Lady Muleskinner Press

I tell you what. We’ve played for bigger audiences,
but we’ve never played for any greater audience, I guarantee it.
 – Mack Vickery, Live! At the Alabama Women’s Prison

Johnny Cash started it with Folsom Prison. Playing prisons had been an important part of what Cash did, but Columbia, his record company, had at first been cold to his idea of recording one of those concerts as an album. Cash’s instincts prevailed, and the record became a defining moment—for many fans, the defining moment—of his career. It enjoyed a lengthy ride on the Billboard pop and country charts alike, it won the Grammy for Best Country Album of the Year, and it inspired a follow-up, Johnny Cash at San Quentin, another classic, the next year. And it would make possible too a new, if tiny, recording genre: the prison album.

Folsom came out in 1968 and San Quentin followed in ‘69. A former Folsom inmate, Glen Sherley, recorded Live at Vacaville, California, in 1971, with Cash’s encouragement. (Cash had performed Sherley’s song, “Greystone Chapel” for the Folsom record, with Sherley in the audience; by ‘71 Sherley was an inmate at Vacaville and MCA arranged with the prison authorities for him to perform.) Also in 1971, B.B. King released his Live at the Cook County Jail, proving beyond any doubt that the prison album was not the sole property of Cash’s circle or of country music.

In the midst of all this arrived, mostly unnoticed, what was certainly the strangest entry in the prison-album catalogue. Its performer, his name unknown on any public scale, had in recent years become a successful songwriter for other artists and had himself been a sporadic recording artist for a little over a decade, often releasing his singles under names other than his own. Recorded in 1970 at the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka, Alabama, and released on the Mega label, Live! At the Alabama Women’s Prison was the first full-length album by Mack Vickery. It was an unlikely debut, and the only full album Vickery would ever record.

Now, almost 40 years later, and again mostly unnoticed, it has made it to CD, among the latest offerings of Bear Family Records.

Inasmuch as this album has been remembered at all, it has been for its cover: tasteless, campy, and absurd, it was a highlight of Paul Kingsbury’s 2003 book, Vinyl Hayride, a coffe-table collection of country album covers both celebrated and obscure, and it turns up periodically on websites devoted to bad album art. Wearing black boots and a black vest, billowy silk sleeves and a scarf, his guitar slung over his back, his lower body packed tightly into his pants and his golden pompadour suggesting a blonde Elvis, the beef-cakey Vickery poses cockily in front of a dreary prison cell. Three female prisoners (models) sit or stand posed around the cell, barefoot in their regulation-blue above-the-knee skirts, cigarettes dangling between their lips or fingertips, their hair piled in various degrees of beehive and their vacant stares suggesting the hardened sexiness of a purity lost. A fourth prisoner stands at the bars, seductively eyeing Vickery as he writes what we assume is his autograph, or possibly his phone number; the inmate’s fingers (close inspection reveals a wedding ring) touch, provocatively, the iron bar near Vickery’s face. Colorful, go-go-style letters announce: Mack Vickery Live! The rest of the title, AT THE ALABAMA WOMEN’S PRISON, follows in an institutional, white block font.

It is a cover which seems to abandon the very thing that has made the better-known prison albums so successful: that is, the deep and obvious respect with which the performers approached their audiences. Here Vickery’s prisoners are crudely sexualized, the objects of male fantasies about women behind bars—this was, after all, the era of women-in-prison exploitation films, and the album’s go-go lettering, prison bars, and sexual innuendo evoke a certain cage-dancing vibe. The cover is self-indulgent and condescending, even as it pokes fun at the prison-album genre itself. It is difficult to tell whether the whole thing is genuine or a joke or, somehow, both. On the cover and in the album Vickery seems to be at once putting us on and in dead earnest.

That ambiguous mix of pranksterism and sincerity was a hallmark of Mack Vickery’s career.

