ABSTRACT
Hank Williams was an extraordinary artist, a songwriter with a gift for concise yet powerful expression, and a singer with exceptional phrasing and drama. This chapter focuses on the ways in which he gave an individual voice to collective fears and hopes about the body, romance, gender roles and the family. Country musicians in general, and Hank Williams in particular, locate the politics of gender on the terrain of social class difference, but less on the overt ground of society and its institutions than on the privatised body, particularly its psyche. In the process, Williams gives sight to the unseen, especially in love song laments about infidelity and failed relationships. The extraordinary popularity of Hank Williams’s songs in the late 1940s and early 1950s played a crucial role in transforming country music from a regional and class-bound genre to a staple of mass popular culture.
