When he died on the way to a show on New Year’s Day 1953, the Yankee newspapers called him a "hillbilly star."

He was declared dead in Oak Hill, West Virginia, but everyone knows he died in the back seat of a big sedan as it rushed along the blacktop, so there is no way to tell, really, where he died, on which mile of asphalt, in which zipcode. How long did his spiritless body ride, before the car’s driver shook him, to see if he was okay?

It’s just one more little thing about him we will never know. We only know he was 29, which is not much life at all, and that he suffered from a back misery so intense that it left him bone white under the stage lights, and that he died in a car somewhere between a snowed-in airport in Knoxville and a coroner’s inquest in Oak Hill, and that the greatest country music singer who ever was and probably ever will be passed into history.

A hillbilly star.

It might have been the fact he sang under a cowboy hat, or that he was from Alabama, or it might have been his spelling and pronunciation, that made them call him that. He spelled things the way they sounded, like hillbillies do, and punctuated them with sorrow, love, and regret. Like this song, which he wrote for his wife Audrey after she left him:

We met we lived and dear we loved
Then came that fatal day
The love that we felt so dear
Fade far away
To night we both are alone
And heres all that I can say
I love you still and all ways will
But thats the price we have to pay

It was almost like the words poured straight out of his heart and bypassed his head, and for the people in the auditoriums that smelled of floor wax and popcorn, it was like they swirled from the microphone straight through their ears and down, down, deep into their own hearts. Heads didn’t have much to do with it. Hillbillies are funny that way.

Now, almost a half-century later, he is brilliant, the music experts say. It’s the same music, but the hillbilly star is now pure genius. He is a pioneer, an innovator. I guess there are just a lot more hillbillies now, in high places.

Some people like to go stand by his grave, but I never wanted to do that. That would be admitting that he is finished, that he is gone.

He is not. Hank Williams is merely dead, and that is not at all the same thing.

I am not like those Elvis fans — good people, a lot of them — who won’t admit that the King is dead. I wonder, sometimes, if what they really see, when they see him at the Waffle House, the Wal-Mart or the Shriner’s Pancake Breakfast, is their own heart. They wish him alive, so strongly.

It’s not that way with me and Hank, with a lot of people and Hank. Hank is dead, his body is dust and bones, and he will never again walk up to a microphone, so thin and elegant in his Nashville-tailored Western suits, and sing his heart out. He is dead, free from the whiskey that wobbled him, free from the pain in his spine and soul, free from the demons that flogged him, free to sleep in ever-lasting peace—unless you believe in the heaven he sometimes sang about.

But gone?

Not as long as there is electricity, or dusty radios, or pawnshop guitars, or people who believe that music is a story, a story about people like them.

Like most people who sing something so true that it makes us cry, or at least makes us smile and tap our toes, he left tracks in the red dirt and black bottomland and Gulf Coast sand, and left pieces of himself in photos and scrawled-out song lyrics, and faded posters of shows he performed and some he never showed up to at all. But people still don’t know him, really. They have seen only specks and glimmers and slivers, maybe because his life was so short, but more likely because that is about all he lets us see.

Even the very old, the ones who were alive when he sang his music at country fairs, who filled auditoriums in Montgomery and Bossier City, know little more than those of us who know his music from hearing our mommas sing his words over dish pans. And we, in turn, know only a little more than the ones who came after us, who heard his words for the first time on gleaming compact discs that have had the scratches magically lifted away.

So we are hungry for the details, for insights, maybe even for answers to why he was able to bend us the way he did, and why he did not last. We want to know little things as much as monumental things. I guess we just want to know, period.

Here, in these pages, Kira Florita and Colin Escott hand us some answers—and, if not answers, at least insights, evidence, sometimes even pieces of his heart. They raise a flap on the circus tent of his life, and let us sneak through, one fuzzy photograph and scrap of correspondence at a time. Why do we need it so, those of us who grew up with his music, and found it only in boxed sets? It has, I believe, everything to do with what is real in music, and what is not.

Smart people can talk about his impact on American music as a whole, and it seems like every day some guitar slinger with pink-tipped hair is saying how he feels some of his best words were influenced by Hank Williams, dude. I know he has been borrowed from just as he borrowed himself—from the bluegrass and the buck dancers and the white and black men who sang to their mules as they worked themselves half to death and sometimes all the way.

But there seems, to me, precious little of him that actually shines through in the music of the young, and that may very well be why those of us who love his music will never move on from it, and why he seems to find new fans every day among people who think music should be more than reverb and pierced belly buttons and pounding monotony.

Even among country musicians, he is as different as a rattlesnake is from a coiled garden hose. There seems no real country in it, except the hats. The women wear Versace, and sing about affairs in the summer before their boyfriend left for college. The men? All hat and no cow, most of them. One even sings about his girlfriend leaving him in a goddamned Suzuki.

I will never forget sitting in a music hall in St. Petersburg and listening as a man in a big hat, a warm-up act for Allison Krauss, took the stage and sang clichés. And then—I am not making this up—he referred to himself as moi.

Moi.

College.

Suzuki.

I guess some people would say it is country for the new world, the new age, but it is not country at all—it is pop music in snap pearl buttons, and it should be more than that.

It should be Hank—or at least Merle or Johnny Horton or Johnny Cash or Patsy Cline or George Jones or, more lately, Steve Earle. But much of what is good, today and forever, you can see Hank in it. We have to look back, all the way back to Hank, because that is where the words and the music and the talent converge for more than just mere sound—forgettable sound.

His fans, now, range from Harvard professors to New York book editors to concrete finishers and laid-off cotton mill workers. College students study his language; dropout guitar pickers, somewhere at this very moment, are picking through "I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still In Love With You)" or "Lost Highway," and singing it in accents that would have made Hank smile.

I guess we can share him with them. I have no claim on him, really. He was dead before I was born. His live voice belongs to my kin, who heard him on the radio, singing and selling tonic, who paid one dollar and twenty cents to hear him sing sacred songs and pretended not to like the other ones, but they did. He belongs to my grandmother, Ava, who sang him to me, and to my momma, and to every old drunk man who ever tried to tune a guitar on the front porches of my life.

Once, marooned by an ice storm in Atlanta with a tall, redheaded woman, I played her some Hank Williams. She was from Staten Island, and I did not think it would take.

Before the ice had melted, she was singing "I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry."

June 2001