 *   *

Mack Vickery was born in Town Creek, Alabama, in 1938. His mother died when he was three and he spent most of his childhood moving from state to state with his father. When he was nineteen he auditioned for Sam Philips at Memphis’ Sun Records, but Philips declined to record him further. In 1958 he recorded his first single for Princeton Records, a tune called “High School Blues,” backed by “We’re Not Engaged Anymore.” Throughout the sixties and seventies Vickery recorded for a variety of labels (Gone Records, Jamie, Playboy) and under a variety of pseudonyms (Vic Vickers, Mac Vickery (more a typo than pseudonym), Atlanta James), but he never achieved any success as a recording artist. Success did come, however, as a songwriter for other performers: in 1968 Faron Young took “She Went a Little Bit Farther,” a song Vickery had co-written with Merle Kilgore, to #14, and Vickery’s songs soon became a staple among the giants of the country business. Hank Williams, Jr., Sammi Smith, and Vickery’s childhood idol Ernest Tubb also recorded covers of “Farther.” Tanya Tucker had a #5 hit with “Jamestown Ferry,” and Johnny Paycheck took two Vickery compositions to #8, “You Gotta Be Puttin’ Me On,” and “I’m the Only Hell (Mama Ever Raised).” Other Vickery songs were recorded by Lefty Frizell, Willie Nelson, Vern Gosdin, and Bill Anderson, and both Hank, Jr., and Waylon Jennings dipped frequently into the Vickery repertoire. Vickery’s songwriting successes continued into the 1980s, most notably with George Strait’s recording of “The Fireman,” and in the nineties country stalwarts George Jones and Johnny Cash took stabs at Vickery compositions, the Jimmy Buffetty “I’ll Give You Something to Drink About” and “God Bless Robert E. Lee,” respectively. All in all, Vickery scored hits in each consecutive decade from the sixties through the nineties, a rare feat for any songwriter.

The names alone of lesser-known Vickery offerings provide a sense of the songwriter’s sensibility and collectively evoke a poetry of their own: “Bad Girls,” “Cheating Our Way to Heaven,” “Don’t Touch My Yum-Yum,” “Falling Out Shelter,” “Paper Prison,” “Three Proverbial Rodents with Defective Vision,” “Boston’s Busiest Peeping Tom,” “Jones on the Jukebox,” “Send Me a Box of Kleenex,” “She’s Up to My Old Tricks,” “Salesman for Jesus,” “I Knew We Could All Get Along When an Indian Sings a Cowboy Song,” “Perverted,” “Love Held the Gun, Hate Pulled the Trigger.” Vickery’s specialty was the smutty, cocky, double-entendre song, best exemplified by his best-known composition, “Meat Man” (more on this in a moment) and its more sanitized descendent, Strait’s “Fireman.” As a songwriter, Vickery had a quick sense of humor and a penchant for wordplay and innuendo, but he was also adept at slowly sensual, tear-in-beer ballads such as Waylon Jennings’ “I Can’t Take My Hands Off of You.”

It was Jerry Lee Lewis, though, who became the most apt and most active translator of Vickery’s compositions. Throughout the ‘70s the Killer found a kindred spirit in Vickery, and many of Jerry Lee’s rawest, freest recordings of that decade were Vickery covers. As Lewis biographer Jimmy Guterman notes, Vickery’s “Rockin’ My Life Away” “immediately became Jerry Lee’s statement of purpose and all-purpose theme song.” In addition to this song, Lewis recorded Vickery’s “Honky Tonk Wine,” “Ivory Tears,” “I Sure Miss the Good Old Times,” “That Old Bourbon Street Church,” and the profoundly raunchy “Meat Man.” “Been down to Macon, ate the furs off a Georgia peach,” Lewis bragged in that song:

I plucked a chicken in Memphis, mama
Still got feathers in my teeth
I ate a pound of pork in Huntsville
From a fine Alabama hog
Ate a charcoal steak in Dallas
And fed the bone to a Louisiana dog
I’m the meat man
You oughta see me eat, man—

And so on. By the end of the song Jerry Lee is worked into an unholy frenzy and as the music stops he screams—belligerently, intoxicatedly—“Meat man, you mutha!”

In 1973, Vickery became part of a historic, bacchanalian Jerry Lee Lewis session which resulted in the single “Meat Man” and the larger album Southern Roots: Back Home in Memphis. While it has been critically applauded in retrospect as a landmark moment in Jerry Lee’s career, a peak in his post-Sun creativity, Southern Roots proved a commercial flop at the time of its release, certainly not the comeback vehicle which Lewis ongoingly, desperately, drunkenly sought. Its only single—a song designed perhaps for cult status but certainly not for radio airplay—failed to go places. Still, for fans at least, there is an uncanny power to both that single and to the overall album, and the power is most effective where the visions of Lewis and Vickery come together. The Vickery material here provides both the album’s frame and its spiritual core, and it stands as the high point of the fruitful Lewis-Vickery collaboration. Vickery’s songs found their natural expression in Jerry Lee’s performance, and they captured better than any other material Lewis tackled in that era the essence, or competing essences, of the Killer. Jimmy Guterman, again: “the Vickery numbers that opened and closed the album defined the two Jerry Lees. In ‘Meat Man’ he was a raving, cocksure stud; by ‘The Old Bourbon Street Church’ he was vanquished, drunk, nearly crying, begging for forgiveness. In Vickery, a fan as well as a professional, Jerry Lee had found someone who could articulate his troubles better than he himself could.” The trade-off was mutually beneficial: in Jerry Lee Lewis, Vickery found a performer who could inhabit his songs in ways he himself could not.

