JAMBALAYA by HANK WILLIAMS. Story by Baz Blakeney.

Louisiana, 1990.

It’s 3am and it’s still hot and steamy. You could stir the air with a spoon.

The only light in the world is from the headlights of the car until we turn a corner and find the bitumen sparkling with tiny beads that pop like bubble wrap as we drive over them. I stop and get out to look. June bugs. Thousands of them.

This is bayou country, a backroad somewhere between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. We weren’t meant to be here.

We were meant to be asleep in some cheap and cosy motel, but our plane had been delayed in Houston and by the time we had hired the car at New Orleans airport it was too late to check in anywhere. So we drove around.

We had been doing that a lot through the US. If we found ourselves between motels, we would just pull off the road and grab some winks.

After one sleep-out in cornfields near Buffalo, I woke to find the entire visible universe in motion. The stars were waltzing across the sky as if the glue of gravity had come unstuck. After recalibrating eye and mind, I realised we were in the middle of a swarm of glowing fireflies.

The sleep-out in Louisiana was not nearly as transcendental. The roadside rest-stop was busy with other travellers, some of whom gave the impression they weren’t afraid of trouble and might in fact be looking for it.

So despite the claggy heat, we kept the doors locked and the windows up.

Hank. Painting: Baz Blakeney

My wife said she was woken just before dawn by a large man trying to open the door handle on her side. I asked her why she hadn’t woken me, and she said she had been so frozen with fear, she couldn’t make a sound. I had slept like a bear in winter.

So I was well-rested but neck-sore in bayou country in a cheap rental car pointed towards New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz and the nursery of almost every other pleasing noise made in America.

One of the joys of driving in a foreign country is listening to foreign radio. Turn the dial in the southern States and you could slide from jukejoint blues to Top 40 hits to a hellfire preacher selling sponsored salvation.

I remember one Bible belter with a velveteen voice telling us: “Jesus doesn’t need your money, but if I’m going to spread his word, I sure do”.

Louisiana radio stations would be spoilt for choice even if they played only homegrown music. Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Dr John, Tony Joe White, Professor Longhair, Louis Armstrong — all born and bred at the bottom end of the Mississippi.

Even folk who don’t hail from down that way like to sing about it. Roy Orbison and Linda Ronstadt pined for Blue Bayou, Tom Waits moaned I Wish I Was in New Orleans, Creedence Clearwater Revival, all summer-of-love Californians, made a career out of pretending to be bayou boys.

For us wide-eyed and wide-eared out-of-towners, it seemed far greater serendipity than it probably was to hear Hank Williams’ ‘Jambalaya’ rattle out of the radio as we first sighted New Orleans from the west at sunrise.

That song would be on fairly high rotation around Louisiana – jambalaya, crawfish, file gumbo, guitar picking, big fun on the bayou. It’s almost a state anthem. But it felt like the DJ was playing it just for us as our welcome to the Big Easy.

The music of Hank Williams was, and remains, in a snug, homey corner of my soul. His sorrowful ballad Never Get Out of this World Alive, contains one of my favourite lyrics.

These shabby shoes I’m wearing all the time,

 Are full of holes and nails,

And brother if I stepped on a worn-out dime,

I bet a nickel I could tell you if it was heads or tails.

We loved and left New Orleans and wended up the Mississippi to Tennessee. In Nashville, I decided to visit the Jim Reeves museum to buy a few souvenirs for my father, a Reeves devotee. The woman serving in the gift shop asked if I was a fan of Jim’s and I told her I wasn’t really, I was buying the gifts for my father. I said I found Jim’s songs a bit sugary — I much preferred country music with some grit like Hank Williams or Johnny Cash.

She looked a little hurt, so I asked her if she had known Jim personally.

“Yes, I was his wife,” she said.

I still prefer Hank to Jim, but if I could have two minutes of my life back to do over, I would speak a little more kindly to Mary Reeves.

Stereo Story #787