Hank Williams Lost Highway

The array of glossy stringed instruments festooning the upstage wall could be a honky-tonk vision of the pearly gates! Actually, it's the backdrop for Hank Williams: Lost Highway, Randal Myler and Mark Harelik's biodrama of the man who introduced the melded harmonies and twanging vocals of the southern-white blues we now know as "country" music to audiences throughout the world.

In American Blues Theater's production, this populist pioneer is played by Matthew Brumlow, assisted by real-life cabaret chanteuse Suzanne Petri as the mother who schooled her son in the "joyful noise" of gospel hymns, as well as a bevy of Chicago's favorite sidemen—Michael Mahler, Austin Cook, Greg Hirte and John Foley—all united in "setting the woods on fire" (to quote a Williams lyric) with the assistance of acoustical music-makers ranging from church organ to spoons.

"It was important to me to play what Hank played," Brumlow insists, "For most of his career, what he played was Martin D-28s—the 'D' stands for 'dreadnought,' by the way, which is a body style unique to Martin. The guitar that I play in the show isn't pre-war era, but a 1974 model that a good buddy named Mike Gunne lent me when he heard I was cast as Hank Williams. It was his father's guitar, too, so it has character."

Williams' first guitar was a Silvertone from the Sears Roebuck catalogue, wasn't it? "Yes, that's what's on display at the museum in Montgomery," Brumlow concedes, "but we tell the story a little different. He also played a Gibson Sunburst acoustic—you can see it in some photographs from his early concerts-which was the 'second-hand' guitar that his mother bought for him. We can't afford an authentic Gibson sunburst—obviously—so what we use is an Epiphone Sunburst that we scuffed up a bit."

Million Dollar Quartet's playbill cites Gibson as the suppliers of their guitars—does Lost Highway also have such an arrangement?

"We should be so lucky!" scoffs assistant music director Michael Mahler, "I play a vintage Harmony six-string from the Sears catalogue belonging to [Music Director] Malcolm Ruhl. Greg Hirte plays a German Wurlitzer violin, a 1920s Gibson model A mandolin, and his own Appalachian fiddle made in the 1930s. John Foley plays his own Regal Dobro, Hohner harmonicas and spoons, as well as a Rickenbacker console steel guitar. Austin plays an upright bass that he rented—"

"After practicing on it for only three days before his audition!" Brumlow interrupts, "Austin is a pianist who learned to play string bass for this show. I'm going to brag on him since he won't do it."

"Suzanne Petri also learned to play the organ—which we found in a closet at New Trier High School—for this production." Mahler continues, "We all do our own unpacking and repacking. We change our own strings and tune them ourselves."

"About an hour before the house opens every night," confides Brumlow, "we all meet to check our tuning and go over any tempo or intro/outro comments that Michael has for us. Then we run through a few of the numbers to ease us into the world of the play. I'm always ready to put on my boots when we're done."

Hank Williams: Lost Highway runs at the Greenhouse through October 12.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Contributing Writer