The Awkward, Enduring Influence of Hank Williams, Jr.

The country-music star Hank Williams, Jr., put out a new album in January called “It’s About Time.” It is his fifty-eighth studio release, but as has often been the case in Williams’s career, which is now more than a half century old, much of the attention that’s come his way has little to do with music. In the beginning, of course, the only reason anyone knew Williams was for the “Jr.”: by the time the younger Williams started performing, his father was not so much a country-music legend as a country-music deity. Hank, Jr., nicknamed Bocephus by his dad—after the Grand Ole Opry comedian Rod Brasfield’s ventriloquist dummy—was born famous. And these days he is more immediately identified for his anti-gay, anti-Muslim, and anti-big-government concert ramblings—and for having been fired from a two-decade-long gig performing the theme song to “Monday Night Football” after seeming to compare Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler during a segment of “Fox & Friends.” Country music’s equivalent to the Son of God is now country music’s equivalent to Ted Nugent.