Hank Williams's birthplace — Georgiana, Alabama

Hiram King Williams was born on September 17, 1923, in a log cabin near Georgiana, a small town in Butler County in south Alabama. His father Lon Williams was a railroad worker; his mother Lillie was a church organist. He grew up moving between small Alabama towns as his father's health deteriorated, and spent formative years in Georgiana itself, where he absorbed gospel from his mother and early country music from the radio. He also encountered Rufus Payne — known as Tee-Tot — an African-American street musician in Georgiana who taught him guitar and whose blues playing shaped Williams's sense of what a guitar could convey, in ways that are audible in everything Hank Williams subsequently made.

Williams left rural Alabama for Montgomery at around age thirteen to pursue a music career, eventually graduating to the Louisiana Hayride radio programme in Shreveport before reaching the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. His time there, between 1949 and his firing in 1952 for persistent drunkenness and unreliability, produced the records on which his reputation rests: "Your Cheatin' Heart," "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," "Cold, Cold Heart," "Hey, Good Lookin'," "Lovesick Blues." He died on January 1, 1953, aged twenty-nine, in the back seat of a car en route to a concert in Canton, Ohio.

Georgiana has a small Hank Williams museum and a boyhood home that has been preserved. The town marks its connection to his birth with modest official acknowledgment. The landscape of south Alabama — flat pine woods, small-town poverty, the particular combination of Baptist church and honky-tonk that shaped his music — is essentially unchanged from the 1920s in its rural character.