By all rights, I should be a country music lover. Born in Indiana, now living in Texas, with a former Klan member/truck driver for a grandfather and a grandma who ran a roughneck bar (and kicked a few asses in her time, I’m proud to say), I spent so much time at car races as a child that I’m still pulling splinters from my rear-end and trying to get the smell of spilt Budweiser out of my eyelashes.

Oh, I’m sorry- was I stereotyping? Too bad. Country music, like rap, Islam, and Catholic priests, has built its own prison of preconceived notions, so it can lie there. Still, I’ve often felt the slightest bit guilty that my rebellion against all things country & Western was so vicious in nature. Other than a childhood crush on Barbara Mandrell and a short-lived fascination with The Oak Ridge Boys’ Elvira (OK, I admit to having liked The Devil Went Down To Georgia as well), the only exposure to country I found tolerable was a few minutes of “Hee-Haw” here and there, and then I was back to my KISS and Foreigner records. Have I been unkind?

Well, I recently came to the conclusion that I’ve spent the last thirty-three years being a tad bit harsh toward C&W. After all, have I not given rap the time of day, and even laid reluctant compliments at its gun-toting doorstep? Even though my music collection is probably more eclectic than most you’ve seen, I’d hate to think that I’ve been closed-minded for no good reason. Even though I generally despise the way in which country music culture wallows in its whiteness (similarly, much of the rap community can’t seem to understand that a world truly exists beyond the ghetto, with millions of people who couldn’t give a crap what goes on there), I feel that it’s time to at least let the drawbridge of Fortress Redneck Shall Not Enter down for awhile and see if there’s anything in the universe of country and Western that I might find halfway palatable. If not, I can always retreat back into post-punk and Turkish music.

And thus is born the "Pyfr Goes West" series, an ongoing mess of reviews in which I'll select one album each by as many C&W stars as I can get my hands on, to see if there's anything there worth making love to. I’ll probably spend most of the time focusing on the older artists, since I generally hold modern music of just about style in the same evil regard. Since my knowledge of C&W is so poor, each review will be as much an observation of the artist as a review of the album in question. My suspicion is that, like the blues, I’ll probably develop more of an appreciation for the really old stuff, but you just never know. One thing’s for sure- this will likely be nowhere near as painful as the moment I decide to open my mind to classical music.

So, without further ado, here’s my first attempt to review a country record.

I selected Hank Williams to start off with because consensus seems to hold the guy up as a country icon. He’s certainly been covered, referenced, and generally idolized by enough artists of many different stripes, and his music-making lineage is now in its third generation, with Hank III carrying on the Williams torch (albeit in a rather unusual way). So, I wondered, will this guy measure up to the number of times I’ve heard his name throughout the course of my three plus decades on Planet Blueball? Will I even recognize one single track on 20 Of Hank Williams’ Greatest Hits? More importantly, will I like or even be able to tolerate his music?

As it turns out, I was a little surprised to find one extremely cool and dark number called Ramblin’ Man (not to be confused with the one by the Allman Brothers, though the theme is much the same, being basically “woman, you about to get left”), as well as two that I’m quite familiar with. I even prefer the original Move It On Over to George Thorogood’s (which I really don’t prefer at all), and was stunned to find that Hank was the creator of Hey Good Lookin’, a song that most of us have probably hummed to ourselves at one point or another. For a country legend, Hank was flying dangerously close to rock and blues on a few of these.

Also cool is Kaw-Liga, the only track I can immediately name that deals with the love lives of Native American wooden statues. I can hear Hank’s influence on guys like Nick Cave and Willard Grant Conspiracy in a song like this, even if it goes a little too hoe-down in places and nearly loses the dark mood. Your Cheatin’ Heart is pretty neat as well, though his voice sometimes threatens to annoy me by getting all bright and nasally.

The other fifteen or so tracks suffer primarily from a tendency to resemble each other in terms of sound and subject matter (of course, that could just be my lack of familiarity with country music seeping in). None of them are bad to the point of nausea, but they all just kind of run into each other. There’s lot of fiddle playin’, pedal steel wailin’ (at least, I think that’s what makes that very unique sound that I always associate with country & Western), and similar rhythms. This isn’t that crying-in-one’s-whiskey style; even when Hank detours into self-pity (as he does on I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry, Why Don’t You Love Me, and many others), there’s still a fair amount of movement going on in the music itself.

Lyrically, Hank seems to dwell either on the cold-heartedness of women (pick a song, any song) or having a good time (Honky Tonkin’). Jambalaya (On The Bayou) makes me hungry with all its talk of Cajun food, and Baby, We’re Really In Love actually finds him happy with the fairer sex for once in his career (even so, there’s little room in my world for lines like I’m nutty as a fruitcake when you’re not in my arms). It’s funny to hear a guy who was known to be an alcoholic and morphine junkie singing about the joys of soda pop and dancin’. One does not die at age twenty-nine by indulging in Dr. Pepper and boogie-woogie.

Speaking of age, it blows me away that he had such a manly-sounding voice for one so young. He had a lot of maturity in his pipes, even if his occasional tendency to yodel drives me up the freakin’ walls (Lovesick Blues is a primary offender). These tracks all date from about 1947 up to 1952, and were recorded either in Nashville or Cincinnati; he died in 1953, with his morphine-injected corpse sitting in a beer can-littered Cadillac. And you thought only rockers and hip-hop stars led such turbulent existences.

So, do I like this scrawny little man from Alabama who was born with a slight case of spina bifida and left behind over fifty years worth of imitators? I’d say mostly yes. His stuff doesn’t always move me, but he seemed to have been the one who bridged the yodeling campfire cowpuncher tradition and the increasingly mainstream direction that country music has taken over the last several decades (just look at the amount of performance time it takes up on Grammy night- second only to hip-hop, I'd say). Only about five songs here really turn me on, but I’d bet that the entire disc would draw an ecstatic “YEE-HAW!” from the C&W crowd. Four stars for being a legend and not too offensive to my very un-country sensibilities.

Recommended: Yes