Hank Williams, Jr., was raised to be an echo, not an influence.
When it comes to anticipating the direction of country music, Jr. But listen closely to country radio’s defining sounds and points of view at almost any moment over the last four decades and Hank Williams, Jr., is right there-often, he was there first. His father remains the genre’s key repository of myth and tradition (though he’s lately moved it on over a bit to make room for Johnny Cash). This is the part of the Hank Williams, Jr., story that’s consistently obscured by his legendary lineage and his big mouth. And both qualities-the perpetually aggrieved but perpetually primed-to-party persona, as well as the hard-rock approach to country music-have long dominated not only Williams’s music but mainstream country generally, up to and including so-called bro-country and various post-bro varieties.
The sound of “It’s About Time,” too-Southern- and blues-rock guitars and boogie-woogie pianos atop country-soul-rockin’ and honky-tonkin’ rhythm-and-blues beats-is the sonic approach he’s been working for decades. Big Reagan-era hits like “Dixie on My Mind,” “Country State of Mind,” and “American Dream,” not to mention the apocalyptic “A Country Boy Can Survive,” articulated the same country conservatism. The identity politics on “It’s About Time”-patriotic, macho, proudly white and Southern, blue-collar (in cultural affiliation if not in fact)-are the ones that Williams has espoused for decades. Yet “God and Guns” is nearly impossible to turn away from, thanks to the record’s cocky delivery, its coolly malevolent rhythm, and its climactic, almost-metal guitar crunch. The America-hating politician goes unnamed (Senator Strawman, perhaps?), and the commentary is ridiculous. In “God and Guns,” Williams tells off a politician who advocates stripping the “working man” of firearms and religious freedom. Still, “It’s About Time” can’t leave politics alone. “I don’t give a shit about the election,” he recently told an interviewer. These days, as he promotes a new album for the first time in four years, the sixty-six-year-old Williams seems determined to sidestep controversy.
And these days he is more immediately identified for his anti-gay, anti-Muslim, and anti-big-government concert ramblings-and for having been fired from a two-decade-long gig performing the theme song to “Monday Night Football” after seeming to compare Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler during a segment of “Fox & Friends.” Country music’s equivalent to the Son of God is now country music’s equivalent to Ted Nugent. Hank, Jr., nicknamed Bocephus by his dad-after the Grand Ole Opry comedian Rod Brasfield’s ventriloquist dummy-was born famous. In the beginning, of course, the only reason anyone knew Williams was for the “Jr.”: by the time the younger Williams started performing, his father was not so much a country-music legend as a country-music deity. The country-music star Hank Williams, Jr., put out a new album in January called “It’s About Time.” It is his fifty-eighth studio release, but as has often been the case in Williams’s career, which is now more than a half century old, much of the attention that’s come his way has little to do with music.
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