Welcome to episode fourteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Jambalaya" by Hank Williams. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.



Erratum

I list "Lovesick Blues" among the songs Williams wrote. Of course, he didn't write that one, just recorded a cover version of it.

First, a brief apology -- this podcast is up about twenty hours later than normal. I used up my buffer over the Christmas and New Year period, and had to deal with some family stuff on Saturday, my usual day for recording new episodes, so everything was thrown out a bit. Everything should be back to normal by next episode.

Resources

As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.

There are many good biographies of Hank WIlliams, but Colin Escott's is generally considered the best.

Williams' recordings are all in the public domain now, so there are many great, cheap, compilations of it. This one, with ten CDs for ten pounds, is probably the best value.

And I mention an episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones in the podcast. This is the episode I'm talking about.

The episode on Bob Wills I mention is here, to save you digging through the archives.

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Transcript

The music that became rock and roll had many different progenitors. The cliche -- which we've already established as being very wrong -- is that it was a mixture of the blues and country music.

While that's very far from being the actual truth, we've also seen that country and western did have a substantial influence on the development of rock and roll. And yet so far we've only looked at one country and western star -- Bob Wills, back in episode three.

Now, this is probably the correct balance -- early rock and roll grew primarily out of rhythm and blues records -- but it would be ahistorical in the extreme if we were to completely ignore the growth of the hillbilly boogie, which is the branch of music that eventually led to much of what we now think of as rock and roll and rockabilly. Obviously, even from its name you can tell that hillbilly boogie was hugely influenced by boogie and R&B, but it was its own unique thing as well.

If you haven't heard of it, hillbilly boogie is a type of music that grew out of Western Swing, and which itself later turned into honky-tonk music. It's music that combined country music instruments -- guitars, fiddles, and steel guitars, primarily -- with the rhythms of boogie music, and it was a big, big, genre in the late forties and fifties. It was less subtle than Western Swing was, with most of its subjects being drinking, fighting, sex, and boogie-woogie, in approximately that order of importance. This was party music, for working-class white men who wanted to get drunk, hit something, and have sex with something.

But as is often the case with music that appeals to such primal emotions, much of the music had a power to it that was far greater than one might expect from the description, and some of it rises to the status of actual great art. And in the right hands, some of the hillbilly boogie music could be as powerful as any music around.

The hillbilly boogie craze started in 1945, with a record called "Guitar Boogie" by Arthur Smith:

[excerpt: "Guitar Boogie" by Arthur Smith]

You can hear in that some of the Django Reinhardt influence we've already seen in the Western Swing genre -- that's still a fairly sedate version of hillbilly boogie, more intellectual than it quickly became. A few years later, the genre had gone a lot further down into the gutter:

[excerpt: "Shotgun Boogie" by Tennessee Ernie Ford]

So today, we're going to talk about a song that was -- as far as we can tell -- a collaboration between two greats of the country field: Hank Williams, who is pretty much the epitome of the 1950s cou