Three Hanks: Men With Broken Hearts

Purists, stay away. Stay very far away. Obviously, it's a novelty to use modern recording technology to put three generations of Hank Williamses on a single recording. Yet songs like "I'll Never Get out of This World Alive," "Move It on Over," and "Lost Highway" are country music classics that were written to be played by a crack band. In the late '40s and early '50s, that band was Hank Sr.'s Drifting Cowboys, and today it's a slew of Nashville cats who can play this stuff in their sleep, since they grew up on it. If you consider these songs not as historical artifacts but as living, breathing compositions, the versions here are quite strong, if a bit overdone with all three men singing in unison at times. Hank III inherited much of his grandfather's vocal ability, and it's his contributions that make the most sense. Hank Williams Jr.'s "Hand Me Down" is a gripping original about a note he found as an adult from his old man.