Hank Williams Jr. has been one of country music’s truest outlaws for over half a century now but at his core, the 72-year-old legend is the bluesman, Thunderhead Hawkins. Listeners to the Bobby Bones show last week would have heard a hilarious live interview and performance from Thunderhead Hawkins that Bones struggled to manage and curate! Pure, unqualified and unadulterated, the only son of Hank Williams has the same down low lonesome in his veins as the man Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne taught to play guitar as a small child growing up in Greenville, Alabama.
With ‘Rich White Honky Blues’, this second-generation Country Music Hall of Famer makes good on his legacy with a turpentine and rough wood take on the hill country blues that informed his father’s raw-boned style of putting his pain out there. GRAMMY-winning Producer of the Year Dan Auerbach recorded the set live over three days, with a dozen songs, reprising classics from Robert Johnson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, R.L. Burnside, Muddy Waters, Big Joe Turner, and a few from Bocephus himself.
“The blues is where it all comes from,” concedes Williams. “It’s the start of everything musical in my family; everything starts with Tee-Tot and flows from there. I’ve always flirted with this stripped back blues – all the way back to the ‘80s. But I finally made an album that’s just that, and I like it.”
With a wicked core of electric slide guitarist Kenny Brown (claimed as “my adopted son” by Burnside), bassist Eric Deaton (who first toured with Fat Possum’s Juke Joint Caravan, backing up T-Model Ford and Paul “Wine” Jones), plus drummer Kinney Kimbrough (son of North Mississippi blues legend Junior Kimbrough), Williams, Auerbach and the band tapped into the lifeblood of the blues.
“If you wanted to play this kind of music, you couldn’t have better players,” Auerbach explains. “The first time I ever saw Hank Jr. on TV, I was a kid raised on Robert Johnson and Hank Williams, Sr. records, and those things came through so clearly watching him. So, I tried to assemble the right parts to just sit in that piece of who he is.”
From the vocal and gut-string bounce of opening track “.44 Special Blues” (Johnson’s “32-20 Blues”), caught on the fly and viscerally gutting the betrayal and consequence rejoinder to a cheating woman, Williams’ vocals are potent, earthy, brash and lascivious. With Burnside’s “Georgia Women” leaning heavily into Williams’ delta blues influences, featuring an explosive dose of slide guitar magic, along with the high-tempo blues burner “Fireman Ring The Bell,” plus the chicken-scratching burn of Big Joe Turner’s metaphoric “TV Mama,” the delectability is greasy, trenchant, built to slather on a too-hot Saturday night.
Rich White Honky Blues Track List:
- .44 Special Blues
- Georgia Women
- My Starter Won’t Start
- Take Out Some Insurance
- Rich White Honky Blues
- Short Haired Woman
- Fireman Ring The Bell
- Rock Me Baby
- I Like It When It’s Stormy
- Call Me Thunderhead
- TV Mama
- Jesus, Won’t You Come By Here
Click here to buy or stream the album
