Hank Williams
American · Mid-20th century
American singer-songwriter and musician regarded as one of the most significant country music artists of all time; died at 29 after writing approximately 160 songs, many about heartbreak, loneliness, and failed relationships.
Connection to Taylor Swift
Uncle Jerry frames Williams as 'the country Western 1950 version of Taylor Swift', a prolific songwriter whose catalogue is dominated by songs about terrible relationships, things going wrong, and things ending poorly, paralleling the documentary-of-heartbreak quality of Taylor's catalogue.
Notable Works
- I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, Your Cheatin' Heart, Cold, Cold Heart, Lovesick Blues, Long Gone Lonesome Blues
Appears in the Archive
Context within the Archive
Cold, Cold Heart (Hank Williams, 1951)
“If you wanna break my cold, cold heart”
Uncle Jerry hears Taylor's doubled adjective 'cold, cold heart' as an allusion to Hank Williams's 1951 song of the same phrase. Uncle Jerry sings the Williams lyric at length and draws out the parallels: both songs deal with a lover whose past has hardened them against trust, and both use the exact doubling of 'cold' before 'heart'. Uncle Jerry notes he has previously identified Williams as a male reciprocal voice to Taylor's songwriting about relationships, and considers it impossible that Taylor does not know the song. The allusion is inferred rather than confirmed by Taylor, but the verbal match is precise.
Cold, Cold Heart (Hank Williams, 1951)
“I've never been anywhere cold as you”
Community readers hear Hank Williams's "Cold, Cold Heart" behind Cold as You - the same image of a lover whose emotional chill cannot be thawed, carried in nearly the same words. Williams's 1951 standard pleads with a partner frozen by past hurt ("why can't I free your doubtful mind and melt your cold, cold heart"); Taylor's narrator arrives at the colder verdict that she has "never been anywhere" as cold as the man she is leaving. The episode frames Williams as a country-songwriting antecedent whose catalogue of relationships gone wrong prefigures Taylor's, and this title is the most direct point of contact: the cold heart named outright, half a century apart.
I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry
Uncle Jerry frames Hank Williams as the country-music genealogical analogue to Taylor Swift, a prolific songwriter whose catalogue is dominated by songs about heartbreak, loneliness, and failed relationships. The parallel is to Williams's catalogue as a whole rather than to evermore-specific lyric content. 'I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry' (1949) stands here as the representative anchor, Williams's most enduring lonesome-cataloguing song and a fair instance of the register Uncle Jerry was describing.