Hank Williams was not a bluegrass musician, but no songwriter has fed more songs into the bluegrass repertoire, and his singles are a foundation the whole genre stands on.

Williams came up out of Alabama playing honky-tonks, and after a first run of records for the small Sterling label in 1946 and 1947 he signed with the newly formed MGM Records. Almost everything that matters was cut for MGM between 1947 and 1953, much of it at Castle Studio in Nashville, under the guidance of the music publisher and producer Fred Rose — who shaped Williams's raw material into the lean, perfect records the world knows. His band, the Drifting Cowboys, gave the singles their loping honky-tonk swing.

The catalog Williams left behind in barely six years is staggering: "Lovesick Blues," "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," "Cold, Cold Heart," "Your Cheatin' Heart," "I Saw the Light," "Hey, Good Lookin'." He wrote with a directness and a knack for melody that made the songs feel older than they were — as if they had always existed — and that quality is exactly what made them irresistible to bluegrass bands.

Williams died on New Year's Day 1953, not yet thirty, in the back seat of a car between shows. His singles kept charting for years afterward. Within a decade, bluegrass acts from the Stanley Brothers on down had absorbed his songbook so thoroughly that numbers like "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" and "Lost Highway" became as much a part of the bluegrass canon as anything Bill Monroe wrote.

Session details drawn in part from the Bluegrass Discography.