Hank Williams Was Their Prophet and Tradition Was Their King

 Whilst a good part of the South was succumbing to the ‘New South’ ideology, and Southern-born, self-made industrialists were counting dollars in Atlanta, folks in my neighborhood were still skidding logs with mules in remote locations. The mountains, which had oft proven to be a curse in many ways, were a blessing in stopping (or at least stemming, for awhile) the tide of the poison known to all of us as ‘progress.’

The story I’m about to tell is one of the many coming from the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. Hardscrabble existence was a way of life with our pioneers, and it was no different in my own bloodline. The Holts, James Simpson, and sons settled on a land grant in Newton County, Arkansas in the 1850s. They were some of the earliest ones to settle the wild wilderness known now as Newton County, and their descendants would go on to perpetuate the ‘wild’ part for generations.

The stories are passed to me, faded, like the faint tunes of an old Hank Williams song, which rang from the clock-like radio of a 1956 Ford Fairlane. In the dim light of that radio, the heroes of my childhood came of age, fighting and drinking their way through their own lives. Much like that Hank Williams tune, the melody seemed to hang on the air, reverberating down into my childhood, with the same sad sound that touched my ancestors. Lost loves and lost people. Some would be found, some would not, but all had one thing they had in common that nobody could take: a home.

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