The Death of Hank Williams Sr.

Bob Thomas, who lives down in Phoenix, Oregon amid pear groves and southern Oregon rednecks, has always been a big music fan.

I've known Bob for over forty-years, met him at Southern Oregon College in Ashland when we were freshmen in the same dorm, Forest Hall, in 1969. I fell in with Bob and his twin brother, John, and we traipsed around the campus in what felt like nothing as much as a comic opera with political overtones, in the heyday of student anti-war activism and San Francisco rock.

Bob habitually turned me on to a variety of music and literature, and I've always valued his contribution to my education in things sublime.

I stayed in contact with him when I lived in New England for a couple of years in the early 70s, and I later rented from him in his house in Lebanon, Oregon, near the mid-Willamette Valley town where I grew up. Bob and his brother eventually settled permanently in southern Oregon, and I worked my way up the freeway to Portland.

More recently, I included a pair of his poems in the Round Bend anthology, Cold Eye. He's also featured prominently in my memoir of growing up in Oregon, A Marvelous Paranoia.

Bob the music lover sent me this fascinating description of the death of Hank Williams, Sr. on New Years Day, 1953, age 29.

Check it out.


TS