** Hank Williams Jr., “Your Cheatin’ Heart”...

** Hank Williams Jr., “Your Cheatin’ Heart” soundtrack, Rhino Movie Music. Though there’s nothing essential about these versions of such Hank Williams classics as “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and the title tune, it’s interesting to see how close Hank Jr. came to matching his father’s style on the album. The vocals were recorded for a 1964 film biography about Hank Sr., the legendary country songwriter who died of a heart attack in 1953 at age 29.

Hank Jr., was just 15 at the time the movie was filmed and MGM executives thought he was too young to handle the vocals. So the plan was to have actor George Hamilton, who was playing Hank, do his own singing.

As outlined by Mark Humphrey in the liner notes, however, Hank Jr.’s mother, Audrey Williams, took her son into a Nashville studio and recorded a few songs. She then played them for an MGM executive without revealing whose voice it was. The executive loved the tape and the teenager got the job. Besides the songs from the film, this reissue contains acoustic versions of the film’s songs.

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