Risin' Outlaw - which he also repudiates. And while Hank I might have had a heart several sizes too big for this world, he died in the back of a limousine, not a pick-up truck.īesides, as his mentor, the heavily Hank-influenced Texan singer Wayne Hancock, has it, 'Shelton got into for all the wrong reasons, but it's like he's born again.' After being lured into the obscenity of the 'Three Hanks' album in the mid-nineties, Williams III put out a gutsy, promising CD last year called As comic Rich Hall puts it in his character of convict country singer Otis Lee Crenshaw, country is about lying on the floor with a bottle of Jack Daniels and your heart broken in a million places and thinking, 'Hmm, how can I make a quick buck out of this?' I'm no booster of today's Nashville, but critics forget at their peril that the genre was a business proposition from the get-go.

Mercenary? I doubt his granddad would give a damn. But, in time-honoured country fashion, a paternity suit pushed him into a corner, and he decided it was time to cash in on the family name. When the music in his blood started bubbling up, young Shelton became a drummer in bands with names such as Buzzkill and Bedwetter. What's more, he's got to bear the weight of his more mundanely famous father, Hank Jr., whose southern-boy country rock and 'outlaw' lifestyle left Shelton Hank Williams and his mom to carry on alone in Atlanta while dad caroused his way through several more marriages. His grandfather, the 'original' Hank, has been nearly lost amid all the fans and musicians, from Albertan punk rockers to Budapest folk singers, who invoke his name to signify hardcore authenticity and raw emotion, living fast and dying lonesome.

Hank Williams III, who opens for punk-rockabilly schtick-man Reverend Horton Heat at the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto next Wednesday and Thursday (ģ70 Queen St. Now imagine if your granddad weren't just a family legend, but a national, even global myth.

Ok computer radiohead grandpa