Lovesick Blues

"Lovesick Blues" is a strange, almost uncontainable piece of music — a pre-existing Tin Pan Alley song that Hank Williams took and transformed into something that sounds like pure unmediated emotion on the verge of collapse. The famous yodel that punctuates the chorus is not decorative; it functions as an escape valve, a place where ordinary melodic language breaks down and something more primal comes through. The tempo is quick and the band swings with genuine energy, a contrast to the lyric content of desperate romantic yearning that gives the whole thing an anxious, destabilized quality — joy and suffering running at the same speed. Williams's vocal here is more acrobatic than on most of his work, the yodeling requiring real technical skill executed to sound effortless and a little unhinged. This was his breakthrough hit, the song that got him onto the Grand Ole Opry stage, and you can hear in the performance the particular electricity of someone who knows this is the moment. The crowd noise on the live recordings tells you everything about how it landed: they went absolutely wild for the yodel breaks. The song belongs to the tradition of country music that contains real joy — not the manufactured cheerfulness of later commercial country but something rougher and more genuine. You feel it as relief more than celebration, the relief of someone finally able to say in public how badly they've got it.