New Hank Williams 16-Disc Collector's Box Set Arrives Today

Time Life has released the highly anticipated The Hank Williams Complete Mother Best Recordings….Plus!- hitting shelves today.

The 16-disc collector’s box set contains 72 complete 15-minute shows, featuring 143 performances by Hank Williams together with conversation, and much more. In the music and talk, Williams is revealed like never before. It is the first three-dimensional portrait of an American music legend.

The recordings are from Williams’ Mother’s Best Flour shows, recorded at the pinnacle of his career in 1951. When Williams was planning to be out on tour, he prerecorded his Mother’s Best shows, and 72 of them miraculously survived. Thinking the shows would only reach a small, mostly rural audience in mid-Tennessee, Hank was unguarded in both his conversation and choice of songs. Accordingly, we hear him perform many songs he never performed elsewhere, including some from his childhood. . The original acetate recordings were painstakingly restored after they were salvaged from a trash can by a WSM employee and turned over to the Hank Williams estate. The sound quality of these exceptional radio shows is at least comparable to his studio recordings, and many critics have remarked that the “direct-to-disc” Mother’s Best recordings actually have more presence and clarity.

Hank Williams Complete Mother Best Recordings….Plus! is comprised of fifteen audio discs and a bonus DVD. The shows contain so many priceless moments, including Williams’ first-ever performances of “Cold, Cold Heart” and “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love with You)” just days after they were written, as well as many songs he never recorded elsewhere such as “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” and “On Top of Old Smoky.” On the DVD, two of Hank’s original band members reminisce about his brief, incendiary career. Sadly, both of them died shortly afterward. . The project also contains a booklet with an introduction by Hank Williams, Jr. and over one-hundred pages on the history of Williams, written by respected music writer and Hank Williams historian, Colin Escott. This deluxe, limited box set is packaged in an antique working radio where the listener presses the radio dial and selections of Williams will play.

“When I heard about the Mother’s Best shows, I couldn’t believe there was more,” exclaims Hank Williams, Jr. “And when I heard that these recordings increased the amount of daddy’s music by fifty percent, man, talk about a grand slam. Hearing him sing songs like The Blind Child’s Prayer and On Top Of Old Smoky, and you realize he was listening to country music, soaking it up, back in the 1930’s. But the most special songs to me are where daddy sings with mother on those old Gospel songs like, Where The Soul Of Man Never Dies. There’s something special about those recordings.”