This budget double-disc set jumped out at me in a music store bargain bin last week. Since I had made a permanent loan of my other Hank CD's to my mother-in-law, who is in her 80's, I grabbed it. Here you have about 20 songs by Hank and the Drifting Cowboys as broadcast back in 1949. That is just about mid-career for Williams, who began to gain regional attention around Alabama just after WW II, and who died on New Year's Day, 1952. The recording quality is excellent. The tracks feature a few hits, like "Lovesick Blues" and "I'm so Lonesome I Could Cry" and "I Saw the Light" but the real interest is in the less-known songs, which in my experience, do not appear on most one-or-two disc sets of Hank's best. If you are already a fan, you'll want this. If you have had little exposure to Mr. Williams, this is a good start. In the subsequent three years after these shows, he wrote his greatest songs and saw his life go wrong. Like Woody Guthrie, Hank Sr. was a natural, a folk poet with an unexplainable genius. Unlike Woody, Hank's best lyrics often have only three-to-five words per line. Also unlike Woody, Hank had a traditional religious streak that informed many of his compositions. Finally, unlike Woody, Hank actually got famous in his lifetime and made money. In my long decades of loving music, both of these songwriters hold high rank in my heart. I don't think you can fully appreciate the richness of American music history unless you own recordings like this, or Woody's "Dust Bowl Ballads" album from 1940. The entire genre of the "singer-songwriter" was pioneered by these guys.