*   * 

The basic elements of a Vickery composition had been in place since at least 1957, when Vickery had walked into the Sun Records studio—the studio which had given the world its first tastes of Lewis, Elvis, B.B. King, Johnny Cash, and other like-minded punks—with hopes of getting his own record deal. Among the demos cut that day was “Drive In,” essentially a raunchy rockabilly reworking of the Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up, Little Suzie” story, in which an embarrassed teenage couple discovers at 4 a.m. that they’ve fallen asleep in a movie theater. This innocent mistake, the couple worries, will ruin their reputations, and they wonder how they’ll explain to parents and friends their late return home. “Ooo-la-la,” friends will say; but the truth is, they’ll insist in all honesty, they didn’t do anything.

Vickery cut his Sun demos in 1957, the year that “Wake Up Little Suzie” became a hit, and, although the two songs are quite different musically, the connections between “Suzie” and “Drive In,” are obvious. Vickery’s heroine is “Sister Suzie,” who stays out at the movies until “almost four o’clock” with her boyfriend Joe and whose “goose is cooked” (a phrase straight out of the Everly song) when she comes home. But Vickery would never in his career indulge in the kind of Beaver-Cleaver bubble-gum innocence which forms the premise of the Everlys’ napping alibi; rockabilly itself would never straight-facedly pass off on its listeners such nonsense. The most telling change to the story is the use of the drive-in theater as the setting, placing rockabilly’s most potent, sexually charged symbol—the car—at the heart of the song; the tune is named, after all, for the drive-in and not for Suzie herself. Against the beat of a thumping piano, Vickery growls unashamed in the chorus that Sue and Joe were “making love in the drive-in, in the very last row,” and that they “never, never watched the show.” Ooo-la-la wake up, nothing.

Vickery from the get-go had one thing on his mind.

*   *

Some years after the fact, songwriter Merle Kilgore recalled the making of Vickery’s only solo album: “He went down and got buddy-buddy with the warden,” Kilgore remembered. “It was a female warden. They had a few drinks together, and he talked her into letting him come down there. He came out onstage like Elvis—shaking—and them women went wild.”

Waylon Jennings wrote the liner notes and in them described his reaction to the album: “Man, I’m not hearing it, I’m living it! Great! Just great! It’s real! If I don’t get to write the liner, I’ll burn your house down! At least that way I feel like I’ve had some small part in the album—okay, Mack?”

There is something special about any prison album, a quality of live-ness that outdoes other live albums. Johnny Cash knew, in pioneering this new genre, that the prison concert, at least one that successfully translated into a meaningful prison album, was not simply a concert performed at a prison; the idea was not merely to run through the hits for the incarcerated crowd as you might any other audience, but to give the prison listeners something unique to their situation. Though his Folsom Prison show did include a few obvious hits, the bulk of the performance and of the subsequent album was made up of songs about iron bars and death row, about crime and murder and regret, or lack of regret, about revenge and about redemption. Songs were even tailored to the specific audience: “Folsom Prison Blues,” an early Cash hit, received new life when performed from the Folsom stage; for the San Quentin album, Cash wrote a new song, “San Quentin,” a throwaway but pointed composition which the appreciative audience demanded he play twice in a row. In addition to building the right set-list, Cash would interact with his audience in ways unique to the prison-concert situation, egging on the guards and assuming his most anti-authoritarian poses. As Cash clearly understood, the rapport established between the performer and the crowd is what makes the prison album powerful.

