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Hank Williams appears in new novel by Steve Earle

March 28, 2011 by ahankwilliamsjournal

Veteran alt country singer/songwriter Steve Earle has published a novel which features the ghost of Hank Williams as a major character. The novel is titled after the Hank song ‘I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive’.

Earle tells the Los Angeles Times the novel is loosely based the quack doctor Toby Marshall who sold drugs to Hank Williams in the final months of his life. Earle’s character is a real doctor who has become addicted to heroin and now lives in the red light district of San Antonio.

“I’d always heard,” Earle says  “that there was a doctor traveling with Hank when he died. When I buckled down, I discovered that Hank had been seeing a guy named Toby Marshall, who was not a doctor; he was a quack who claimed to be able to cure alcoholism with chloral hydrate. But I thought it would be more interesting if my character was a real doctor.”

Of course the majority opinion these days is that Hank was only accompanied  by his teenage driver on the ill fated trip to Canton Ohio on New Years weekend 1952. Earle   has his doctor character administer a final injection into Hank Williams. He says there is a letter from Toby Marshall which hints Marshall may have been on the trip and disappeared after Hank’s death. Whatever, Earle says the character is fiction and only based on Marshall as a starting point.

Earle says the novel is filled with heroin and ghosts.

Earle is also releasing an album which also has the Hank Williams song title. It’s an album of Earle originals, but does  include Hank’s title song as a bonus track. The book is coming out in May, the record in April.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Death of Hank Williams, Hank Williams, I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive, Steve Earle, Toby Marshall | 1 Comment

One Response

  1. on March 20, 2012 at 6:16 pm hank sundell

    Hank Williams was and still is my hero. His voice and songs brought much comfort to us who served in the army and later in a army hosoital. He was blue collar and down right a nice guy. There will be only one voice like his. God Bless you Hank where ever you are but I suspect on a cloud somewhere bringing tears to our eyes. You are sir a important part of my recovery as I was in Brooke General Hospital and had the privilege of listening to that wonderful God Given voive. There will be only one Hank Williams. Where ever you are Hank I love you, the rest of the world loves you…



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