Song #53: Hank Williams III - "Crazed Country Rebel"

Song #53: Hank Williams III - "Crazed Country Rebel" (2006)

Straight to Hell

"I'm always livin' hard, always smokin' weed, and I'm hanging down in Texas drinking mushroom tea."

Hank Williams III's song "Crazed Country Rebel," off his third studio album Straight to Hell which, to date, ranks as his strongest in my book, is the man's tour-de-force track, as it details the kind of destructive and lawless lifestyle he proudly lives put to instrumentation and a style that he wholly embraces. The song was one of the first Hank III songs I had the pleasure of hearing, back in 2008 when, like I stated in my writeup for "Straight to Hell ('Satan is Real' Medley)" (number seventy-three on "The One-Hundred Songs of Steve Pulaski"), I desperately needed a rebel-spirit to help me through some grave changes that were about to be made in the transition from middle-to-high school.

"Crazed Country Rebel" helped a lot, as it concerned III detailing a life of pure rebellious destruction of everything in his path, embracing things like weed, alcohol, outlandish concoctions of the two, and the wildly prominent theme in his music about the "overdose of sin." "Crazed Country Rebel" makes for a jolting ride through the person that is III, and is put to a fantastic, neotraditional country style that III has tried to embrace since he began, unfortunately being limited by his record label and brought down by people who've gone on to accept the mainstream pop country as the genre norm.

Even with all that, there's too much lyrical strength and talent to ignore in III's "Crazed Country Rebel," so much so that it's stunning that Curb let him release the Straight to Hell album as is.

Give "Crazed Country Rebel" a listen, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GP3-jHZF2Q