Hank Williams Jr. was already a veteran entertainer by the age of 30. he not only learned from masters including Johnny Cash and Earl Scruggs, he also carried on the music legacy left by his famous father. And he never forgot the lessons he learned, among them to be true to yourself and don’t forget to have a good time along the way.
That helps explain the mixture of Country fun and self-awareness, plus a few doses of political opinion, that constitute his latest Curb Records album, 127 Rose Avenue. Its first single, for example, “Red, White & Pink-Slip Blues,” written by Mark Stephen Jones and Bud Tower, was released with somewhat playful timing on April 15, a dreaded day for many Americans. “We have the highest unemployment today that we’ve ever had,” Williams explained. “I’m very proud of the song and video: Here’s this guy in [Williams’ late manager] Merle Kilgore’s ’59 Cadillac, telling all his problems to his Labrador. The fans love it!”
Running with this economic theme, Williams’ label organized a contest timed to the single’s release, offering the singer’s own stimulus package as the prize. “We called it the Bosephus Bailout,” said Jeff Tuerff, VP of Marketing, Curb Records. “We launched the single on April 15 and created a Web site that featured the premiere of the single. Radio received it the same day, and they helped drive traffic to the site. We also did consumer polls on what fans thought about the song and what Hank means to them. We got thousands of comments, many of them saying that Hank needs to run for president!” (Response was so strong that a poll was added to the home page with visitors invited to click Yes or No to the question, “Should Hank Jr. run for president?” The overwhelming consensus was “Yes.”)
During its first week online, www.BocephusBailout.com received 10,000 visitors, according to Tuerff. Once onboard, they could access a Hank Jr. Player, which featured a catalog of the artist’s older songs, as well as the “Red, White & Pink-Slip Blues” video. “The song ranked in the Top 10 streams on CMT,” Tuerff said. “We also had great visibility on iTunes. His performance on ‘Fox & Friends’ resulted in a lot of play on YouTube, and all that led into the launch of the music video a few weeks later, which resulted in another round of great response from the consumers.”
The promotion ran for six weeks, with more than 25,000 people signing up for the contest, with prizes including $1,000 cash, an additional $1,500 for travel and accommodations to a Williams concert location, premium seats and a backstage meet-and-greet at the show, a “collector’s tin” featuring three Williams CDs, a limited-edition “Monday Night Football” guitar and an autographed copy of “Red, White & Pink-Slip Blues.”
Beyond that emotionally intense single, 127 Rose Avenue offers a variety of material, from the fun-filled Country rap of “Farm Song,” written by Rick J. Arnold and Williams, which features pedal steel guitar virtuoso Robert Randolph, to the thought-provoking James Carson chamberlain, Phil Barnhart and Michael White composition, “Sounds Like Justice.” Though written by John Scott Sherrill and Don Poythress, “Mighty Oak Trees” is a highly personal tribute to those who mentored Williams. And the title track, written by Bud McGuire, Kim Williams and Ray Hood, conjures a few other spirits as well through a lyric that documents a visit to Hank Williams’ Boyhood Home & Museum, formerly the home where Hank Williams Sr. grew up in Georgiana, Ala.
“I just couldn’t believe it when I first heard ‘127 Rose Avenue,’” said Williams. “I said, ‘Holy wow, what a song! What a lyric!’ And then I found out the real story, that the guy went down there and went through the museum and had this experience, and that’s why he wrote the song. I said, ‘Well, that’s it. I’m recording it.’ You know, the folks at Curb wanted to name the album ‘Red, White & Pink Slip-Blues,’ but I told them, ‘No, the title of the album should be 127 Rose Avenue.”
Co-producing with Doug Johnson, Williams began working on the album in the spring of 2008. They took their time — “We’d cut a couple things, then wait a couple months and cut a few more,” the singer/songwriter said — but responded quickly when inspiration struck, such as when the idea came to add marimbas and horns to “Gulf Shore Road,” which Williams wrote about his home.
