Pull up a chair. Every genre has a cornerstone, one name it keeps circling back to no matter how far the sound travels, and country’s cornerstone has a birthday this week. So before we get to everything else that happened on these dates, let’s start where country music kind of starts.
Happy 103rd, Hank
On September 17, 1923, near Mount Olive in Butler County, Alabama, a boy named Hiram Williams was born to a church-organist mother and a father who worked the logging camps. The world would come to know him as Hank. He got just 29 years, dying on New Year’s Day in 1953, but in that short run he more or less wrote the blueprint every country songwriter has been working from since. “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Hey Good Lookin’,” “I Saw the Light.” He is widely called country’s first true superstar, and in 2010 he was even given a special Pulitzer Prize for it.
Here’s the part that matters if you’re listening today, though. Hank never really left. George Jones spent his early career trying to sing like him. Alan Jackson looked straight back to Hank when he was finding his own lane. And if Charley Crockett has been in your rotation this year, you have heard Ol’ Hank’s fingerprints all over that phrasing. Three generations of the family are still on stage right now (Hank Jr., grandsons Hank III and Sam Williams, granddaughter Holly Williams), which makes the Williams name less a piece of history and more a living family tree.
Fitting footnote: September 17 also happens to be International Country Music Day. The calendar clearly knew what it was doing.
The Rest of the Week Around the Dial
Hank’s birthday anchors the week, but these dates have seen plenty more.
Rewind to September 14, 2018, when Carrie Underwood released Cry Pretty, her sixth studio album and her first after signing with Capitol Records. The title track became one of the most-played songs on country radio that year. Four years earlier, on September 14, 2014, Luke Bryan became the first country artist ever to headline Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, bringing Lee Brice and Cole Swindell along to help christen the room.
Jump to September 18, 2018, and you would have caught one of the sweetest moments in the format: Dustin Lynch getting inducted into the Grand Ole Opry after Trace Adkins surprised him with the invitation at a show weeks earlier. That same date in 2015, the Country Music Hall of Fame opened its “Eric Church: Inside the Outsider” exhibit, stage wear, handwritten lyrics, well-loved guitars and all.
September 19 carries both a goodbye and a milestone. In 2004, the great Skeeter Davis passed away at 72. Her crossover classic “The End of the World” is still a benchmark, and she was a beloved Opry member for more than 45 years. On a brighter note, in 2018 Miranda Lambert kicked off her artist-in-residency at the Country Music Hall of Fame, an honor reserved for artists who’ve genuinely shaped American music.
Why We Keep Looking Back
It’s easy to treat “this day in history” as trivia. It isn’t. The thread running from Hank Williams in a 1923 Alabama farmhouse to Miranda Lambert holding court at the Hall of Fame to Charley Crockett borrowing that lonesome ache is the same thread. Country doesn’t discard its past, it builds on it, and that’s exactly why the music still feels like home to so many people. Knowing the story behind the sound only makes the next song hit a little deeper.
Over to You
Of everything on this list, whose music are you cueing up first this week, Hank or one of the folks he inspired? Tell us in the comments, and if there’s a country anniversary you never miss, drop it below so we can celebrate it right alongside you.
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