Hank Williams' story reads like fiction: dirt-poor beginnings as a sickly child, learning music from a black street singer and refining it in raucous honky-tonks during the Depression, and emerging as a Grand Ole Opry star. He mined his experiences to write songs that will live forever.

After he died in the backseat of a Cadillac at the age of twenty-nine, Hank Williams, a frail, flawed man who had become country music's most compelling and popular star, instantly morphed into its first tragic martyr. Having hit the heights in the postwar era with simple songs of heartache and star-crossed love, he would, with that outlaw swagger, become in death a template for the rock generation to follow. Presenting the first fully realized biography...