Hank Williams pioneered and pretty much invented what we
know today as country music. At the peak of his career, he was acknowledged to
be the greatest singer-songwriter in American history. But after a meteoric rise
to record and radio super-stardom in the late 1940's, the man had made a train
wreck of his life. Drugs, alcohol, and a hair-trigger temper had ended two
marriages, ruined a host of friendships and made the tortured genius a virtual
untouchable in the music business. So at the end of 1952, Hank Williams gathered
what was left of his physical strength to make things right, and begin the long
road back. He booked New Years shows in West Virginia and Ohio, and hired a
local kid who didn't even own a radio, much less know who this legend was, to
drive him there from Montgomery Alabama. Inspired by the mysterious final days
Hank Williams' mercurial life, THE LAST RIDE is the story of that final drive
through the bleak Appalachian countryside of 1950's America. A lonely two-man
odyssey; a boy coming of age, and a man leaving this world way before his time,
a victim of his own abuses.
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