Outlaw country musicians suffer from not being rock ‘n’ roll stars. One of Waylon Jennings’s best recordings is a steel guitar version of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice,” from the float period between Jennings’s career with Buddy Holly and his eventual role as outlaw country superstar. Jennings could have gone another way, as could have Joaquin Phoenix’s Johnny Cash, if he had stuck a little closer to his pal Elvis. Waylon’s son, the long-haired Shooter Jennings, channels Bon Jovi in order to sing about how he and his date “couldn’t take no more of that rock and roll / so we put on a little George Jones and just sang along.” Shooter Jennings’s appeal, as Country Music Television adumbrates it, drives the question of country’s rocking potential: It is exciting to think that country has the chops, but simply not the time, to outdo its rocking brother.

Hank Williams III, or Hank III, nevertheless believes that combining rock with his country roots amounts to some kind of appalling necromancy – Hank III seems to think he is a zombie, risen up to repeat the sins of his fathers and to continue their hopped-up crusade against an indifferent establishment. For this reason, he has hired the same creative team promoting “Saw II” – or so it appears – to design the jacket art for his new double album “Straight to Hell” (Bruc Records): Three bent, rusted, and bloodied railroad spikes adorn the foreground, as if he hired a giant country troll to pry him out of his grandfather’s crypt.

Hank Williams Sr. was himself a spooky figure. Long before Garth Brooks dreamed up his soul-patched Aussie Chris Gaines, Williams invented Luke the Drifter, a haunting, preacherly alter ego, distinguished from his cheating, drinking, and drug using self for the benefit of gospel hour disc jockeys. Williams has occasionally been reanimated as a ghostly, Kenobi-like figure in country videos – most famously in his son Hank Williams Jr.’s cover of the hit “There’s a Tear in My Beer.”

But Hank Sr. was more than a catalog of sin. As Dave Hickey writes of Williams Sr. in his excellent essay “Glass-Bottomed Cadillac,” he was a universal songwriter. In Hickey’s words, previous country stars imagined it was their corny duty to write songs that were simple and true, whereas Hank Sr. wanted to write songs that were “clear and perfect.” It’s an ambitious distinction. You can hear it in Williams’s careful enunciation: He wants very much to do his songs right.

Hank III wants very much to do his songs wrong, or at least half of them. Disc 2 of “Straight to Hell” is an amateur noise collage that resembles the kind of ghost track a grunge outfit would have buried at the end of an album during the early 1990s. Hank III promotes it as a separate disc, as something “nothing at all like you see comin’ out of Music Row.” This is rank juvenilia. Field recordings of horses and steam engines give the impression that Hank III is like a boy desperately trying to play with toys that no longer exist.

The first disc, also self-recorded, submerges Hank III’s regular recorded sound in dubious echo effects. They do, however, reward casual listening. Hank III can sing, if nothing else. “Pills I Took” celebrates some uppers; “Country Heroes” trots out the standard George Jones/whiskey synesthesia; “Dick in Dixie” warrants the album’s parental advisory sticker and rips off Carlene Carter’s famous pun on “country” in the process. Hank III has one of the most impoverished imaginations in country music, and one of the best voices. Froggier than his grandfather, he beats Hank Jr. hands down.

Hank III’s live shows begin with an hour of country, after which Hank gives audience members the option of leaving before he gets out an electric guitar to launch into his “hellbilly” routine. “Straight to Hell” is the first of Hank III’s records to meld straight country with the rave-up hellbilly sound. Hank III thinks this is an ingenious inflection of country’s “true outlaw spirit,” but it sounds like niche marketing to me. Until Hank III gets over his war with Nashville, he’ll come off like a McCoy without a Hatfield. After that, he might become a fine entertainer.