This truth is evident on the Cash records and on B.B. King’s, and on Glen Sherley’s Vacaville; Alabama Women’s Prison is, in some ways, no different.But here there is something else going on, too. As the title suggests and the cover makes explicit, Alabama Women’s Prison attempted a twist on the exclusively male world of the prison album. In other hands these records were characterized by the macho male swagger that exuded from both sides of the mic: think of Cash and the prisoners alike ogling June Carter (”I love to watch you talk,” he says on Folsom; “I’m talking with my mouth,” she responds, “it’s up here!”) or King rationalizing to his baby (and to enthusiastic applause) that when he cheated on her he was high and therefore not to blame. The Tutwiler album abandons that exaggerated male bond between audience and artist for a similarly exaggerated sexualized interplay. Vickery winks and swaggers and oozes innuendo and his audience plays its part to perfection, shrieking and swooning from start to finish.

The album opens with “Life Turned Her That Way,” a weepy Harlan Howard ballad popularized by Mel Tillis, which urges its listener not to put down but instead to pity the woman-gone-wrong, whose fall was not the result of her own actions but of her victimization by men. If there is a central figure in the songs Vickery performs here, it is this fallen woman, and if there is a central message of the album, it is this song’s refrain: “Don’t be quick to condemn her for the things she might say. Don’t blame her, life turned her that way.” “Life Turned Her” becomes a running motif of the album: a Greek chorus of female singers revisits the single line, “Don’t blame her, life turned her that way,” several times between songs. (At other transitional moments, the melancholy chorus sings a refrain of “Bars, lonely bars; how I hate these lonely bars.”)

The woman-gone-wrong appears again in the album’s second track, “A Woman Who Walks on the Wild Side,” an up-tempo Vickery composition which explains that the woman of the title “is just following in the steps of a man.” Vickery belts it, his singing bloated and swaggering, then launches into the Joe South soul-rocker (probably best known from Elvis’ cover; Vickery’s performance smacks throughout of Elvis), “Walk a Mile in My Shoes.” The first side of the record concludes with a comedy monologue and medley called “Down at John Wayne’s Ranch.”

This is where things really get strange.

Certainly humor was a big part of Mack Vickery’s overall thing. Most of his best-known tunes turn on some kind of wordplay (usually risque); Vickery had also been prominently featured on the 1960s “triple-X-rated” adult comedy LP, Elmer Fudpucker Live at the Nudist Colony: Lettin’ it All Hang Out. (That album, released on the Vulgar label, went gold, and is really Vickery’s album more than it is Fudpucker’s; among other songs, Vickery co-wrote “Big Bad Bruce,” a spoof of Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John,” in which the hero is not a burly coal-miner but a swishy-stereotyped gay hairdresser who dies trying to rescue his purse from a hair-drier fire.) Supposedly a tape exists of Vickery telling jokes to an audience of ducks, who quack at all the punchlines. The comedy routine had long been a staple of live country shows and figured also into Elvis’ Vegas act; a common kind of schtick has been the impersonation of popular singers singing their biggest hits (check out the live albums of Merle Haggard or Buck Owens for examples). Heard today, these routines, even in the hands of a Haggard or Owens, usually come off as variously corny, dull, or embarrassing—but even within the tradition of bad country comedy, awkward one-liners, and mediocre celebrity impressions, Vickery’s eight-minute “Down at John Wayne’s Ranch” is an unusually uncomfortable listen.

The bit is bizarre and convoluted—it features, among other things, Vickery’s impression of Porky Pig doing an impression of Mel Tillis—and is at most moments painfully unfunny, but it does give Vickery a chance to interact with his audience, and that interaction, as on any prison album, is what gives the record its charm and even (this is not a joke) its emotional impact. However corny or surreal the material may get, the response of the audience is genuine and infectious. When Vickery, impersonating John Wayne, introduces his friend Porky Pig to the audience, an African American inmate shouts out: “Okay, soul brother!” In his best John Wayne drawl Vickery responds, “Well, thank you, sister,” and the crowd goes wild. When Vickery launches into his Elvis impersonation, that crowd—apparently oblivious to the fact that much of the show already has been a kind of Elvis impersonation—responds as if the King himself has just walked onstage. He hits “Heartbreak Hotel” and unleashes screams. And something happens here: Vickery and the audience alike are transformed by the communal act of make-believe. In this moment, black and white, the incarcerated and the free, the woman-gone-wrong and the male seductor himself, gyrating hypnotically onstage, are all, mysteriously, united—it is an unusually transcendent moment for so patently unfunny a comedy routine.

Side one ends.

The second side of the record opens with “Alabama Women’s Prison Blues,” which Vickery, under the pseudonym Atlanta James, would release also as a single. This song is the highlight of the album, better even than the collectors’-item cover. “Well, they caught her in Montgomery,” Vickery sings, “carrying that hooch, hoochie-coo.”

