is on display in exaggerated style in the horn-heavy “Women I’ve Never Had,” another track from Whiskey Bent, in which Hank spells out, with greater precision than in the title track, why he can no longer stomach his father’s music. “I am into happy,” he sings, “and I don’t like sad,” before pledging his allegiance to cheap sex, weed, wine, and guns.

Due to their vocal dexterity, trenchant lyrics, and wildcat edge, Hank Sr.’s songs were genuine events in popular music. He was a harbinger of Elvis, James Brown, and the Beatles. When he debuted at the Opry, it was like a revival. Amid waves of wild hollering, he played six encores of “Lovesick Blues.” Still, his songs, however thrilling, also tended to be tragic. He could be a ham (see “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive”), but even at his cleverest, you could still glimpse the skull behind the crooked smile. Heartache was the heartbeat of his music, mortality its animating force. “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” made grown men and women cry. It preached and scolded, lamented and decried. It had the Book of Job in it but also Romeo and Juliet. Beckett and Sartre could have taken it for an anthem, and yet you didn’t have to know how to spell philosophy for it to register—all you needed was a pulse.

At the start of Hank Jr.’s career, his father’s lonely catalog had filled him with purpose. It got him out on stages, gave him a set list before he had one of his own. Later, it supplied succor and direction. But after a while, all that hurtin’ music just killed the buzz. Despite the saunter of the fiddle between verses, despite the smooth pour of Hank Jr.’s singing, “Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound” marks a big shift in country music. It’s the moment when the son, figurehead of a new generation of Nashville country boys, begins to regard his father as a peer more than a forerunner, and pivots hard.

It was a productive move to which fans rallied. From 1979 to 1989, Hank Jr. released 13 top-10 albums, five of which went to number one. At the peak of his popularity, at a concert in 1986 that was recorded and released as Hank Live the following year, he walked onstage to a jingle by Merle Kilgore, his manager and an old friend of his father’s. “I ain’t gonna call Hank Williams Jr. ‘Junior’ anymore,” Kilgore sings. “Even though I know what all his daddy done before.”

Hank’s music going forward will take as its subject many of the same vices his father explored, all the cheating and rambling and drinking, but will reframe them as virtues, not as problems to bemoan but as the desideratum of an outlaw condition. Having shoved off his father’s singing style, he’ll shed his father’s sense of contrition too. He’ll whoop it up with whiskey instead of drenching his regrets. Call it Persona Country. More than heartache and letdown and other universal human experiences, his songs will increasingly be about the experience of being Hank. He might be hell-bound but he won’t let himself be heaven-haunted. He’ll find enough release valves in the here and now to keep the doom at bay.

And if “Whiskey Bent” suggests that he already knows it’s a bust, that a man can no more get above his upbringing than fall out from under it altogether, and if he suspects that, sooner or later, his wayward heart is liable to tell on him too—well, at least he’ll be casting his own shadow instead of taking cover in Ol’ Hank’s. You can keep your pity, wring the neck of your nostalgia. Beneath all the bluster, beneath the blame, what a son really wants is his father’s respect.