Hank Williams

It's impossible to overstate Hank Williams' importance to country music. Surely among the greatest singer-songwriters in the style, Williams' popular success was key to country's crossover from the "hillbilly music" ghetto to the mainstream pop charts during the 1950s. If his career hadn't been cut short on New Year's Day 1953 by his chronic alcoholism and drug addiction, his five-year string of hits surely would have continued. (Indeed, he had six hits in the year after his death, including both the stone classic "Your Cheatin' Heart" and the deeply bizarre cigar-store-Indian love story "Kaw-Liga.") Those who come at country music from the doomed-romantic school of rock often attempt to mold Williams into some kind of twangy Ian Curtis, but that reductive view is belied not only by joyous hits like 1947's "Move It On Over" (a swaggering piece of proto-rockabilly), but by posthumous compilations like 2010's The Complete Mother's Best Recordings, collecting Williams' genial, housewife-friendly pitchman spiels from his 1951 afternoon radio show. (For that matter, the fact that the man born Hiram King Williams went by Hank professionally because he thought it sounded more country should give pause to those who praise "authenticity" above all.) For every "Cold, Cold Heart," there's a "Hey, Good Lookin'," and that mixture of blues and joy -- plus some of the old-time religion Williams explored on his often-fascinating gospel sides under the pseudonym Luke The Drifter -- encapsulates not just Williams, but country music as a whole.