The crowd cheers. The band is rocking.

“She was wearing high-heeled sneakers,” Vickery continues in the song’s only other verse, “and a low-cut mini, too.”

The song ends too soon. He doesn’t play it twice. Band and singers immediately switch gears back into the slow refrain of “Life Turned Her That Way” before Vickery introduces the next number:

“This song,” he solemnly informs the audience, “was inspired by the contents of a woman’s purse.” The song—his own composition, “The Purse,” almost certainly composed with this very moment in mind—traces the life-cycle of the good-woman-gone-wrong through the changing contents of her purse: from, on the girl’s fifth birthday, the purse’s dum-dum sucker, bobby pins, and souvenir sea-shells; to the rat-tail comb and drive-in ticket stub the purse carried on graduation day; to—after a tell-tale key change—”a pearl-handled pistol, six silver shells,” and (the finishing touch) “a roll of papers from a woman’s prison.” Also in this last incarnation of the purse are a quarter and a dime which the woman will spend on a bottle of wine, so that she can dream of the dum-dum suckers, bobby pins, and rat-tail combs of her innocence.

(It is hard but to notice that drive-in stub among the contents of the pivotal second purse: perhaps if Sister Suzie had not gone with Atlanta James to the drive-in, or perhaps if she’d only watched the show, she would never have taken that turn for the worse, following in the steps of a man. Vickery may as well be indicting himself. Maybe he is.)

“Sing it!” someone shrieks, more than once, during the song. And he sings it.

The band cranks it up again for another Joe South cover, a catchy “Games People Play.” There’s another country weeper and the album ends with a trio of religious tunes, including Sunday-school sing-a-longs of “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” and “Old Time Religion.”

The album fades out over frenzied cheers.

At the Julia Tutwiler, Mack Vickery is a star.

 *   *

Mack Vickery died of a heart attack at the age of 66, on December 21, 2004. His friends remembered him unanimously as a hell-raiser and a good time. His only album, Live! At the Alabama Women’s Prison, was released on CD for the first time in 2008, by Bear Family Records. The reissue includes the full LP, plus two bonus tracks, including Vickery’s own recording of “Meat Man.”

May he rest in peace.

Sometime in the hours between New Year’s Eve, 1952, and New Year’s Day, 1953, en route to a show in Canton, West Virginia, Hank Williams passed away in the back seat of his Cadillac, 29 years old, his body full of morphine and whiskey. His recent recording, “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive,” endowed now for his fans with a sudden, mystical relevance, immediately went to number one on the country charts; other releases, including “Kaw-Liga” and “You’re Cheatin’ Heart,” also became major posthumous hits in the new year. Hank’s record label, MGM, followed the death of its biggest country star (the biggest country star) by quickly issuing and reissuing as much of Hank’s material as it could. One of the label’s releases in the coming months was a box-set of 78-rpm recordings by Luke the Drifter, Williams’s homily-spinning alter-ego. The new package of previously released recordings presented Hank Williams for the first time as Luke the Drifter, the two names printed side by side—though the identity of the man behind the pseudonym had never been much of a mystery, during Hank’s lifetime the Drifter records never bore the singer’s real name. In death, though, Hank and Luke were finally, formally united.

The Luke the Drifter records were, for the most part, spoken recitations, interspersed with occasional singing, featuring religious and moral themes. The alternate persona Williams created through Luke the Drifter provided an escape from, and a balance against, the image of Hank as sinner—an image hinted at by his more raucous songs, with their celebration of the honky-tonk lifestyle, and reinforced dramatically by reports of his drinking and marital infidelities, his expulsion from the Grand Ole Opry, and, finally, the circumstances of his death. In the wake of that death, the timely reminder of Hank’s work as Luke the Drifter served as a sentimental memorial and an assurance, to those fans who might have been concerned, that Hank Williams was above all a good man, a mama’s boy and a Christian, however flawed, and that, despite anything else, he had surely made it through the Pearly Gates.

