Pictures From Life's Other Side

The standard view of Hank Williams' Luke the Drifter recordings can be found in Barbara Ching's Wrong's What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (Oxford UP, 2001), in which she claims that Luke the Drifter is Williams' "alter ego," an alias used to distinguish records that were "hellfire" from those that were "hell-raising" (p. 55). Since jukebox operators preferred the hard-drinking Williams with the "bad reputation" rather than the Williams who engaged in moralistic recitations and sanctimonious rebukes, Williams was urged to create the alter ego, a shadow self representing the fundamentalist side to his normal, hedonistic, pleasure-seeking self. But why would he adopt the alias in 1950 (the year of the first Luke the Drifter recordings) at the very height of his fame, by which time he had become the central figure in country music?

What if it's really the other way around, Luke the Drifter being the real "Hank Williams" while the one singing "Jambalaya" and "Kaw-Liga" is in fact wearing the mask? From this perspective, songs such as "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" and "Lost Highway" represent moments when the mask slips, when the real "Hank Williams" reveals himself, especially so since he is singing for a community to which he could never belong. As Greil Marcus observes, "Beneath the surface of his forced smiles and his light, easy sound, Hank Williams was kin to Robert Johnson in a way that the new black singers of his day were not" (Mystery Train, Third Revised Edition, p. 131). The Luke the Drifter records only make sense considered as an aggregate rather than individually; the mistake is to single out any particular one as "typical." It is true that the songs are moralistic in a way easily assimilable to the community, but that's beside the point. They are actually songs of loss, exclusion, and tragedy bordering on the nihilistic (hence Marcus's allusion to Robert Johnson), songs about abject figures who've inherited life's accursed share, too different or too grotesque or too scorned to fit in. "Drifter" is simply another name for someone without a home, without a community, and that is what the songs are about. (In the 1970s "drifter" was replaced by "outlaw," a key figure being Hank Williams, Jr.). "Hank Williams was a poet of limits, fear, and failure," writes Greil Marcus in Mystery Train (131), an important aspect of the country world to be sure. By the time of Hank Williams' death, though, the style had become so pervasive "that it had closed off the possibilities of breaking loose." The other side of the country world, the one consisting of "excitement, rage, fantasy, delight," emerged soon after in the music of Elvis Presley -- in the music known as "rockabilly" rather than "hillbilly."