Lost On The Highway

I was introduced to Hank Williams [Snr.] in the eighties by my late mate Alan. I'd hitherto resisted the lure of country music as somehow alien to me, and a bit naff to be frank, although I was already a fan of Willie Nelson by that time [still very much am]. Around the mid-eighties, I'd started to become aware of the New Country movement, which seemed to hark back to genres from the sixties/seventies with which I was already familiar and very fond of: country rock and folk country; so I guess I'd actually liked country music from the outset and was really only prejudiced against the hard core country that dominated certain airwaves in my youth.

Alan turned me on to the modern rootstock of American Country Music: Merle Haggard, Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, et al., and many of the much earlier influences from Appalacia and early white man's blues. But the one artist that stood out for me was Hank Williams [Snr.]: an old school bad boy and rebel who lived fast and died young, at the age of twenty-nine. Pictured, his arrest photograph, in a rather wasted state not that long before he died: I used this image for a number of artworks in the late eighties, a few of which still exist. Williams was born just four years before my mother-in-law, who is still with us as I write; and died a full eighteen months before I was born. Sobering on so many levels, methinks...