One of my favourite Leonard Cohen hits is Tower of Song.
In it, he sings, “I asked Hank Williams, how lonely does it get. Hank Williams hasn’t answered me yet. But I hear him coughin’ all night long. A hundred floors above me in the Tower of Song.”
In an interview about that line, Cohen said he was not being modest in elevating Williams to a level much higher than himself. He considers Hank Sr. to have been one of the best at the craft of songwriting.
He is not alone in thinking that.
Today, Williams is affectionately known as the William Shakespeare of Country Music. He had such a talent for using imagery to evoke emotion, despite the fact that he had only a very basic education in school and no education in music or songwriting.
He learned his skills at the feet of a street performer in his hometown in Alabama.
He was often asked about his secret to good songwriting, and he always gave an aw shucks answer. My favourite quote of his is, “If a song takes longer than 20 minutes to write, it probably wasn’t worth writing.”
In that approach, he was different from Leonard Cohen who sometimes takes years to complete a song. He will get stuck on a word and can’t move on till he finds the right word to replace it.
I have dabbled in writing songs for over 40 years and I lean towards Hank Williams’ method, though as far from his quality as the earth is from the sun.
The songs of mine I like the best are written quickly. I sometimes go back and tinker with them later and they evolve but if I have to spend too much time cooking up a tune, it probably won’t be very tasty.
Still, there are some I wish I had spent a bit more time on.
Few songs are perfect. Even Gordon Lightfoot has had to go back and change some of the lyrics to his iconic Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald because some of his information in the song turned out not to be true. And he no longer performs one of his songs because it is considered disrespectful to women.
To me, Lightfoot is an amazing songwriting talent and I’ve always loved singing his songs.
But lately, I’ve been learning some of Hank’s material and it is powerful stuff. Knocks my socks off.
©2013 Jim Hagarty
