Why did you want to include the Hank Williams classic, "Hey, Good Lookin'" on the album?
If anybody, Hank Williams has to be the default songwriter of songwriters. Whether you're a country singer or whether you're any kind of a writer, to me, it's Hank Williams. My parents -- I grew up in south Alabama -- weren't necessarily country fans. My mother was more a Frank Sinatra fan, and my dad listened to kind of Cajun music from his family. There was always Hank Williams in their record collection. I'm so old that I had to grow up listening to my parents' record before the 45 [rpm single record] came around. Then, you got your Elvis record. Until there was Elvis, Hank Williams was in my house. I remember doing that song or loving that song when I was about 8 years old -- "Hey, Good Lookin' "and "Jambalaya" -- and I would sing them at parties and stuff that my mother would have. I was so closely attached to those before I even seriously considered anything about being a musician or writer. Even back in those days, when I first started out, that song [and] two or three others were always a part of a repertoire when I was playing bars and lounges and everything else. And not being able to do my own material, "Hey, Good Lookin'" was in there. It was always a crowd-pleasing song.
Everybody went just right for it, and with that arrangement, which we borrowed from all those kind of wonderful people we had in there, we just decided to put a little bit of a we call it Buffettizing. (laughs) We kind of take material that are great songs. We don't change anything. There's no chord changes. There's no modulation. There's nothing. We will set a tempo and a groove that probably is more of a result of playing it live in front of fans and the energy that our shows run at. When I go in to make an album, I think of an album as a set in front of a live audience. That's the only way I've ever thought about it. I pace it like that. I try to put energy levels in a record the way I do in a show. I couldn't think of anything better to kick off an album that this finally resulted in the 16 or 17 songs that we cut. It was like the opening song of the set to me. I went back, and I said this is very full circle for me without it being, "Oh, I'd like to thank Hank Williams." Of course, we would.
The unique side of the Hank Williams story to me is that many years ago when I was in Nashville, I was a reporter for Billboard magazine because I couldn't get a job singing. I had a college degree, which was something you didn't go to Nashville with in those days. (laughs) Thank God, a dear friend of mine named Bill Williams hired me at Billboard magazine to be a writer. During that time, my mother worked -- my mother always worked -- she worked at a shipyard in Alabama, and she sent me a package one day. And she said, "I think you'll get a kick out of this." Hank Williams had worked at that shipyard in 1942 as a welder, and it was his employment file and his job application because ... I guess he didn't get drafted. He had some kind of medical ailment so he didn't join the Army during the second World War, but he worked as a welder. And it was his file with his picture in it and his handwritten job application. And I love the fact of it that it said "occupation," and it had in his penciled handwriting "welder/musician" -- and "musician" was spelled wrong. (laughs) When my mother passed away last year, my niece gave me some things, and that folder came back up. So, I kind of did it for her.
|