“I really love that song,” he reflected. “That’s where I’m at in my life right now. I go down there and it’s hard to come back to West Tennessee from that little part of Florida. That song took 10 minutes to put it down. It’s not a fantasy. There really is a Gulf Shore Road, and the pelicans do fly right over your head at Pelican Bay. I had that lying around in my guitar case for a while, and Doug said, ‘How can you let this lie here?’ But it wasn’t the right place and right time to record it before now.”
One surprise on 127 Rose Avenue is another Williams composition, “All the Roads,” which features bluegrass greats The Grascals. “That’s just me. You know, people don’t realize it, but Little Rockin’ Randall used to step on his Boswell’s Harley Davidson at 2131 Elm Hill Pike and ride over to Earl Scruggs’ house for his banjo lessons,” said Williams, referring to himself with a handle based on his middle name Randall under which he once occasionally performed and noting his address in Nashville at the time. “And then he’d go over to Johnny’s [Cash] and talk Civil War. I better know how to play banjo; I had some of the greatest teachers in the world with Earl and Sonny Osborne.”
With the high standards set through his birthright and his own work as an artist, Williams finds it hard to find fresh songs from contemporary writers, most of whom seem to want to pitch material similar to what he’s already recorded. “I have to tell you,” he said, “it gets so old when you hear ‘I’ve got this smash for you’ and the lyrics are ‘I’m from the South. I drink whiskey.’ If I’ve heard one of those I’ve heard a thousand, and you talk about redundant: That horse has been whipped to death. I don’t want to hurt their feelings, but that ain’t ‘Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound.’ You can’t wait to write one after you’ve heard 75 songs like that.”
Every now and then, though, a new song does jump out from the pack. For Williams, “Forged by Fire,” by Ronald W. Hellard and Daryl Burgess, was one of those. “I listened to a lot of songs and I love that one,” he said. “I’ve had phone calls from Iraq already, so that one is wonderful.”
Williams also includes his dad’s “Long Gone Lonesome Blues,” though in a different arrangement than folks might expect to hear. “Doug told me to do it like I do it onstage, and when we were finished he said, ‘You’re giving us a history lesson of Lightnin’ Hopkins teaching you,’” said Williams, referring to the late Texas blues legend. “That was the last song we did, on the last evening. It took two takes and we were done.”
Like all writers, Williams especially appreciates those songs that write themselves in 10 minutes or so, and “Last Driftin’ Cowboy” was one of those. This tribute to steel guitar legend Don Helms, a member of his father’s band the Drifting Cowboys (the intro is Helms playing “Honky Tonk Blues”) came to Williams nearly instantly and intact.
“I do a mile and a quarter every morning with my Labs,” he said, referring to his retrievers Dakota and Ellie May Clampett. “And ‘Driftin’ Cowboy’ came right out of the sky. It was something very … well, I guess you can say I had an experience. I had the words and melody, and when I got back from that run I sat down at Daddy’s desk and it was done. It usually doesn’t work like that, but that song was done in a matter of an hour and a half.”
As rewarding as it was to work on 127 Rose Avenue, Williams and his family especially enjoyed the news that “Family Tradition: The Williams Family Legacy,” their exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, has been extended through Dec. 31, 2011. “It’s the biggest thing they’ve ever had,” he said. “I just found more things to take over to them. I found another original Hank Sr. special-order 1946 Martin, so it’s been very exciting.”
As Tuerff sees it, the popularity of the exhibit, like that of Williams, can be explained by the breadth of its appeal. “He’s an icon,” he said. “His music is passed down from generation to generation. The album is a fantastic body of work, and we are in Phase 2 for launching singles into multiple formats. We plan to release singles that target military, Country and bluegrass radio because what he delivers on each album presents unique opportunities for us to not only hit his existing fan base but to keep growing it too.”
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