Tag: outlaw country

Album Of The Week – May 23, 2022

On By bigbadburchIn Album of the Week8 Comments

With this week’s album pick it’s time to go country. It’s the second album from a third-generation star who would begin sowing the seeds of rebellion against the Nashville establishment (especially his own record label) and those taken aback at someone going his own way as opposed to living in the shadow of his father’s and grandfather’s legacies.

Hank Williams III – Lovesick, Broke And Driftin’

Released January 29, 2002 via Curb Records

My Favorite Tracks – Cecil Brown, Mississippi Mud, One Horse Town

It took three years for Hank III to see the release of his second album. His debut Rising Outlaw was marred by Hank’s unhappiness with a sterile country sound and being largely a covers album. His second effort was recorded in a few weeks at home and is all original compositions save for the last track. This would be an album Hank could be proud of and tour behind, unlike his debut which he talked down in the music press.

The atmosphere found on this album does not invoke the kind of “country” found in a warehouse-sized bar on the suburb outskirts that plays more dance music than country. This is the backwoods, dirt road kind of country where the only civilization to be found is a shady dive bar or a nondescript liquor store. There are 13 tracks to get through on this album so let’s have at it.

7 Months, 39 Days

We begin with a bit of a trucker’s song, though this trucker booked an extended stay at the county sheriff’s hotel. It’s a fun song that sees the subject at the end of his lockup and hitting the highway to get the hell out of dodge. The upbeat tempo is slowed down at the end to give a bit of atmosphere to the number.

Broke, Lovesick And Driftin’

This song settles into a more slow and somber feel, something in abundance on this record. It’s an ode to the lonely lifestyle of a honkytonk drifter, playing tunes from town to town and not having a stable, anchored home life. While a lament, the tune doesn’t do anything to discourage said lifestyle.

Cecil Brown

This melancholy tune was written about someone Hank knew growing up in southwest Missouri (about 100 miles from where I live currently). It’s a haunting account of someone who didn’t fit in where he was and the alienation and abandonment just flow forth from the mournful song.

And I do definitely “feel” this song to a degree. I also grew up in a small Missouri town where I didn’t fit in much at all. I won’t say my childhood was bad by any stretch, but there was a lot of alienation and ultimately getting the hell out of there to find a sense of self somewhere else. It’s a song I truly do identify with.

Lovin’ And Huggin’

The tempo is back up for this fun and brief number about being in and out of love. The song is as simple as it gets but is also very fun and expertly placed in album sequence to cut the weight of the prior track.

One Horse Town

This is an old-time country tune that plods through life being down and out in nowhere. It’s the kind of song that people who don’t listen to country think country is. Even with the cliched feel the song evokes its atmosphere very well and handles traditional country expertly. It keeps things upbeat despite the low down struggle.

Mississippi Mud

This song is cited by many as their favorite from the album, it is the consensus pick for the star of the show. It’s another fun number that stays out of the city and finds fun out on the backroads. Nothing like partying out away from it all.

Whiskey, Weed And Women

Another lament about life lost to the 3 W’s, as it were. The song certainly captures that old-time feel, though it does go all-in on the country cliches. Maybe not the strongest effort around but it does flow with the rest of the album pretty well.

Trashville

The pace picks up big time here for Hank’s first open shot fired at Nashville’s establishment. For its time the song was quite the talking point to hear someone from the Williams family and a Curb Records employee going at the establishment like this. But Trashville was just a warm-up, and a few years later Hank would release a track that makes this sound downright pedestrian by comparison.

Walkin’ With Sorrow

Yet again Hank is drinking his way through loneliness and sorrow. This time he offers up a bit of yodeling to the old-time dirge, something in line with his legendary grandfather.

5 Shots Of Whiskey

Again here we are with the alcohol and loneliness. This song does feel a bit more fleshed out than the other laments that really just string a few phrases together and rely on the music to carry the tunes. There is a story to these lyrics and a reason for the depression.

Nighttime Ramblin’ Man

Turn it up to 11 for this one, this is a total barn-burner. It’s an ode to partying and raising hell and is also a sign of things to come from Hank III. While the title borrows in part from a Hank Sr song, III makes this all his own and puts his own signature on the line. Rising Outlaw may have been the name of III’s first album but this song is where the outlaw truly rises.

Callin’ Your Name

One more down in the dumps tune, this time Hank is calling out to the Lord for help and mercy. The lyrical tone is slightly different but the song doesn’t really set itself apart from the sundry other sad songs on the album.

Atlantic City

The only song not written by Hank III on the album, this Bruce Springsteen cover was previously recorded for a Springsteen tribute album and was appended to this record by the label. The cover is well done, ramping up the country feel of Springsteen’s country-adjacent effort. Note that this song isn’t available on streaming. Some versions of the album have a bit of a “hidden” song on the same track as Atlantic City, with a radio DJ announcement and another performance of Walkin’ With Sorrow.

Lovesick, Broke And Driftin’ would mark what Hank III felt was his true debut album. Almost entirely composed by him, he bucked Nashville trends and his record label’s direction to cut the album he wanted to make. He had reluctantly began a music career in country due to a legal order to come up with money, so now he was able to begin functioning on his own terms.