It would be nothing new to point out the double personality of country music, or of American roots music in general, that Saturday-night/Sunday-morning split that allowed even as staid an outfit as the Carter Family to move back and forth from Jesus to the jailhouse without pause or apology. For much of the twentieth century, the African-American blues musician turned his or her back on the church by choosing instead to play the devil’s music, while the churchgoer likewise made a conscious decision to reject the blues outright; at the dawning of rock and roll, Jerry Lee Lewis, one of American music’s essential personalities and most divided souls, bemoaned the fact that he was dragging his audience with him to Hell—but, like a thing possessed, kept right on playing. You can’t have it both ways, the strict sin/salvation dichotomy behind the music exhorts, but our greatest performers have flamboyantly bucked such an assumption, ingrained in their upbringings but contested in their lived experience. Country music, rising from the same wellsprings as the blues and rock and roll, has likewise always saved room for its opposite impulses of downhome values and downhome revelry, even if at times that schizophrenia has been tricky for the artists or their fans to negotiate.

With the invention of Luke the Drifter, Hank Williams provided the ultimate metaphor for country music’s divided soul.

 *   *

As Luke the Drifter, Hank Williams sings and speaks religious songs and sermons you can, and possibly should, drink beer to: sadly, reverently, slowly. The Drifter recordings are the flipside to Hank’s gayer, good-timing numbers, songs like “Honky Tonk Blues” or “Settin’ the Woods on Fire”; but like so many of Hank’s secular classics—”I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Take These Chains from My Heart”—the Drifter recordings carry the heavy sorrow of human endeavor and failure, the same sense of loneliness, desperation, fallibility, and rootlessness—the same sadness, in short, that Hank made almost synonymous with country music. The Drifter sides feature broken hearts, broken homes, suicidal girls, dead mothers, and weary sinners, set against country bass lines and fiddle strains reminiscent of “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” An organ often underscores the midnight-radio-preacher feel of the monologues. Tunes that are not overtly religious are at least moralizing and typically heavy with sentimentality. All are spoken from a familiarity with “life’s other side,” born out of an intimacy with sin and sorrow. The Drifter himself is both an outcast and a preacher, outlaw and revelator, spinning his teary, beer-drenched philosophies from a barstool pulpit against the quiet hum of a country jukebox choir. As Luke the Drifter, Hank does not renounce the wilder side of life; he confesses it and tries, through tears, to understand it. He repents, but not with the finality which pretends that he will never do it again. The Drifter sermons are above all a grappling at understanding, at meaning, and at peace; they are a plea for both divine and human compassion.

Just a picture from life’s other side: someone has fell by the way
A life has gone out with the tide, that might have been happy some day
There’s a poor old mother at home; she’s watching and waiting alone
Just longing to hear from a loved one so dear; just a picture from life’s other side

Though he became a master of the genre, Hank did not invent the morally driven recitation record; such records were already part of a healthy country music tradition by the late ‘40s, T. Texas Tyler in particular making a name for himself in this field with his 1948 narration, “A Deck of Cards,” and later follow-ups. Hank wrote some of the Drifter songs himself, often in collaboration with songwriter/publisher/producer Fred Rose, but he drew from other sources as well for his narrations: “A Picture from Life’s Other Side,” for example, was a late nineteenth-century parlor song, recorded first in 1926 and several times since before it got to Hank and Luke. Williams had a liking for this type of song and pushed to get the records made, despite the initial reluctance of Rose and MGM.

When Hank’s recitations were first released as singles, the “Drifter” pseudonym had developed out of simple market considerations. Hank records were popular commodities, but

Hank’s name on a recitation record would cause jukebox operators to rebel. As biographer Colin Escott puts it: “Virtually all of the operators serviced bars, and the last thing they needed was for someone to punch up a Hank Williams record and get a sermon.” Hank records were meant to be played in honky-tonks; Luke records were meant to be played at home—by the so-called “take-home” crowd. Although the pseudonym didn’t, and wasn’t meant to, fool anybody about the owner of that too-familiar voice, it did allow listeners to know what they were getting into before they spun the record, and, if they liked, to keep the two spheres—honky-tonk and hearth—separate.

One metaphor country music offers for this classic separation is the brother duet, a tradition best embodied by the Louvin Brothers, Charlie and Ira. Originally pigeon-holed as a religious act, the Louvins also proved their mettle with their many secular successes—”When I Stop Dreaming,” “The Knoxville Girl,” “Cash on the Barrelhead”—and finally managed a delicate balancing act, moving back and forth throughout their career between the non-religious and the gospel. When the Louvins had first branched away from their gospel beginnings, they risked losing their fanbase and their label, but, on the strength of the performances, they kept both while gaining also a much wider audience. The brothers continued to break up their secular work with classic gospel singles and albums. Their 1958 LP Satan is Real remains one of the Louvins’ best-known works, in part because of its cover, which pictures the white-suited Louvins singing with outstretched arms from a rocky, burning Hell; a towering plywood cutout of a buck-toothed Satan, designed by Ira himself, looms behind the brothers. Though kitschy cover art has helped the album remain a solid seller into the 21^st century, a quick listen to the music inside, or to any of the brothers’ religious cuts, testifies loudly to the fact that the Louvins could sing the hell out of a sacred song.

