Where Hank Williams died — Oak Hill, West Virginia

Hank Williams died in the back seat of a powder-blue Cadillac on New Year's Day 1953, somewhere on the road between Knoxville, Tennessee, and Canton, Ohio, where he was scheduled to perform. He had been driven by a hired driver, Charles Carr, a college student. He was twenty-nine years old. The cause of death was heart failure, with the combination of alcohol, chloral hydrate, and morphine prescribed by a doctor the previous evening as contributing factors. He was so still and unresponsive in the back seat for so long that Carr did not realise he was dead until they stopped at a service station in Oak Hill, West Virginia.

Oak Hill is a small town in Fayette County that had no particular prior claim on music history and has been associated with Williams's death ever since. The Pettit Funeral Home in Oak Hill, where his body was taken, still stands. A historical marker near the point on the highway where his death is believed to have occurred acknowledges the event. The exact moment and location of his actual death in the moving car cannot be known precisely; Oak Hill is where it was discovered.

Williams's funeral in Montgomery, Alabama, on January 4, 1953, drew an estimated 20,000 people — the largest gathering in the city's history to that point. He is buried at Oakwood Annex Cemetery in Montgomery. His death at twenty-nine, from the accumulated cost of a life conducted at maximum intensity and minimum self-care, was entirely consistent with the songs he had been writing since adolescence: music about heartbreak, loneliness, and the gap between what people want and what they get.