Hank Williams Jr.

Did You Know?

• His daughter Katherine Williams-Dunning died in a car crash on June 13, 2020, at age 27.
• His grandson Coleman Williams performs under the sobriquet "IV".
• On April 10, 2006, CMT honored him with the Johnny Cash Visionary Award.

Early life

Randall Hank Williams was born on May 26, 1949, in Shreveport, Louisiana. His father nicknamed him Bocephus after a ventriloquist dummy. After his father's death in 1953, his mother Audrey raised him. As a child, he was influenced by musicians such as Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis, who visited and taught him. He first performed his father's songs onstage at age eight and attended John Overton High School in Nashville.

Career

Williams made his recording debut in 1964 with "Long Gone Lonesome Blues", one of his father's songs, and provided the singing voice of his father in the 1964 film Your Cheatin' Heart. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s he had country hits as a Hank Williams impersonator but became disillusioned and cut ties with his mother. By the mid-1970s he pursued a new direction, collaborating with Southern rock and outlaw country musicians including Waylon Jennings, Toy Caldwell, and Charlie Daniels on the album Hank Williams Jr. and Friends (1975), often considered his watershed work.

On August 8, 1975, while climbing Ajax Peak in Montana, he fell nearly 500 feet, suffering severe skull and facial fractures. After two years of recovery and 17 surgeries, he re-learned to talk and sing; the accident was chronicled in the TV film Living Proof: The Hank Williams Jr. Story. He grew a beard and began wearing sunglasses and a cowboy hat to hide scars, which became his signature look. In 1977 he released One Night Stands and The New South and worked with Jennings on "Once and For All".

In 1980 he appeared on Austin City Limits. Rolling Stone wrote in 1976 that his mainstream country material was among Nashville's best. He was prolific in the 1980s, releasing albums such as Family Tradition, Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound, and many others, producing a long string of hits.

Musical style

Williams is a multi-instrumentalist proficient in guitar, bass, steel guitar, banjo, dobro, piano, keyboards, saxophone, harmonica, fiddle, and drums. He began by covering his father's songs but preferred listening to rhythm and blues. He recorded under aliases including Luke the Drifter Jr., Rockin' Randall, Bocephus, and Thunderhead Hawkins. His music has been categorized as country rock, blues rock, southern rock, outlaw country, rockabilly, and rock and roll.

Politics

Williams is a registered Republican and has been politically active for decades. In the 2000 presidential election he rerecorded his song as "This is Bush-Cheney Country". At a 2008 rally for John McCain he performed "McCain-Palin Tradition". In November 2008 he considered running for the U.S. Senate from Tennessee in 2012 but decided against it. He declined to endorse a candidate in the 2016 Republican primary but later voiced support for Donald Trump and attended an Alabama football game with Trump and Kid Rock in September 2024. On October 3, 2011, on Fox & Friends, he compared a golf game involving President Barack Obama to "Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu" and called the president and vice president "the enemy". As a result, ESPN dropped his opening song from Monday Night Football for that week's broadcast.