The Hank Snow Story

By Hank Snow, with Jack Ownbey and Bob Burris

One of the famous singers from my youth who seems to be forgotten today is Hank Snow. I don’t hear his name mentioned or his songs played on classic country stations. He was Mom’s favorite singer. I can remember her singing “Let me go, let me go, let me go, lover” when she was teasing us kids. I didn’t know then that it was a Hank Snow song or that in 1954 it had been his fifth #1 Billboard hit.

I purchased his 1994 autobiography while working on Faron’s biography. When I recently pulled it off the shelf, I was surprised to realize The Hank Snow Story, written by Hank Snow, the Singing Ranger, with Jack Ownbey and Bob Burris, had been published by the University of Illinois Press in its Music in American Life series. That’s where my biographies are published!

The two co-authors approached Hank after he headlined a benefit to raise money to fight child abuse; they offered to help write an autobiography that would publicize the story of the abuse Hank had suffered as a child in Canada. Ownbey writes, “One of our biggest challenges came from the fact that Hank’s memories could easily fill three books. He had so many inspirational and well-told stories. We’ve included as many of these as possible, in Hank’s own words, just as he remembered them.”

This 500-page book does a great job of covering his life. I’ll just mention one incident here. When he got his first radio job at age 19, in 1933, and someone told him he had a lot of fan mail at the radio station, he asked a friend what fan mail was. He then walked to the radio station and picked up the 90 letters that were waiting for him.