Hank Williams was the last echo of Walt Whitman’s barbaric yawp. In just five short years, from 1948 to his death in the back seat of a car on the way to a concert on January 1, 1953, he recorded 66 songs, most of them his own compositions, many of them still heard on radio stations around the world. A Nashville songwriter named Harlan Howard summed them up in a nutshell: “Three chords and the truth.”

Every American and just about everyone who knows something about America recognizes at least a refrain from “Cold, Cold Heart,” “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love With You,” “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “Why Don’t You Love Me (Like You Used To Do)?” “Jambalaya,” or “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” whether in versions by Williams himself or Elvis Presley, Nat King Cole, the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, Tony Bennett, James Brown, Linda Ronstadt, the Bee Gees, or even Lawrence Welk. What other songwriter been covered by Nat King Cole, the Grateful Dead, and Lawrence Welk?

Hiram “Hank” Williams was the greatest star of the heroic era of country music in the years following World War II.A logger’s son, he grew up in tiny West Mount Olive, Alabama, in a log cabin in back of a country store. Once the family was settled, the father split, and Hank didn’t see him for another 10 years. Little Hank roamed the town, listening to music at both white and black churches. “Rather than relying on secondary sources – commercial radio, tape recordings, songwriting lessons – he had gone straight to the roots,” Paul Hemphill writes in his splendid new book about the musician, “Lovesick Blues: The Life of Hank Williams” (Viking, 207 pages, $23.95).

Williams’s first direct influence was a black professional musician named Rufus Payne, known by the locals as “Tee-Tot.” Payne gave Hank an informal course in nearly half a century of Southern music – country, blues, gospel, and medicine show tunes. He taught Hank something else, too: Poor folk wanted to see a performer who looked better than they did. When he became a professional, Hank would emulate his teacher, always performing in a hat, coat, and tie.

Thin, pale, and suffering from the boyhood ravages of spina bifida, the teenage Williams became an alcoholic. He dropped out of school and got his education on a circuit of clubs that, as Mr. Hemphill puts it, “had a particular edge to them; which is to say you could get killed in there.” It was the only work Hank would ever know, and he was good at it when he showed up.

When he didn’t, he risked the wrath of small-time mobsters like Jack Ruby (yes, that Jack Ruby). His voice, lyrics, and onstage charisma soon won him a huge following, but his erratic behavior and reputation were anathema to the establishment represented by the Grand Ole Opry. His idol, Roy Acuff, told him, “You got a million dollar voice, son, but a ten cent brain.”

Perhaps, but as one of his band members put it, “For a man like that, to make that kind of impression on mankind, he had to be a genius. Education might’ve ruined him.” Williams had an amazing natural poetic gift, honed by a partnership with a Nashville producer named Fred Rose. Together they came up with lyrics that would make a fin de siecle French poet weep: “The silence of a falling star lights up a purple sky / And as I’m wondering where you are, I’m so lonesome I could cry.”

He was possessed of an innate sense of what his audience wanted because, as G.K. Chesterton said of Dickens, he wanted the same things they wanted. Though Williams was the first country songwriter whose work was recorded by mainstream popular singers, he resisted the trend toward greater sophistication; when one of his musicians asked if a recording sounded “too country,” he answered, “It’s never too country.”

Williams’s life and work have received surprisingly little serious attention, primarily due to legal squabbles within the Williams family that kept letters and papers out of the hands of potential biographers. His own home state of Alabama, which could never quite decide if it regarded him as a suitable native son, did not erect a statue of him until 1991, and not until 1993 were his lyrics taken seriously enough to be published between covers.

In 1995 Williams did receive a definitive biography, “Hank Williams,” by music historian Colin Escott, who also co-produced the comprehensive set of Williams’s recordings, “The Complete Hank Williams.” But this slim volume by Mr. Hemphill, the Birmingham-born journalist whose 1970 “The Nashville Sound” was many a college student’s first guide to country music, is the only book I’ve read that is as exhilarating as the man’s music.

Williams performed in a time, writes Mr. Hemphill, when songs were “written and performed by Southern boys and girls not a day’s bus ride from the cotton fields or Appalachian hollows whence they had come … To people in cities like Chicago and New York, especially the more sophisticated songwriters on Tin Pan Alley, country music was for losers. But for people like my father, it was the latest news from home.” Who could have guessed that more than half a century later, in cities like Chicago and New York and London and Tokyo and Moscow, that news would still seem so current?

Mr Barra’s football column appears every Monday in The New York Sun.