When he died, just 29 years old, on New Year's Day in 1953, from a combination of alcohol and the pain killers he had used for years to ease the cronic pain of a congenital spine defect, he was already a legend.

Hank Williams was the first country singer and songwriter whose songs consistently crossed over to the pop music audience, heartfelt songs like "Your Cheatin' Heart" and "Cold, Cold Heart" and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," with such undeniable emotional appeal that they transcend time and place and audience. Almost everybody, it seemed, could identify with the suffering that Hank Williams packed into a two-and-a-half-minute blues song. What everyone didn't know, as it turned out, was that Williams was privately suffering most of what he sang about so convincingly.

He was raised in the most abject poverty in Alabama; he had an absentee father and a domineering mother and an equally domineering first wife. He was the first Cadillac cowboy. Yet he never believed he had earned the astonishing success that was his; he felt success had been forced upon him, a bitter pill to be choked down daily. The pull Hank felt between God and Satan showed in his recordings: he recorded Saturday night "sin" songs; his alter ego, "Luke the Drifter," recorded Sunday morning messages of hope. In the end, Saturday night won the battle, and Hank lost it on a combination of drugs and alcohol.

The first records made by Hank Williams were on the Sterling record label. Since there were no professional recording studios in Nashville, Tennessee, at the time (about 1946) these were all cut directly onto acetate discs at the WSM radio studios and were released on 78 RPM, 10" shellac records. The musicians were basically the Oklahoma Cowboys (now the Willis Brothers) Guy, Vic, and Skeeter Willis, and Chuck "the Indian" on bass. At times other musicians were added to this basic group.

When Hank Williams went to MGM records, MGM also took the Sterling masters which were later included in MGM albums. Most of the first MGM records were recorded in a Cincinnati studio, except those which were already on Sterling masters. Hank recorded his first session after he formed his Drifting Cowboys band in Nashville, and all following sessions at Castle Recording Studios in the old Tulane Hotel at Eighth Ave. and Church St. (now removed.)