At his centenary, Hank Williams still helps us see God coming down the road.
Credit: JNix
Grandpa stopped listening to country music when he returned home to Acadiana from Vietnam. But he never stopped singing. Subsequently, I was eighteen years old the first time I ever associated the lyrics of “Hey Good Lookin” with Hank Williams’ name. After all, they’d only ever reached my ears through Grandpa’s voice.
As part of a generation disenchanted with their ancestors’ faith in the post–Vatican II world, he left for something that seemed anything but exhausted and empty: the Pentecostal Church. It wasn’t hard, after all, for a Cajun to immerse himself in a faith built on one’s mystical encounter with the Holy Spirit. If you’ve trawled through the fogs of the bayou on a jon boat at dusk, you’ll know precisely why: Mystery becomes your bedfellow, it dances on your skin.
In any event, the Pentecostal Church has quite the Puritan streak. So, Grandpa eventually came around to giving up all worldly music. He never escaped the world, though, and I reckon that’s why he kept singing. Not at local taverns or honky-tonks, mind you. He was far too proud for those sorts of things—his brother had also drowned himself in liquor. So, none of that. I don’t think he could even play the guitar. He just played the harmonica, yodeled (quite badly, but with good humor), and sang while cooking, fishing, or working.
He then raised my father in the Pentecostal faith, who, in turn, raised my three brothers and me in it as well. So I never listened to Hank while growing up. Well, to Hank directly, that is. But lyrics to “Jambalaya,” “Cool Water,” and “Lovesick Blues” serenaded my Grandpa’s modest, Mamou outdoor kitchen like the Gumbo he was cooking saturated the air, or permeated the thin forest of the bayou where we were fishing like the Kingfisher’s song rattled off the cypress trees in winter.
Not once did I ever think to ask Grandpa what he was singing, either. I suppose that was because the lyrics were always so silly, so foolish, and Grandpa acted like a silly fool himself. I suppose I sincerely believed he made them all up. I sincerely believed everything else he told me when I was six years old, anyway. Why not believe that? Why not believe that the man who told me the reason his stomach was so hard when I punched his gut was because he, a brick mason, ate a brick at work, would also make up lyrics like “Today I tried to eat a steak with a big old tablespoon/You got me chasing rabbits, walkin’ on my hands, and howlin’ at the Moon?”
I believed everything that came from him. He was the first person I consciously loved.
Nothing gold can stay, however. I would soon find myself acquainted with another part of Hank Williams. The part of him that wrote lyrics like:
I’ve never seen a night so long
And time goes crawling by,
The moon just went behind the clouds
To hide its face and cry.
Fast forward seven more years of me growing up and him singing, and I’m watching him have a stroke in the basement that he was turning into a mancave for us; then a few more days and I’m staring at his casket. I think that’s when my mind started running, pursuing something my heart began to beg for. Perhaps it was Pascal’s God-shaped hole. But the hole looked an awful lot like my Grandpa.
Moving into high school, I started to listen to worldly music of my own: classical music with hints of Nat King Cole and Dean Martin sprinkled in. I started to believe my heart was begging for sophistication, wealth, and prestige. I kind of enjoyed the music, but more: I wanted people to think I enjoyed it. I disdained country music. It lacked everything I wanted at the time. Indeed, the tradition of country music condemned them—mocked them, even.
But, by the grace of God, my heart did not stop begging.
Transitioning into college, through lessons learned in determining experiences, my heart turned to petition life for more: home, family, beauty, tranquility, simplicity.
My self also happened to emerge. I began to comprehend who I was, and I wanted to be that. I wanted to become who I was. It lands strangely on the ear, but it’s true.
I also looked to country music, starting with a playlist from the ’40s and ’50s. That’s when I heard Hank for the first time. His doleful twang met my mind like a desert wind. His voice was challengingly comforting. I could not stop listening. Then I heard it: “Hey Good Lookin’.” I didn’t notice at first that this was the song my Grandpa sang the most, which is strange. It was one of his most famous, and I often hear my Grandpa sing “Hey good lookin’—whatcha got cookin’?” But my moment of realization was when he sang “I got a hot rod Ford, and a two dollar bill / And I know a spot right over the hill.”
I cried when I heard it. It isn’t a traditional tear-jerker, but it was as if I was embracing myself with every word. Memories washed over me in waves. They still do.
I haven’t stopped listening. Hank was, in so many pivotal ways, my point of return. My return to my Grandpa, to the Southern way of being, and to my childhood. To foolishness, in a way.
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I also don’t find it coincidental that not long after discovering Hank that face returning my gaze in the God-shaped hole started to look a lot more like God. I wouldn’t say it’s because of Hank. But he was there, tacitly singing in the background while it happened; while I took up wrestling with God.
In several respects, this was the story of his own, troubled life. In the midst of the turmoil of his final days at 29 years old, he told his wife, restlessly tossing and turning in bed, hours before his death, “I think I see God coming down the road.”
He’s helped me see the same.
Sourse: theamericanconservative.com
