On the night of May 3, 2000, the 35th Academy of Country Music Awards was broadcast on CBS from the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, with Dolly Parton as host. Partway through the show, Alan Jackson stood at the microphone with “The Blues Man,” a song Hank Williams Jr. had written about his own hardest years. Before it ended, Hank Jr. walked onto the stage, and Jackson stepped aside to let him finish it.
A song Hank Jr. wrote about himself
Hank Williams Jr. put “The Blues Man” on Habits Old and New, released by Elektra/Curb in June 1980 and produced by Jimmy Bowen. It was his third full-length album in about fourteen months, following Family Tradition and Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound.
He was about 30, and the song says so. He sings it in the first person, as a man whose name keeps reminding people of a blues man who is already gone, a plain nod to his father, Hank Williams, who died when his son was three. He admits to the drinking and the pills, the arrests on back roads, the lawsuits over shows he never played, and he credits a woman’s love with lifting that weight off him.
Those hard years were real. In August 1975, Hank Jr. fell roughly 500 feet down a snowfield on Ajax Peak, on the Montana and Idaho border, and spent the next two years going through reconstructive surgeries on his face and head. The same 1980 album carried “All in Alabama,” his song about that fall. By then he had rebuilt his career on his own terms, and “The Blues Man” was the quietest, most honest corner of it.
Why Alan Jackson recorded it
Alan Jackson grew up in Newnan, Georgia, listening mostly to gospel music until a friend introduced him to Gene Watson, John Anderson and Hank Williams Jr. The Williams family stayed with him. He later wrote “Midnight in Montgomery,” a song set at Hank Williams’ grave, and at the 1994 ACM Awards he traded his tuxedo for a Hank Williams T-shirt with the sleeves cut off.
In October 1999, at the height of his commercial run, he released Under the Influence, an album of songs by the singers who shaped him, from Merle Haggard and Charley Pride to Johnny Paycheck and Jimmy Buffett. With producer Keith Stegall, he cut “The Blues Man” at just over seven minutes.
Jackson did not simply copy it. He turned it into a story told about Hank, in the third person, and let the original first-person lines come back near the end, as if the blues man himself were finally speaking. He also moved the age in the closing lines from 30 to past 40. The song went to radio as a single on January 16, 2000, and peaked at No. 37 on the country chart.
The night at the Universal Amphitheatre
Jackson was already at the center of that night. He and George Strait opened the show with “Murder on Music Row,” their duet about country radio pushing traditional sounds aside.
George Jones was on the bill too, singing “Choices.” Seven months earlier, at the 1999 CMA Awards, Jones had stayed away after being asked to shorten that song, and Jackson had answered by cutting off his own “Pop a Top” and singing part of “Choices” on national television. At the ACMs, Jones got to sing it himself.
The moment Hank Jr. walked out
Then came “The Blues Man.” Jackson sang it slow and low, reaching down into the deep notes the song asks for. According to later accounts, the audience did not seem to know Hank Jr. was coming, and the room erupted when he walked out. Jackson stepped back and let him carry the rest of the song alone.
That left the closing lines to the man who had written them about himself twenty years earlier. Hank Jr. was a few weeks short of his 51st birthday, singing about the road that wore him down and the woman who stayed.
Most of what survives of the moment comes from clips of the broadcast that fans have reposted over the years and from retrospective articles, so small details, such as the exact line where Hank came in, are hard to pin down. The show’s own performance list confirms the pairing: Alan Jackson and Hank Williams Jr., “The Blues Man.”
Twenty-one years later
Jackson kept the song close. He sang it at Farm Aid in Bristow, Virginia, on September 17, 2000, and again for a CMT Giants special honoring Hank Jr.
On November 21, 2021, in the CMA Theater at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Hank Williams Jr. received his medallion as the Hall’s 142nd member, alongside Dean Dillon and Marty Stuart. The musical tributes were kept as surprises for the inductees. Eric Church sang “A Country Boy Can Survive.” Alan Jackson, in his hat and with an acoustic guitar, sang “The Blues Man.”
This time Hank Jr. did not walk out to finish it. He watched from the front of the audience.