Dispatch from Georgiana, Alabama

0:13Hello and welcome to the Monocle Weekly. I'm Laura Kramer. On today's show, we are exploring the Hank Williams family dynasty and the intersection of country music and politics in America ahead of the U.S. election. Here is Poppy Damon.

0:44We're driving down the Lost Highway in Alabama, named after a famous country song.

0:55We pull up on a street that looks like something out of Old Weston. Train tracks right through the middle, a rusty bridge, not a soul around. Yeah, it's a big railway track. All the buildings are kind of copper red. There's signs with historical figures pinned up. We're in a place that can genuinely claim to be the birthplace of country music. Georgiana, which is central Alabama. South central Alabama. And we were developed in 1855. And we were a logging town, a cotton town, and then we happened to have this gentleman called Hank Williams learn to play guitar here and grew up here as a boy. Yes, Hank Williams and his musical family, the first family of country.

1:42And I want to know what this dynasty can tell us about the changing politics. of the South. Country music is music from people from the country, right? It's agrarian. It's rural. It's not of the cities. It's not of the elite classes. It's everyday music. Speaking for people that are not spoken to through the rest of culture, they end up in country music. That's Kyle Coronas. My pen name is Trigger. I run a website called savingcountrymusic.com. Remember when the Dixie Chicks got cancelled for criticising the Iraq War? Or Jason Isbell wrote a song backing gun control? Well, those are the rare examples of country backing the left.

2:24But as you might guess, there is a history of country music being connected to Republican figures. The culture war runs straight down the middle of country music. Well, it used to be easy to get a place, build a house. Now the EPA said, no, that's the home of the blue mouth. Don't tread on me. Don't you tread on me. We're going to use some common sense and we're going to take back our country. Hank Williams Jr. Fair haired beard, white Stetson, big shades, and he is both a symptom and a cause of country music being political. Hank Williams Jr. has a long history of supporting Republican candidates.

3:09Here he is singing All My Rowdy Republicans at a George Bush rally in Florida, year 2000. Get ready, make everything right. All my Florida friends are coming over tonight.

3:24Are you ready for a big win? Republican Party. And then there's his song four years later, We Don't Apologize for America, which was performed as an endorsement of Sarah Palin in 2008. The left-wing liberal media have always been a real close-knit family. But most of the American people don't believe in any way, you see. Stop and think it over. But Hank Jr. might be most famous for his introduction to Monday Night Football, All My Rowdy Friends, which was pulled after he likened Obama to Hitler on Fox News back in 2011. In a way, he was MAGA before Trump, replete with good old boy Southern views.

4:17Well gay guitar pickers don't turn me on And we don't all get into Donna Summer Burnt by his Fox experience and changing social attitudes, he's been quieter ever since although he was spotted alongside his friends Kid Rock and Donald Trump high in a box at the Alabama-Georgia football game a few weeks ago. But here in Georgia, it is Hank Williams Jr.'s father, Hank Williams Sr., the grandfather of country music, who is celebrated as the chronicler of the south of the 1940s and 50s. I have no happy, no sorrow inside. Praise the Lord, I saw the light.

5:09He says, I love this place. I wasn't born here, I was born near here. And if it was to do over again, I would be born right here. And then that's Hank Williams, November 5th, 1939. Me and my editor Charlie are on the stage of the Georgiana Opry House with Tracy Eason. We're standing on the spot that Hank Williams played in his hometown as just a teenager. He is not a star, star, he's 16. but he's gaining some traction. He's won some talent shows. He's got some radio shows. He's got his eyes set on going somewhere. He played two nights. Right here on this stage? Right here on this stage. Tracy, donning a flowery shirt and cropped hair, bought the venue a few years ago and is trying to revamp it, commemorate its history and reinvigorate the town.

6:00Oh, and by the way, it's totally haunted. Seeing that kind of stuff happens all the time. I saw that. Like a light kind of went over. And then, like, drums. There's drums on that stage. It's like something moved, something. It happens all the time. Are you saying it's haunted? I do. I'm pretty sure. I'm just hoping you're not freaky about it. No, I love ghosts. They're friendly. I think it's cool. Hank Williams was born in 1923, and he died at just 29 on the back seat of a car on the way to a gig. What he achieved in that time is kind of legendary, and his short life now reads as the blueprint for all rock stars that followed.

6:39A tumultuous romance with his wife Audrey, an addiction to alcohol and prescription drugs, and a death far too young. Hank Williams truly was the first country music superstar. That's Trigger again. He was taught by a blues musician. His nickname was T-Top, but his real name was Rufus Payne. And so he had a lot of that pain and a lot of that blues in his music. Why can't I free your doubt to mine And melt your cold, cold heart Rufus Payne was an African-American street musician who taught Hank how to play in the segregated South and who Hank played tribute to throughout his life. But despite this seeming slant towards unity on the issue of race, Hank Williams' politics is kind of a mystery.

7:37There's a lot of people that have tried to assign political affiliations to Hank Williams, and I just don't know that we have a clear enough picture. That assigning is because Hank can be both easily a symbol of macho American southern masculinity, salt of the earth and singing about the hurt of the working man that appeals to perhaps a Republican image, but he could just as easily be cast as someone sympathetic to the downtrodden, a Democrat hero, perhaps. There is no such ambiguity with Hank Jr. If the South would have won, we'd have had it made. I'd probably run for president of the Southern state.

8:15He had what he would probably call rebel attitude. And you also saw the presence of the Confederate flag behind his music. One of the famous sort of Hank Williams Jr. iconography you can find is a Confederate flag with his face like right in the middle of it. The irony is that his great-grandfather actually flipped. A Southern separatist, he ended the Civil War spying for the Union Army. But Junior never lets facts get in the way of a good story.

8:47But what is fascinating is what his sons did with that legacy. Both sang, continuing their family legacy, but both, whilst loyal to their heritage, quite literally rebelled in ways that tell of the changing attitudes in America. I don't know where home is anymore

9:11I can't find it on the map There's no number on the door And that's one of those sons playing now. You can hear that despite brash Hank Jr. being his dad, Sam Williams appears to be striving for a different kind of sensibility. Initially a reluctant performer, he joined the family business, releasing songs that project a much more vulnerable side. After the death of his mother and sister, Sam surprised the country music scene, and you would imagine his father, by coming out as gay. This was heralded as brave in the context of country music's sometimes homophobic and hyper-masculine image. His latest song speaks to the dispossessed in a different way.

10:14Perhaps this is a coded message about how he feels about country music, or perhaps for the United States as a whole. But he doesn't offer his endorsement to any particular party. Maybe he's trying a different tactic, one with more ambiguity. Each Williams generation, from Depression-era Hank to 80s individualist Hank Jr. to Sensitive Sam, perhaps tell a story of the changing politics of Southern masculinity, a much more diverse image of what makes a man.

10:48I'm a stranger to my hometown. I get lost in time. I think that the person that has it to bring us back together is Sam. And I do. He's got the sensitivity that his grandfather had. And he's obviously emotionally affected by who he is and who others think he might be. And so there again, I think he's more like Hank Senior. He was feeling that. And I think he would be the one that would reunite us probably more than anybody.

11:48Thank you very much to Poppy Damon and Charlie Bell for that report from the birthplace of Hank Williams. The Monocle Weekly was edited by Steph Chungu and presented by me, Laura Kramer. Thank you for listening.