Country Music, Episode 3

With the third episode, "The Hillbilly Shakespeare," country music finally finds the person who will rise above and beyond the musical genre he worked in, for his time and for all time. By far the most comparable figure to Hank Williams in American music is Robert Johnson, whose story has also passed into myth and legend. The similarities are as striking as the differences. Both were dead before they turned 30. Almost 20,000 people showed up for the funeral of Williams, a white man and a famous star. Johnson lived and died in near obscurity and was buried in an unmarked grave. You can hear Roy Acuff in Williams' music just as you can hear Son House in Johnson's - but both men took their art far, far beyond what anyone in country music or the blues had done before. It was in the songs they wrote, and it was in the grain of their voices. They both sound like men who have looked face to face into something too terrifying to even contemplate. That thing we so often hear in their voices? Barely suppressed panic. Hello, Satan, mutters Johnson. It's time to go. There had never been anything like it, and there's been nothing else like it since. Williams sang hopefully about salvation, but he knew better and you can hear that he knew better. Johnson sang about being pursued by demons and furies, though we have no idea whether this had much to do with his life and times, so much of which is and will remain a mystery. But he was a black man living and working in 1930s Mississippi. He had much to be panicky about. We know much more about Williams: his physical pain, his alcoholism, his psychic torment. But like Johnson, he remains fundamentally inexplicable. Genius, like a thunderstorm, comes up against the wind.