A Cure for the Long-Gone Lonesome Blues

Today, Jett Williams is married to her attorney/manager, Adkinson, and lives just outside Nashville, where she writes music, cuts the occasional record (she's made three already) and keeps a watch over her father's legacy. She says she has a "cordial, but not close" relationship with her famous brother Hank Jr. (He declined to speak with NEWSWEEK.) But the two did recently work together—well, at least through their attorneys—when successfully fighting their father's former record label for control of the "Mother's Best" recordings.

Still, many details of Hank Williams's life remain a mystery to the daughter he never met, though the old radio shows—and some "hand-me-down" stories—do offer some clues. "I was fortunate that his fans and friends put their arms around me. They told me what his favorite food or color was, which was great," says Jett, who combined the names of her mother and father in 1985 for her stage moniker, and eventually toured with original members of the Drifting Cowboys, "but now, to actually hear him laugh. For anybody who's lost a parent, whether they knew him or not, to hear them talk again—it makes your knees buckle."

Jett says she hopes to release the rest of the "Mother's Best" material over the next three years on separate CDs and, in doing so, show her father in a new light. Hank Williams is, after all, almost as renowned for his drinking and drug abuse as he is for his music. The Opry eventually fired him for being too drunk to perform, and people still suspect that his heart-related death was really a drug overdose. But the material on his radio show, or at least the bits picked for the box set, reveal him as surprisingly lucid. When bantering with his band or talking to his listeners, Williams is as upbeat and witty as he is in songs such as "Move It On Over" and "Hey Good Lookin'." "People always ask me, 'What do you hope you got from your dad?' " says Jett. "First and foremost, I say I hope I got part of his heart. Based on what he did for me, and the stories I've heard, and the songs he wrote and, now, what I hear on these recordings, he had a big old heart. If I only have a small piece of that, then I'm good."

© 2008