Hank Shines Through : Songs to Remember : Music: During his short and troubled life, Hank Williams wrote songs that continue to live on.

The late Hank Williams (1923-53) generally is regarded as the most influential, most beloved country-and-Western artist of all time. An immensely gifted and prolific songwriter and musical visionary, Williams did for country what Elvis did for rock and roll, Louis Armstrong did for jazz and Muddy Waters did for modern blues.

But Williams was neither a prisoner of genre nor a slave to temporal convention. Like all great songwriters, he was able to deal with the most private feelings and make them seem personalized for any listener. Williams’ body of work is so strong that his most popular songs--”Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “Jambalaya (On the Bayou),” “Cold, Cold Heart,” and “Hey, Good Lookin”--remain staples of the country repertoire more than half a century later.

The proof of his talent, however, lies as much in Williams’ lesser-known songs, which, collectively, represent a comprehensive blueprint for the spectrum of country music song styles, subject matter, and musicianship that followed.

Ironically, a number of today’s fans might never have heard of Williams if it weren’t for Mark Charron, a little-known, non-country musician who began performing in Houston in 1963, 10 years after Williams’ death. Charron had nothing to do with Williams’ career, and, in fact, he was barely aware of the man until he saw “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” the 1964 movie about Williams’ life, starring George Hamilton.

Charron was impressed with the film’s soundtrack, which featured Williams’s songs, as re-recorded by his son, Hank Jr. But one particular ballad, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” so haunted Charron that he insisted it be added to the repertoire of his rock-soul band, the Triumphs. Most of the players resisted on the grounds that the song was “too country,” but the Triumphs’ lead singer, B.J. Thomas, whose father was a big Williams fan, overrode their objections.

The Triumphs’ recording of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” became a regional hit, and when New York-based Scepter Records signed Thomas to a solo contract in 1966, they released the same recording as his first single. The tune made it to No. 8 on the national charts and launched the singer’s career, but it also drew the pop audience’s attention--again, as it turned out--to Williams’ songwriting.

In many ways, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” is the perfect introduction to Williams, especially for those who are not predisposed to country music. The song’s plaintive melody, melancholic imagery, and easy waltz meter effect an immediate tug on the heart and evoke a universal loneliness.

While Thomas’ lilting interpretation emphasized the song’s pathos, Williams’ simpler, more formally countrified 1949 version is even more potent for its acknowledgment of an emotional vulnerability not commonly associated with white, southern males of the day. For Williams, such intimate disclosure was no contrivance, but the natural product of an artistic honesty.

Unadulterated in his approach, artless in his adherence to the simple, down-home principles that were his muse, Williams wrote about booze, women and dissipation, but what came across was an odd, affecting composite of pain, playfulness, bitter remorse, love, hate, loneliness and joy.

The amateur psychologist would be well occupied drawing a bead on the roots of Williams’ art. He was born Hiram Williams in 1923, in a two-room share-cropper’s shack near Mount Olive, Ala. When he was seven, Williams’ father--a shell-shocked veteran of World War I--drifted away and eventually committed himself to the mental ward of a veterans’ hospital. Young Hank and his sister were raised during the Great Depression by their mother, an organist at the local Baptist church.

Williams’ early life surrenders all the signposts of a troubled, difficult future. Abandonment by his father, harsh religious fundamentalism, abject poverty, loneliness. His great escapes became music and alcohol, each of which took their turns consuming him.

Like Jimmie (The Father of Country Music) Rodgers before him, and Elvis after him, Williams integrated the music of poor Southern blacks with that of their white counterparts. He especially was drawn to the blues, and learned guitar from a black street singer in Greenville, Ala., who called himself Tee-Tot. But Williams’ also was influenced by the country music born of the Anglo-Celtic ballad tradition. The Carter Family, the Monroe Brothers, and the Blue Sky Boys were some of the proto- country acts he constantly heard on the radio.

