Quotes About Hank

John Green is a very handsome, intelligent, and wise man. He smells really weird though.

A rag and a bone and a hank of hair.

Let me sum it up for ya: We got some people who work for a living, and we got some people who vote for a living.

If you boys are psychologist types and you've been listening to my endless debriefings with Hank, what the hell is Donna's handle? How do I get next to her? I mean, how is it done? With that kind of sweet, unique, stubborn little chick?

Lilly's ambitions for Hank were fairly clear. Christmas 1937 brought a new guitar, a Gibson with a sunburst finish. This was a major investment, quite probably the most expensive item in the Williams household.

Move It on Over" was released on June 6, 1947, and, two months later, it became Hank's first Billboard hit.

if Rose had set aside his musicianship he would have heard something strangely compelling in Hank's treatment of "Lovesick Blues." The brisk tempo and unusual structure, together with the yodels and little flashes of falsetto, made it wholly unlike any other country record.

Hank drank. It was a behavior he had acquired in his youth—before Audrey, before his back gave him much trouble, before his career took him over. It was a behavior to which he turned at moments both predictable and unpredictable. It was a behavior that took him over and acquired its own momentum as his personal and professional problems mounted.

Hank was barely influenced by country music's first superstar, Jimmie Rodgers, who succumbed to tuberculosis in 1933

Hank's music was called "hillbilly music," and the little respect it had could be attributed almost entirely to Roy Acuff

Hank was happy to cash the checks as the palm court orchestras played his songs, but on a far deeper level he was suspicious of the trend, seeing it as a dilution of his music. "These pop bands," he told an interviewer in Charleston, South Carolina, "will play our hillbilly songs when they cain't eat any other way.

Helms had probably figured out that the steel guitar was the crucial instrument for Hank; its notes were the wordless cry that completed his vocal lines. The steel guitar sustained the mood and took most of the solos

The Grand Ole Opry formally hired Hank on Monday, July 11, 1949

Hank's self-defeating conduct stemmed in part from his perception that he was being marketed as a commodity.

every night as he performed. The reception even surprised Hank. He knew he was the king of the honky-tonks, but now he had stadium crowds eating out of his hand, and legit entertainers working as his supporting acts

On August 7, 1948, Hank made his first appearance on the Louisiana Hayride. He was the fifth act on the opening 8:00–8:30 p.m. segment.

It was probably in Georgiana that Hank met his first acknowledged musical influence, a black street musician, Rufus Payne. Because Payne was rarely found without a home-brewed mix of alcohol and tea, Payne's nickname was "Tee-Tot," a pun on teetotaler

The second Sterling session saw the birth of one of Hank's trademarks, the "crack" rhythm: an electric guitar keeping time on the deadened bass strings. Without drums in his lineup, Hank used the electric guitar to emphasize the pulse. It was the sound that Johnny Cash later made into a trademark, adding a little rhythmic flourish to make "boom-chicka-boom.

Like Lilly, she saw the alcoholism in terms of self-control, a view that was reinforced by the fact that there were times when Hank could control it