And yes, while the album has several highlights, some of it does get a bit derivative. Many of the slower, sad songs are really pedestrian and don’t offer a ton in the way of dynamic songwriting or structure. There still is something to them, perhaps a bit of a callback to Hank Sr. and his way with pulling at the heartstrings. The songs do work but after an album’s worth they kind of run together a bit.

For Hank III this album was really the beginning. He would wind up in court with Curb Records over his contract and desire for creative control and his next album four years later would truly cement him as his own performer and forge an insurgent outlaw country scene that would shift music’s landscape. But this album showed that Hank III knew where the music he was making came from. He would absolutely blaze his own trail and get far out of the long shadow cast by his family name, but he still knew his way around country music. With drink in hand and sorrow in heart, the party was just getting started.

Memories – Straight To Hell

On By bigbadburchIn Memories1 Comment

I’m winding down the main crux of my Memories series now. There is only really one more part to go after this one. This page recounts my older posts about what I’ve listened to over the years. This time I’m going to get into the years 2006-2010, which brought a very radical series of changes in my life that would reflect in what I chose to listen to during that time.

In the summer of 2006 I endured a few severe blows in life that left me regrouping. I relocated to where I am now, in the southwest of Missouri. I was more or less starting all over in every aspect of existence. Thankfully I still had plenty of friends from my last time living here, after all I’d only been gone about 18 months.

Everything that had happened left me clawing back toward that which was comforting and familiar, and few things were as much that to me as heavy metal. It did help that my network of friends in the area were also into the same thing. People had huge collections, played in bands and it was that community that I returned to that year.

“Metal” meant, by and large, the extreme side of things. The early 2000’s saw death metal return in a big way to prominence and black metal was mostly past its 90’s drama and about the music itself. A host of bands old and new were blazing paths in every different direction.

For me it was a bit more than just picking up the music again. It became more of an identity thing. I wasn’t just into harsh music, it was an embodiment of what I thought about society and people. All of the music’s yelling about war, death, Satan and how fucked humanity is wasn’t just there because it suited the music, it was in step with what I thought and how I felt. Perhaps not a good thing, I don’t know, but it was what it was at that time.

I didn’t just listen to the music – I wore the shirts, I went to the shows, I lived and breathed it. I can’t even count the number of friends I had who were in death metal bands at the time. I pretty well gave up on being a “normal” member of society and chose to exist in a counterculture pocket instead. Sure I worked like everyone else, but my spare time was focused on the music. I embraced the identity fully, both to express myself and to keep people the hell away from me.

I wouldn’t rest long just in one pocket of heavy metal. I would soon pick up far more on the doom subgenre around this time. I hadn’t previously been exposed to much of it beyond the obvious Black Sabbath, but in the late 00’s I went all in on doom. Old, new, it didn’t matter. The music suited my obviously not great mental state at the time and was a comforting presence during those years. I am far “better” now by most metrics than I was back then but doom metal is still a good part of what I enjoy these days even if I don’t explore the area as intently as I did back then.

As 2007 came around I would find myself exploring an unlikely genre, though it was entirely fitting for me at the time. A friend lent me a CD he’d picked up not long before and thought I should give it a spin. I’d heard the name for years and knew he’d been a bit different from his namesake and his chosen genre but I never took the time before to give his music a spin. The artist was Hank Williams III and the album was Straight To Hell. The results would kick me off into a new appreciation for country music.

I spun the Hank III album time and time again. While the genre was something I avoided up to that point, this rough and tumble outlaw tear was right up my alley at the time. There was obvious crossover between the outlaw country movement of the late 00’s and the heavy metal scene. But I didn’t just stop with Hank III, himself a metalhead with his own bands. I jumped in to country as a whole, visiting legends like Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings along with artists of the day like Wayne Hancock and Lucky Tubb.

As luck would have it, my area was a good place to be for that country scene. Both Wayne and Lucky played shows at least once a year in my town and I was a fixture at their shows. Hank III also came through for one of the craziest, longest and booze-soaked concerts I’ve ever seen. I wasn’t alone in my newfound love of the music – many of my friends were also picking up on Hank III.

Country would last with me even after that insurgent movement of the late 00’s slid away and became something else that would eventually find its place in mainstream music. But that outlaw scene of the time hit home with me, a thread I’ll pick up another time in another fashion.

As the decade wore down I was pretty entrenched in the sounds of underground and independent movements. I had anchored my identity to them, after all. After a bit of a struggle through 2008 I entered 2009 in a more stable place though still fully vested in these counterculture leanings. I wanted to yell at the world how messed up I thought it was and I did so through the many songs around that echoed the same sentiment. It was angst that perhaps mutated into true misanthropy, at least to a degree. If anything, I didn’t realize how much of that time would just be a pregame for society’s shitshow to come.

That is where I was as 2010 came about. I had fashioned myself as some uncaring, hateful outlaw, sick of it all and armed with the tunes to prove it. I entered a bit of a different headspace around this time as my station in life slowly improved, caring less and less about what image I projected onto society and just enjoying whatever I wanted to enjoy. And it was around this time I noticed them slinking around the same corners of the record store where I was at – the metal, the independent country and roots music. Who were these man-bun wearing, beard-clad, craft beer swilling people and why were they into the same shit I was? What did it make them, or perhaps more interestingly, what did it make me?

Questions for the next time, of course.