LONG GONE LONESOME. The Hank Williams doc on PBS was pretty good. They focused on old-timers, mostly surviving Drifting Cowboys, so I didn’t have to hear Bono or somebody like that talk about how fantastic and seminal Hank was.

I can’t be neutral on Hank Williams. In every band I’ve ever played in, I endeavored to get at least one of his songs into our repertoire -- even if only in a horrible grinding noise version. In a bar band I played with a million years ago, we'd stretch out "Wedding Bells" and "Jambalaya" to kill time in our night-long sets, and they were always a blessed relief for us and for the audience. I’d rather listen to Hank's worst songs than most other people’s best songs. Hell, I even like the songs with Audrey in them.

I’m amazed and delighted that Billie Jean Horton is still around. After her death-truncated marriage to Hank, she hooked up with Johnny Horton, and he died young, too, in 1960. She had been a singer, and charted with "Ocean of Tears" in 1960. She looked splendidly old-fashioned, with her flame-red dyed hair and heavy face powder.

I already knew about his back, and his shady homelife growing up, and the Louisiana Hayride and the Opry, and Audrey and the toll of the road and his feeling like he was being "sliced up like baloney" for sale in those awful last years. So I didn’t learn much new, except what sort of fellows he hung out with, and the surviving Drifting Cowboys seemed like the same sort of fellows you see in the background of any country band photograph from the 50s: raw and good-humored and happy to be dressed up nice and doing just what they liked to do. It wasn’t new things I was looking for, anyway. There were several clips of Hank singing his songs, some of the familiar, all of them wonderful. There were two real money shots. One was his duet with Anita Carter on "I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love With You." It was like slow lightning -- tender and sexy and strong enough to tear you out of yourself. The other was a slightly rote performance of "Cold, Cold Heart," a song he introduced as the one that had best kept him and the boys "in beans and biscuits." Hank alternated between a heartfelt expression appropriate to the song and a flickering stage smile that seemed alternately show-biz smug and ineffably sad.