panzade wrote:2PacksAday wrote:Lonesome Whistle - Hank Sr.
Only three songs from the July 25 session were deemed issuable by Fred Rose. Of these, the most unusual was "Lonesome Whistle," a title truncated in the interests of jukebox cards from "(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle Blow."
Credited to Hank and Jimmie Davis, it was a trite and cliché-ridden prison song....
Tillman Franks... says that Davis told him that he supplied the title to "Lonesome Whistle" and Hank wrote the words after riding on a train with a convict under armed guard. But Hank didn't ride trains anymore.
Like "Ramblin' Man," "Lonesome Whistle" had the form and content of a folk song, and Hank's record gained what impact it had from the way he grafted the sound of a train whistle onto the word "lonesome."
Colin Escott, Hank Williams: The Biography, Boston, 1995, pp. 162-163.
Yeah I love that song, the "whistle" in lonesome gives me chills.
Today is my Grandfathers birthday {the 9th}, he would have been 73, he passed away five years ago the night before Halloween. I lived most of my life with my grandparents...they were my parents....so I call them mom and dad in person.
When he was in his 20s...late 1950s...for some reason, I don't remember exactly why, he bought a non functional jukebox from a guy, for like...five bucks. He tinkered with it for several weeks and actually got it in running order, sold it, made a nice profit, and thus began his lifelong hobby of buying/selling/revamping etc....jukeboxes, pinball machines, and arcade games...basically anything made before the invention and mass use of the printed circuit. In the pursuit of these objects, he began to encounter more and more records, which in turn led to his other hobby, record collecting.
Between searching for jukes and records we logged many miles together across the midwest, sometimes we would leave on a Friday after work/school, and head out for Louisville, Nashville...Memphis....heh Memphis...I remember standing on and walking across piles of Sun records that were strewn on the floor in the back of Sun studios. There was a guy in there with us, that was just throwing them on the floor as he went thru them...dad said something like...ah don't worry about it son, there are thousands of them, probably never be worth anything anyway....wow. There was one Friday night that he actually waited for the homecoming dance to be over with before we left, he knew how bad I wanted to go with him, and understood how important it was for me to go to the dance with my "sweetie", so he compromised. Those trips of ours were and still are very special to me, I'd give anything for one more.
I grew up listening to Hank Snow, Gene Autry, Ray Price, Hank Thompson, Eddy Arnold {which was his favorite singer} and many others blasting from several different Wurilitzer 1100's and also a 1015 that we had for many years. Nothing can duplicate the sound of those old jukes, I can tweak my sound system and get it close...but anyone that has heard Hank Williams or JR Cash on one of those knows what I mean..the sound is very unique. Not to be morbid, but when he passed away, my mom asked me if there was anything special that I wanted to do for his headstone...we are a family of masons, and with me being the stone guy, it was assumed that I would attempt to make something myself...but the first thing that came to my mind was a jukebox...and that's what we did. I made a sketch, and they made what I drew out of standard granite...it's pretty cool..he would have thought so too.
My Grandfather was tall and thin, much like Hank Sr....any one of those old C&W songs will remind me of him, but Lonesome Whistle, with Hanks trademark whine just sums up all my feelings for my dad in one simple song.
