Upon First Hearing Hank Williams, Jr.

Within a minute of sliding his Out of Left Field CD into my home stereo system, I’d cranked up the volume and was shouting, “Sing it, Hank, you sing it!”

By the second track, I gave up trying to read the Boston Globe at the kitchen table and started singing along, not giving a damn that in reality my voice was a startlingly poor karaoke version of the man’s.

By the fifth track, I realized that anything that got me out of my chair and singing like a damn fool was grist for my writing mill. I headed upstairs for the computer.

Good Lord, as I'm writing this, I am listening to him camp it up on another track - a playful, jazzy version of “You Got A Dirty Mind”, complete with piano riffs, brush work on the drums, and a bass keeping the rhythm. Is there any style this singer can’t cover?

He gallops through some songs with chaps flying and canters slowly through others, roaming the range from the melancholy of love lost to sweet gratitude for the grace of a loving woman. He inhabits the territory between heartache and heartthrob.

I believe I can hear the entire history of country singing in his lyrics, intonations, rhythms, and subjects. I hear echoes of Johnny Cash, George Jones, and Hank Williams, Sr. This  dude just loads the micro grooves of the CD with his maxi-baritone voice, which easily rises above the accompanying slide guitars, basses, drums, and backup singers. When he sings one of those melancholy songs, it makes me think that people in the southwest get their hearts broken in ways we northerners just don't.

I’d been looking to pick up a Hank Williams, Jr. CD for over a year and never got around to it. Now, I’m at home with his music and his stories of yearnings, losses, and the bliss being held in a loving woman’s arms.

I feel like bustin' out the door to taste that kind of love. Not the kind in the “Someone Special” greeting card section in CVS, but the kind where decent people with good intentions go for broke and win it all or go down tragically in flames, smashing into the earth with enough impact to be felt in the next county.

Yep, I’m aimin' for that all-or-nothin’, Mach Two, pinned-to-the-back-of-the-seat kinda love.

Hank sings, “I’ve loved and been loved, but not at the same time, I’ve been on both sides of good-bye”. Damn, I want to ride my heart south of the Mason Dixon line and live to tell the tale. I'm gonna play that CD again right now.