Celebrating a Music Pioneer: Hank Williams, Jr.
Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer lead an annual New Year's tribute to country legend Hank Williams at the Birchmere.
Cathy Fink didn’t grow up listening to or even necessarily appreciating country music. “In fact, I grew up in a neighborhood where people made fun of country music,” says Fink, an acclaimed folk/country artist who became a fan of the genre only after she moved away from her native Maryland for college.
“Like a lot of people, a lot of vintage country music became special to me once I became the person in some of those songs — those heartache songs, those ‘I got left’ songs. Then I started really paying attention to it.”
From that point forward, says Fink, “I ended up becoming just a huge fan, particularly listening to Hank Williams. The essence of country’s soul is in his songs.” She cites as an example the Williams staple “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” “I believe there are only 13 distinctly different lines in that song. It is the most perfect country song there is about being lonely.”
A seminal early country music artist sometimes referred to as the original king of the genre, Williams became an American musical and cultural phenomenon a decade before Patsy Cline. His significance and legacy as a singer-songwriter has endured in the nearly 70 years since his early death at age 29 due to drug-related heart failure.
A diverse multi-genre, multi-generational swath of artists today name Williams as a key influence, including Fink and Marcy Marxer, her partner in life and music for over 40 years. Williams was remarkably prolific, and became known for music often straddling genres, from honky-tonk country and rockabilly to folk, western swing to gospel and the blues. The duo Cathy & Marcy have taken inspiration from that in ways evidenced by their similarly diverse range in musical output.
“While we are folk musicians, we have a huge repertoire of country and early country and western swing,” says Fink. “Are we hardcore country? Absolutely not. And at the same time, we just did a whole album of 28 songs that [folk legend] Tom Paxton and I wrote together. And there’s absolutely at least five killer country songs on that album.” Simply titled All New, the 28-track double set credited to Tom Paxton, Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer was released in late July of this year.
Since the late 1990s, Fink has organized an annual show featuring a variety of artists performing in tribute to Williams. This year’s show, set for Friday, Dec. 30, at The Birchmere, marks the event’s 25th anniversary, not counting the pandemic-necessitated all-virtual edition held in 2020.
“I’d [long] wanted to do a tribute to Hank Williams close to New Year’s Eve, because he died on New Year’s Eve 1953,” Fink says. “I’ve always felt like there should be some recognition or tribute to him during that time.”
Once the Birchmere signed on as the host venue, “I immediately reached out to Robin and Linda Williams, who were old friends and beautiful harmony singers” — a fellow longtime married music-making duo who count Hank Williams as an influence but not a relative.
Over the years Fink has recruited an eclectic mix of special guests to perform with the two duos accompanied by a backing band currently including Alex Lacquement on bass and Patrick McAvinue on fiddle. This year’s special guest is Darly Davis.
“Mr. Boogie Woogie Piano,” says Fink, “who toured with Chuck Berry for a long time. Daryl’s a huge Hank Williams fan and likes to connect the dots between country and the blues.” The same lineup will perform an additional show the evening before at Baltimore’s Creative Alliance.
Elaborating on the appeal of Williams’s music, Fink says it sometimes comes down to “the beauty of the poetry. The straightforwardness of Hank’s storytelling gets a lot of people right in the heart. And I don’t feel that it is specific to any one sexual preference or gender.”
When asked about Williams’s views on gay people or related issues, Fink says, “We’d have no way of knowing. I certainly can’t speak to what the 1940s and ’50s would have been like. [But] country music has a history of homophobia that I think is improving greatly. And it’s improving thanks to some wonderful musicians who are gay and who are proud and who are able to do their thing and bring everybody along. In the world of country music in general, I see things improving a lot.”
Certainly Fink and Marxer have contributed to that changing landscape, both by being out as a married musical duo and through their work in mentoring younger artists. And they’ve won two Grammy Awards, out of a total 14 nominations, for their work where those two areas intersect, at least indirectly, with recordings deemed the Best Musical Album for Children in 2003 and 2004.
In 2021, Fink was honored as the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Mentor of the Year. “In that work, we often have the opportunity to mentor artists who are gay or trans or bi and are looking for help navigating what they need to and be who they are.
“We haven’t had a lot of problems [as openly LGBTQ artists]. If there are venues that chose not to hire us on account of being gay, they weren’t dumb enough to use that as the reason. If there’s a difference from 40 years ago to now, it’s simply that people are happy to talk about it and happy to showcase it as opposed to just kind of knowing in the background but not wanting to say anything about it.
“The Birchmere is a club where everyone is welcome, and that is important to me,” she continues. “I don’t want to play venues where that’s not the vibe. That’s definitely the vibe there. It’s one of the reasons why it’s home to this tribute to Hank Williams and to some other projects that we do.”
The 25th Annual Hank Williams Tribute Show is Friday, Dec. 30, at 7:30 p.m., at The Birchmere, 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria. Tickets are $35. Visit www.birchmere.com or call 703-549-7500.
An additional performance is Thursday, Dec. 29, at 7 p.m. at the Creative Alliance at the Patterson, 3134 Eastern Ave., in Baltimore. Tickets are $25. Visit www.creativealliance.org or call 410-276-1651.
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