Hank Williams -- "Move It On Over"
Hank Williams simply has to be the greatest American songwriter ever. There's no Shakespearean genius at work here, nothing too complicated or sophisticated. What you have instead is a kind of simple, crude vernacular that cuts straight to the heart of what music is supposed to do: it infuses you with feeling and makes you want to move. "Move It On Over" is simple genius, a song that does what American folk music does best, which is to take a crummy situation and make a bouncy little tune out of it. Williams had the appeal of a folk artist and the studio support of the commercial recording industry -- the two mechanisms could only have fused together in such a seamlessly productive way at this precise historical moment, the late 40s and early 50s, before the commercial aspect of things had taken over completely.
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