The greatest voice in the history of country music.
He came from hardscrabble beginnings in Beaumont, Texas. Served a little time in the US Marines. Cut his first records for the Starday label in the mid-1950s.
There was country music before him, of course, going back to "The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane" by Fiddlin' John Carson in 1924, and there has been country music, of a sort, albeit with a veneer of overwrought glitz and cynical marketing designed to self-congratulate and reinforce a demographic's attitude, since Possum's heyday.
But no one, save maybe Hank Williams or Webb Pierce, has brought to musical life the actual swath of American humanity that understood every note the likes of these artists ever sang. It's a type of American whose engagement with life is raw, whose missteps and fits-and-starts growth of character are on full display, but who endure with humor, simple faith, and the loyalty of friends who can take the ornery with the sublime.
Oh, as the heading for one of your recent blogposts put it: the inherent contradictions that inevitably surface in a society where relativism prevails...
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