Hank Thompson, Country Music Star, 82

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The New York Sun

Billed as “the King of Western Swing,” Hank Thompson was a country musician with an exuberant repertoire and a touring career that stretched into a seventh decade.

Having announced only last month that he was retiring for health reason – and canceling a planned tour – Thompson died at his home outside Fort Worth, Texas. He was 82.

Thompson scored 29 top-10 hits including his first, “Humpty Dumpty Heart,” which reached No. 2 on the country chart in 1948. The song’s cheerful lyrics were typical of much of Thompson’s carefree oeuvre:

“I’ve got a Humpty Dumpty heart / You dropped it and broke it apart / All the king’s horses, all the king’s men / Could never put it together again.”

While he never had a top-10 tune after 1974, his records continued to sell and until he slowed down in recent years, he toured up to 250 nights each year. In 1997 his duet with Junior Brown, “Gotta Sell Your Chickens,” made him one of the few artists ever to hit the charts in six decades.

Arrayed in rhinestones and a 10-gallon hat, he was the epitome of the carousing country star, and his song titles reflected it: “Smokey the Bar,” “Hangover Heart,” and one of his biggest hits, “A Six-Pack to Go.” Another saloon song, “The Wild Side of Life,” based on a hymn and with a lyric that went “I didn’t know God made honky tonk angels,” became his first No. 1 hit in 1952. The song became a country music legend because it inspired his some-time singing partner, Kitty Wells, to record a retort. Ms. Wells launched her solo career on the strength of “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.”

Thompson was born in Waco, Texas, on September 3, 1925, and grew up listening to western swing and country musicians such as Gene Autry and Bob Wills. His father was a railroad engineer. By the time he was in his late teens, Thompson was a local singing star with a radio show, known to listeners as “Hank the Hired Hand.” He joined the Navy in 1943 and served in the South Pacific. Thompson liked to joke that the Navy made him send home his red cowboy boots but let him hold onto his guitar. He played for Navy troops on a jerry-rigged stations described as “the Mosquito Network.” Before breaking into song, he urged troops to take their antimalarials: “It’s Atabrine cocktail hour under the banyans by the musty Matanikau River on Guadalcanal – only 7,000 miles from the sunny shores of California.”

Returning to Texas after the war, he assembled a band he dubbed the Brazos Valley Boys after Waco’s river. The band’s first recording, a song Thompson wrote while in the Navy, was “Whoa Sailor.” Signed at Tex Ritter’s urging to Capitol Records in 1947, Thompson went on to have a string of hits through the mid-1950s that almost sound like novelty records today, including “Waiting in the Lobby of Your Heart,” “Rub-A-Dub-Dub,” and “Squaws Along the Yukon.” Proving that Country musicians listened to artists in other genres, Thompson’s “Wake Up, Irene” (1960) was an answer to the Weavers’s “Goodnight Irene.” The Brazos Valley Boys were voted the top country and western band for 14 consecutive years by Cash Box magazine. Thompson was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1989.

Although he lived briefly in Nashville, Tenn., Thompson disliked the pared-down, non-electrified Grand Ole Opry style, and move back west to Oklahoma City where in 1954 he began hosting a televised musical variety show broadcast live in color. Injecting mainstream show business into country, he was among the first acts to tour with his own sound and light system. He was one of the early country acts to perform in Las Vegas. His recording of a 1961 performance at the Golden Nugget is said to have been the first live album in the history of country music.

Although he continued to tour, Thompson mostly fell off the charts after the mid-1970s. A younger generation of “alt-country” listeners discovered him in the 1990s — in part in reaction to his description of what passed for mainstream Country at that time: ” pathetic, monotonous, repetitious, and very boring.” In 2000, he told Texas Monthly magazine, “Alternative is just the music of the forties, the fifties, and the sixties. That was a great era not only for country music but for rock; a lot of the finest pop things came out during this time.”

Bob Dylan has played “A Six-Pack to Go” on his XM Satellite Radio show, and on at least one occasion claimed Thompson as an influence.

“What amazes me is that someone like a Bob Dylan says in numerous interviews that I was a big influence,” Thompson told the Wichita Eagle in 2001. “And I hear no similarity.”


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