Needing Some Room

Song 328: This week the playlist comes around to Move It on Over by Hank Williams, who also wrote the song. When Hank had his first big hit on the country charts in 1947, rock and roll did not yet exist as an official music genre, but hearing this track now, it certainly sounds like an early version of the concept. Junior has even claimed that his father invented rock and roll, though Senior had a few contemporaries approaching a similar synthesis from different directions, such as blues singer Roy Brown who did Good Rocking Tonight that same year. This cut definitely proves that Hank started his remarkable, short-lived, troubled, prolific and monumental career with a bang, though, as he shows off the musical lessons he had learned as a teenager from blues street player Rufus Tee-Tot Payne. While I remember hearing lots of HW records during my pre-teen summer visits with Ohio relatives, I don’t recall meeting this piece until George Thorogood’s cover came across the airwaves in late 1978, and when I learned that it was a Hank tune, I felt that I could gladly slide it on over to give that hot dog even more of my musical respect than the large amount I had already earmarked for him because I felt he had earned it.