[78-L] Hank Williams 1938, 1940

[Cary Ginell]

The Time Life website has 30-second snippets of all the tracks on the set. The early sides are certainly interesting, but the sound quality is pretty poor. Still, you can hear the nascent Williams style emerging, even while he was only a teenager. It's apparent he hadn't learned to yodel yet - his one attempt, on "Freight Train Blues" is laughably bad (plus there's apparent groove damage that causes a skip on the track). - I'm still not sure whether he learned "Lovesick Blues" from an Emmett Miller 78 or a remake by fellow Alabamian Rex Griffin (I would wager on the latter). He gets the words wrong on "Alexander's Ragtime Band." Two of the songs, "New San Antonio Rose" and "Greenback Dollar" don't even sound like Williams. San Antonio Rose is a harmonica/guitar instrumental and the vocal on "Greenback Dollar" is a group vocal but it's hard to pick out Hank's voice. 

Picking out a couple of random tracks from the H&H shows, the quality sounds pretty good. I don't have any here to compare them to, only original reel-to-reel dubs taken from actual discs and unprocessed. But what I heard sounds like it was cleaned up pretty nicely. 

It's certainly an interesting find, but is it worth the price of the whole set? That's up to the buyer. If I were a HW fanatic, I'd probably go for it. Williams' sound changed so little over the years that a little goes a long way and I have more than enough of his records to last my lifetime and don't have the burning desire to own the early raw transcriptions.

Cary Ginell

> From: sternth at attglobal.net
> To: 78-l at 78online.com
> Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2011 17:03:45 -0400
> Subject: [78-L] Hank Williams 1938, 1940
> 
> 
> Time-Life has just issued a 3-CD set which contains 2 recordings from 1938, 4 from 1940,
> remastered Health & Happiness program, and a late PSA.
>   http://www.timelife.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=1001&catalogId=10001&productId=200502&sourcek
> ey=Y11GEM914A&mediacode=email
> 
> Has anyone heard these recordings?  Comments?
> 
> A lot of marketing hoopla about "rare and unreleased" - seems misleading as there are really
> only 6 cuts that are significant.  The PSA may be unreleased, haven't checked if it is on
> other HW sets, but offers nothing particularly unique.
> 
> It seems like an imposition to have to buy the H&H programs again to get these 6 rare early, and probably
> not terribly enlightening (???) cuts.
> 
> Is the remastering of the H&H programs significantly better than previous issues?
> 
> Thanks!
> Best wishes, Thomas.
> 
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