But the personal life of the Louvins—that of Ira, anyway—was considerably less pious than the religious tracks would suggest. Biographers tend to portray the brothers as polar opposites, the embodied halves, in fact, of country schizophrenia: Charlie, the virtuous teetotaler, vs. the alcoholic and sometimes-violent Ira, notorious for drunkenly smashing his own mandolins on-stage and on one occasion shot three times in the back by his third wife (he had attempted to strangle her with a telephone cord; both survived the incident). An eerie precursor to Jerry Lee Lewis, Ira was despite his unholy reputation nothing if not God-fearing, guilt-ridden by his avoidance of an internal call to preach and tormented by his inability to do right. Fed up with his brother’s transgressions, Charlie Louvin finally quit the duo in 1963 and launched a respectable, if forgettable, solo career; Ira, along with his fourth wife, died in a car wreck two years later.

Hank Williams, meanwhile, at once country music’s damnedest sinner and holiest saint, was Charlie and Ira Louvin bound into one man, a poet of goodness and a poet of wickedness also who, in Whitman’s terms, was genuinely propelled both by evil and by reform of evil—but he created the pseudonym to keep his two halves symbolically, however superficially, separated. “Here’s one by my half brother,” he sometimes announced before doing a Luke the Drifter tune over the radio, winking obviously at Nashville’s worst-kept secret and transforming himself with the offhand quip into a one-man brother act. The line between the two personas (the Williams Brothers, if Luke had been the type for last names) was drawn, but fuzzily.

For his doppelganger, Williams chose the image of the Drifter, the classic Western hero, grounded in the still-older tradition of the wandering, sermonizing champion of the New Testament. And, like that Original Drifter, he befriended in song and sermon the “social enemies” of his own time and place—the lipsticked lady of the night, the bad girl down the street, the shame-faced dying gambler, the broken-hearted living dead, and all the other “outcast[s] whom no one will save.” Even “The Funeral,” whose grotesque representation of African Americans comes off today as more than offensive, attempts to demonstrate the humanity and power of what the Drifter calls, oblivious to the condescension beneath his good intentions, “a crushed, undying race.” One of the Drifter’s favorite themes is “Judge not lest ye be judged,” and again and again he warns against casting stones, insisting that there is another side to the story. As anyone familiar with the old westerns knows, it is a fine line that separates the lawman from the outlaw, the “good guy” from the “bad guy,” and it is the arbitrary, flimsy, even reversible nature of this line with which the Drifter is interested.

The trick of the pseudonym, of the doubling of the self, was of course an old trick in popular music, indeed in many areas of our culture. In the 19^th century, Soren Kierkegaard had written under, or through, a variety of pseudonyms, each of his various-named “writers” representing a different mode of belief; the use of the pseudonyms allowed Kierkegaard a distance from the often-contradictory views his writers expressed, allowing for dialogue rather than a single, overarching philosophical structure within his work. One of these fictitious authors, Anti-Climacus, was Kierkegaard’s ideal Christian, capable of voicing ideas which Kierkegaard—himself an ordinary sinner—would be unable to effectively express. Luke the Drifter serves a similar function, allowing for the expression of ideas which may have seemed at odds with the public persona of Hank as Hank, and what Williams creates through this character is indeed a kind of dialogue between his two selves. But, again, the line between Luke and Hank is blurry, and even Luke—unlike Anti-Climacus—is not a “perfect” Christian. If there is any one moral to the Luke the Drifter recordings, after all, it is that no one is perfect, that the notion of a perfect Christian itself is by definition a sham—that the best we can do is to recognize that we all are simply human, and that this shared humanity is, if we choose to recognize it, God’s greatest gift to us.

That Luke is a Drifter—like Hank, like the rest of us—is what makes his sermons work.

