Music: Long Gone Lonesome Blues

Today is the birthday of Hank Williams, perhaps the most influential country music singer-songwriter who ever lived. Even in 2012, more than fifty years after his last recording, bits of Old Hank can be heard in almost every country artist on the radio today. Taylor Swift's ultra-biographical tales of heartbreak, Brad Paisley's tongue-in-cheek novelty songs (the refrain in "My Bucket's Got a Hole in It" is the spiritual ancestor of the chorus in "Camouflage")...they can all be traced to Hank Williams.

Here's my favorite Hank Williams song, "Long Gone Lonesome Blues," set to some of his home movies: