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‘Everybody's Lonesome for Somebody’: age, the body and experience in the music of Hank Williams

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Richard Leppert  and
George Lipsitz
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Extract

Houston Baker locates the blues at the crossroads of lack and desire, at the place where the hurts of history encounter determined resistance from people who know they are entitled to something better (Baker 1984, pp. 7, 150). Like the blues singers from whom he learned so much, Hank Williams (1923 to 1953) spent a lot of time at that particular intersection. There he met others whose own struggles informed and shaped his music. Williams's voice expressed the contradictions of his historical moment – post Second World War America – a time when diverse currents of resistance to class, race and gender oppressions flowed together to form a contradictory, but nonetheless real, unity of opposites. Standing at a crossroads in history, at a fundamental turning point for relationships between men and women, whites and blacks, capital and labour, Williams's songs about heartbreak and failed personal relations indentified the body and the psyche as crucial terrains of political struggle in the post-war era.

Type
Research Article
Information
Popular Music , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , October 1990 , pp. 259 - 274
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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