We were lookin’ over at Salmon, Idaho, right by a brass stake that marks the Divide. “It takes a while to get up to 9,000 feet. Climbing a Montana mountain with a guide and his son, he stood at the Continental Divide and looked out. & Friends, that signaled his emergence from his father’s shadow. He’d just recorded a landmark country-rock album, Hank Williams Jr. The one he tells now is especially bumpy. He commands a range of Southern vocal tricks, from a playful falsetto crack to a sage-like basso profundo, with separate controls for drawl, speed and irony: Each story becomes an aural roller coaster ride. Like his father before him, Hank is a singer, and even his speaking voice borders on song. We’re sitting in his den in backwoods Alabama, where he’s unwinding after a grueling tour of California. It’s a horrifying sight, but my host-a tall man in a Stetson and black shades-feels it more deeply than I do: Hank Williams Jr. Karl Wallenda plunges to his death, and the man beside me booms out “Gawd!” In the slow-motion TV replay, Wallenda’s last-second grab for the wire seems to sum up everyone’s will to live, in one gesture.
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