Hank’s Drifter is a descendent of the Biblical Job, who knows hardship, temptation, and tribulation, but retains faith in a mysterious God who must know what He’s doing, who believes with Jimmy Carter that “life is not fair” and that that knowledge makes its unfairness bearable. Neither Luke’s past nor his present are spotless, and even his future is uncertain; he is a wanderer, aimless, in the wilderness, kin to the protagonist of Charles Brown’s 1945 “Drifting Blues,” “drifting like a ship out on the sea” and crying, “I ain’t got nobody to care for me,” familiar too with the spiritual danger forewarned by Bill Monroe in his classic bluegrass exhortation, “Drifting Too Far From the Shore.” It is characteristic that in the opening line of “Men with Broken Hearts,” Luke the Drifter includes himself among the fallen: “You’ll meet many just like me,” he begins, “upon life’s busy street.”

This is not the uplifting, bouncy gospel of, say, “I Saw the Light,” Williams’ best-known religious song (a song recorded under his own name, not Luke’s, and lacking the sermon that is hallmark of the Drifter recordings). But “Men with Broken Hearts” was a song Hank was proud of, his own composition, and it’s a typical expression of Luke the Drifter’s dreary brand of gospel. The narration continues, underscoring the typical judge-not theme with typical despondency:

“Isn’t that the awfullest, morbidest song you ever heard in your life?” Hank once beamed after playing the tune for a Montgomery reporter. He played the song again, and this time remarked, more soberly: “Don’t know why I happened to of wrote that thing. Except somebody that’s fell, he’s the same man ain’t he? So how can he be such a nice guy when he’s got it and such a bad guy when he ain’t got nothin’?”

 *   *

The life of Hank Williams ended abruptly, his career at its peak. The scramble to make sense of that life—to explain it, rationalize it, deify it, or lay claim to it—began as soon as Hank’s body was cold, and for many that struggle to define Hank Williams has been waged on a moral scale: in the final judgment, the question arises, does Hank the sinner outweigh Hank the saint, or vice versa? Certainly, today, the sinner story gets more press. Hank’s own son, Hank, Jr. (who once upon a time, between 1969 and 1970, released three albums as Luke the Drifter, Jr.), has spent most of his career embracing the “rowdy” side of his father’s legacy, rationalizing in his daddy’s name that “If I get stoned and sing all night long, it’s a family tradition.” Indeed, this side has appealed to many of Hank’s country music inheritors, his extended, self-proclaimed “family.” A line from alt-country iconoclast Robby Fulks wryly nods to the image of Hank-as-demon, commenting on the birthday of Bloodshot Records, the Chicago home of “insurgent country,” that “somewhere down below, Ol’ Hank is sweetly smiling.” But other fans, less comfortable with the hell-raising or hell-bound legacy, have held up Hank’s religious records in defense of his wilder, destructive side; beneath the good times, the women, and the drinking, they can assure themselves, was the more profound faith of a Christian whose religion embraced above all else the ideals of Mother and of God. Luke the Drifter, they argue, pointing at “Beyond the Sunset” or “I Dreamed About Mama Last Night”: that was the real Hank Williams.

Of course, any view that ignores or underplays either side presents an inaccurate portrayal of Hank. Indeed, the very phrase “either side” already creates a false simplicity, as if the duality of the two repertoires and two names could after all represent two neatly divisible halves. Luke the Drifter may have worked as a useful marketing tool, and may help neatly personify country music’s warring impulses, but, as the Drifter himself insisted, virtue and vice are not so easily delineated.

Hank Williams is buried in Montgomery, Alabama, beneath an astro-turfed, tourist-frequented gravesite. Inscribed prominently on his tombstone are the words “Praise the Lord—I Saw the Light,” underscored with musical notes. The line is familiar to any Williams fan and is, on a tombstone, comforting—but it is somehow unsatisfying, too much of a disconnect, perhaps, or too narrow a view, and therefore rings false. (Minnie Pearl, after all, reported that towards the end of his life Hank refused to sing his beloved song with her: “There ain’t no light,” she recalls his bleak protest. “It’s all dark.”) More appropriate, if less familiar, might be a line from a Luke the Drifter record; the little girl praying in the Drifter’s “Help Me Understand” may sum up Hank’s, and our, spiritual strivings best. Bewildered by her parents’ senseless divorce, taught to feel shame at the mention of her father’s name, floundering for answers in a physical world and a spiritual world that are equally confusing, she is left only with a humble prayer:

That, in the end, may be Hank’s—and Luke’s— most fitting, and most powerful, epitaph.