Song of the Day 3/24: Hank Williams, “(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle”

Guest post by Nathan Arizona

Trains and prison have always been favored subjects in country music. The train whistle calls to farm boys who long to ramble or need to escape. Sometimes they start to miss home. Sometimes they end up in prison. Then the lonesome whistle calls again.

“(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle” has both trains and prison. It makes sense that it was written and popularized by the king of country music, Hank Williams. He heard those whistles as a boy in southern Alabama.

Hank never went to prison. A surprise, maybe, for an unreliable hell-raiser who drank way too much and was addicted to pills prescribed by a quack doctor for a congenital spinal deformity. He did have one brief stay in jail after an arrest for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct, apparently when suffering from the DTs.

Nonetheless, he wrote and performed a string of honky tonk hits that by themselves read like a country music hit parade: “Your Cheatin’ Heart”; “Hey Good Lookin’”; “Why Don’t You Love Me?”; “Cold, Cold Heart”; “Jambalaya”; “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love With You.” This list could be longer.

Williams joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1949, when he was 26. By 1950 he was a superstar. By New Year’s Day 1953 he was dead. He died on New Year’s Day in the back seat of a car on its way from Knoxville to a show in Canton, Ohio, a victim of drugs, alcohol, hard living and a weak heart.

Williams wrote (“I Heard That} Lonesome Whistle” with his friend Jimmie Davis. Davis had good credentials – he wrote the classic “You Are My Sunshine.” He was also governor of Louisiana from 1944 to 1948.

This version of the song has a local angle. The rare recorded concert performance was made at Sunset Park, just a few miles from Newark in West Grove, Pa. Sunset Park, open from 1940 to 1995, when its heyday was long over, booked the nation’s top country and bluegrass performers. A lot of young musicians honed their craft hanging around Sunset Park. Many came from New York and other relatively close East Coast cities. Jerry Garcia was one of them.

The hits just kept on comin’.

Johnny Cash knew about prisons. The song was a natural for him.