A set of previously unheard Hank Williams songs recovered from notebooks left behind after his 1953 death at 29 years old have been co-written to completion and recorded by Bob Dylan, Jack White, Jakob Dylan, Levon Helm, and others. News broke tonight (via Rolling Stone) that the long-rumored LP, dubbed The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams, will finally see the light of day on October 4th, via Bob Dylan’s Egyptian Records imprint. Few other details about the project — aside from the tracklist below — have been announced, but here’s a choice quote by White on his contribution from an obscure interview with Pamela Des Barres I stumbled upon while researching our spring Dylan covers roundup:
The great thing is I live on the street Hank Williams lived on in Nashville and [“You Know That I Know”] just came out of the pile [Dylan] sent over, I picked that one. And there was this phrase about this girl with red hair, and I went, whoa, whoa, and I read backwards, ‘you know that I know that you ain’t no good.’ That was the first line! And I was like, oh my God! And I prayed to God, I said, please, Hank was walking on this street at one point and I’m sitting here now… let it happen again. And it happened in five minutes and that song came out. It was so cool. I was so thankful to be an antenna like that for a second. Because Hank wrote the song, let it be an antenna again.
The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams
01 Alan Jackson – You’ve Been Lonesome, Too
02 Bob Dylan – The Love That Faded
03 Norah Jones – How Many Times Have You Broken My Heart?
04 Jack White – You Know That I Know
05 Lucinda Williams – I’m So Happy I Found You
06 Vince Gill w/ Rodney Crowell – Hope You Shed a Million Tears
07 Patty Loveless – You’re Through Fooling Me
08 Levon Helm – You’ll Never Again Be Mine
09 Holly Williams – Blue Is My Heart
10 Jakob Dylan – Oh, Mama, Come Home
11 Sheryl Crow – Angel Mine
12 Merle Haggard – The Sermon on the Mount