TERRY MOSHER
I don’t know if you have heard Hank Williams sing the Lost Highway. Williams had a short life full of lost loves, drink and drugs, and he put all of those together to sing the most intense and passionate songs you can ever hear.
There is no way I can properly describe the deep and sensitive feelings he put into his numerous songs that he wrote. He poured out his (broken) heart time and time again and became an instant sensation for a young lad who grew up poverty in Alabama during the Great Depression.
There have been several singers who over the years have had a large impact on me for the ability to pour out deeply-felt emotions into song. That would be people like Dinah Washington (who died from drugs), Billie Holiday (who died from drugs), and Hank Williams (who died from drugs).
I discovered these emotional singers when I was a young teen going through some tough emotional times that years later I neatly wrapped up in three words – My Dark Years.
Washington, Holiday and Williams got me through some tough times, because I could hear in their voices and in their words some of the same feelings I had, but were locked inside of me aching to get out.
Whenever I heard one of them singing on the car radio, I almost always had to pull over to the side of the road to listen and cry. I was alone back then – not physically alone – but emotionally alone and I got comfort from them because I could sympathize with what they were saying through their songs.
In short, I was them and they were me.
It has bugged me since those early teen years that whenever Williams’ voice came through the radio those others with me couldn’t feel what I was feeling as he moaned his way through a troubled song.
I would say that I was a lost soul from my teen years (after my mother died when I was 12) to 1989 when our granddaughter (Junior) was killed. It was only then that I got off the lost highway and sought spiritual understanding, and it took me a year of begging God to tell me why she had to be killed before I had a spiritual awakening and cried for six straight days. The seventh day I experienced what humans cannot – true love. It lasted for just hours before the real world started battering me once again, but it was the best thing I have experienced.
Now I get closer and closer to God every day, although like the rest of us I can get sidetrack, but now for only a few hours at a time instead of 30 years when I was a lost soul.
Williams pictures those 30 years perfectly in his Luke the Drifter song, “Lost Highway” in which he lectures us about being lost. Here are the lyrics to that song:
“I’m a rollin’ stone all alone and lost
For a life of sin I have paid the cost
When I pass by all the people say
Just another guy on the lost highway
Just a deck of cards and a jug of wine
And a woman’s lies makes a life like mine
Oh the day we met, I went astray
I started rolling down that lost highway
I was just a lad, nearly twenty two
Neither good nor bad, just a kid like you
And now I’m lost, too late to pray
Lord I take a cost, o the lost highway
Now boy’s don’t start to ramblin’ round
On this road of sin are you sorrow bound
Take my advice or you’ll curse the day
You started rollin’ down that lost highway.”
I understood perfectly when Williams sang “I’m Too Lonesome To Cry.” I was often alone with my thoughts and walked through nearby woods just to get away. I hated going home and these walks would often last all day and into the early evening.
“Hear that lonesome whippoorwill,
He sounds too blue to fly.
The midnight train is whining low,
I’m so lonesome I could cry.
I’ve never seen a night so long
When time goes crawling by.
The moon just went behind the clouds
To hide its face and cry.
Did you ever see a robin weep,
When leaves begin to die
That means he’s lost the will to live,
I’m so lonesome I could cry.
The silence of a falling star
Lights up a purple sky.
And as I wonder where you are
I’m so lonesome I could cry.”
I don’t mean to get you moody or feel sorry for me. We all have our moments when things don’t go right and we curse the night, so I’m all right. But inside I’m sensitive to more things than even my family knows, and that started I think when my mother died, my father remarried (a year later) and we moved from my beautiful hometown in New York State to this state.
The move moved me from being a bright boy with the world in his hands to a dull boy engulfed by darkness. Thank God I did not do anything wrong other than to risk my life doing stupid things like driving over a 100 mph on back dirt county roads, jumping off a cliff into Puget Sound and threatening to swim across the spring surge of Nooksack River and things like that.
But I clearly understand the pain of others, and especially of Williams, who died way too early, at 29 in the backseat of his Cadillac en route to a New Year’s Day gig in Canton, Oho.
Williams wrote this last song in the backseat while with Minnie Pearl as they were going to a recording session. It pretty much sums up me, and Williams.
“I wandered so aimless life filed with sin
I wouldn’t let my dear savior in
Then Jesus came like a stranger in the night
Praise the Lord I saw the light
I saw the light, I saw the light
No more darkness, no more night
Now I’m so happy no sorrow in sight
Praise the Lord I saw the light
Just like a blind man I wandered along
Worries and fears I claimed for my own
Then like the blind man that God gave back his sight
Praise the Lord I saw the light
I saw the light, I saw the light
No more darkness, no more night
Now I’m so happy no sorrow in sight
Praise the Lord I saw the light
I was a fool to wander and stray
Straight is the gate and narrow’s the way
Now I have traded the wrong for the right
Praise the Lord I saw the light
I saw the light, I saw the light
No more darkness, no more night
Now I’m so happy no sorrow in sight
Praise the Lord I saw the light.”
Be well pal.
Be careful out there.
Have a great day.
You are loved.
