When Waylon Jennings, the most innovative country singer of the ’70s, wrote a song in which he criticized his older, more musically conservative colleagues for having made music “the same way for years,” he called it “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way.” Numerous books have been published about him, including The Hank Williams Reader (2014), a splendidly edited scholarly compilation of essays, articles, and reviews, and several biographies, the latest of which is Mark Ribowsky’s Hank: The Short Life and Long Country Road of Hank Williams, which has been widely and in the main favorably reviewed. Williams’s rough-hewn “honky-tonk” sound has since been supplanted by more modern styles, but he remains an emblematic figure who is universally thought to embody the authentic essence of country music. One of them, Leonard Cohen, described him as “a hundred floors above me in the tower of song.” Another, Bob Dylan, praised him unstintingly in Chronicles: Volume One, his 2004 memoir, speaking of how “the sound of his voice went through me like an electric rod.”

Many of his songs, among them “Hey, Good Lookin’,” “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love with You),” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” are now country standards, while a younger generation of rock and pop stars embraced his songs-and singing-as enthusiastically as did his contemporaries. At a time when the music he made was still mostly regional in its appeal, he was well on the way to national celebrity when he died in 1953, and his posthumous fame would grow even greater. (Nov.Ank Williams is the most important of all country musicians, past and present. But in looking back at the legendary Landry’s life (1924–2000), Ribowsky (Howard Cosell) reveals how much the game has changed since the coach’s heyday while providing an eloquent, honest tribute to a football genius. Ribowsky’s thorough examination of a surprisingly complicated man offers original reporting, which serves here as merely a complement to this impressively researched work. At the same time, Landry was a devout Christian who lived by a simple code of honor-he essentially agreed to coach at one point on a handshake deal-only to get squeezed out by the growing corporate nature of pro football. He ruled with an unrelenting rigidity, whether it was viewing players (including legends) as replaceable parts or sticking with his landmark offensive and defensive systems, even as the game outgrew those once-novel innovations.

Rom 1960 to 1988, Tom Landry was the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys, taking the football team from expansion joke to a big, bad cultural empire now known as “America’s Team.” In Ribowsky’s authoritative biography, Landry appears more stoic king than coach, his ever-present fedora serving as a crown.

Hank by mark ribowsky