In 1937, Williams won a talent contest with a self-penned song, “WPA Blues,” and thereafter proceeded headlong toward his destiny. Dubbed the “Singing Kid,” Williams landed a twice- weekly radio show in Montgomery, Ala. Later, he formed his first band, the Drifting Cowboys, and played the Alabama roadhouse circuit, with his mother acting as his agent and driver.

In a radio shop in 1942, Williams made what some believe was his first record--a poorly recorded acetate of the Drifting Cowboys playing his “I’m Not Coming Home Anymore.” The nasal, lachrymose vocal style that would become part of Williams’ trademark sound are clearly heard through a haze of hiss, crackle, and other noise.

A year later, Williams met Audrey Mae Shappard at a medicine show, and the two were married at a filling station in 1944. Marriage ignited Williams’ ambitions even as a worsening problem with alcohol threatened to short-circuit them. He wrote songs nonstop and within two years had become a big name in Montgomery. He signed a music-publishing deal with the now-legendary Acuff-Rose house in Nashville, and began recording, first for the Sterling label, and then for MGM. His records sold reasonably well.

In 1948, a radio station in Shreveport, La., began broadcasting a show called “The Louisiana Hayride.” Williams joined the program, and soon his songs were being heard by hundreds of thousands every Saturday night. His yodeling performances of “Lovesick Blues,” a song to which Williams had bought the rights from another songwriter, became a Hayride favorite. He released a recording of the tune in February, 1949, and it stayed at number one on the charts for 16 weeks.

Things were happening fast. In May, a year after delivering the couple’s daughter, Lycrecia, Audrey gave birth to Randall Hank Jr. With “Lovesick Blues” still peaking, Williams flew to Nashville to do more recording. In June, he was asked to become a regular member of the Grand Ole Opry, which traditionally had been cool to “outsiders” from places like Alabama. Williams had arrived.

Blinded by sudden acclaim as “the brightest new star of country music,” Williams couldn’t see his demons gaining ground on him. A binge drinker with no physical tolerance for the stuff, Williams would imbibe until he was unconscious. While he governed his habit somewhat during these halcyon days, a chronic back problem prompted Williams to begin mixing barbiturates with the booze.

Williams enjoyed unprecedented success for the next couple of years. His up-tempo tunes, especially, sold well (oddly, his great ballads, including “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” were sales duds). In December, 1950, Williams and his band recorded the best-selling “Cold, Cold Heart,” which became one of the first country songs to cross over into the pop field. Even Tony Bennett--against his wishes--recorded the tune.

The hits kept coming--”Hey, Good Lookin’,” “Honky Tonk Blues,” “Jambalaya (On the Bayou),” “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” But while Williams’ career momentum seemed unstoppable--every record he released between 1950 and 1952 hit the Top Five, and many were covered by pop artists--his personal life was a shambles.

Marital strife--exacerbated by the drinking--took its toll. Williams and Audrey divorced in May, 1952. In August, the Grand Ole Opry fired him. Williams returned to Louisiana, where he took another bride.

Around Christmas of 1952, Williams performed his last public concert for the Montgomery chapter of the American Federation of Musicians. He closed the performance with “The Log Train,” a ballad about his father. It was the last song anyone would hear him sing.

On New Year’s Eve, Williams headed for a gig in Canton, Ohio. While waylaid in Knoxville, Tenn. by bad weather, Williams received a pain-killing injection. Some say he went to sleep, never regained consciousness, and was dragged--already dead--into the back seat of the chauffeured car. Officially, Williams suffered cardiac arrest from years of abuse and was found dead when the car arrived in Oak Hill, W.Va., on New Year’s Day, 1953. He was 29.

Williams’ difficult, tragically brief life has contributed to his legend, but the music world always will remember him as a great songwriter, a unique vocalist, and the first real popularizer of country-Western. He possessed the rare ability to frame his music with unmistakable cultural sensibilities and flavor it with regional accents, while creating a body of work that transcends time, style, and dialect.

While his music and legend are rightfully enshrined in the country-Western field, the restless, sensitive soul, psychological scope, and visionary quality of Williams’ music makes him a compatriot of legends in other genres, other arts, and other times who stuck around only long enough to leave a gift.