I have no idea when or where I learned “Cold, Cold Heart” — it must have been sometime after the 1970s, because I didn’t grow up with classic country, aside from a couple of Johnny Cash records and the cheapo anthology where I learned “Lonesome 7-7203.” That changed in the 1980s, in a large part due to Bill Morrissey, who turned me on to Merle Haggard, George Jones, and the depth of classic country songwriting — which is to say, Hank Williams and his myriad followers.

I’ve already posted a few of Hank’s songs (“You Win Again,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and “Lovesick Blues“) and I know a bunch more (“Jambalaya” and “Hey, Good Lookin'” were staples of my Antwerp busking years), but they are so familiar and frequently done that I feel a bit ridiculous doing yet another version…

…and that’s particularly true of “Cold, Cold Heart,” which is not only one of the biggest country hits of all time, but was also the first huge pop hit for Tony Bennett, and an R&B hit for Dinah Washington, and really doesn’t need to be done again, ever, by anybody…

…or at least, that was how I always felt about it and why I never performed it…

…until a few weeks ago, when I started fooling around with it and actually paid attention to the lyrics. As it happens, that was also what persuaded Bennett — when Mitch Miller sent him Hank’s demo of the song, he initially rejected it because he didn’t like or want to sing country music, but Miller told him to forget it was a country song and listen to the lyrics, and he fell in love with it, recorded it, got a huge hit, and later recalled with pride that he had heard Hank would punch up his version whenever it was on a jukebox.

I vastly prefer Hank’s version to Bennett’s, or even Washington’s, and in any case it’s the one in my head. But I’m not sure why I learned it, because, as I said, it is so, so overdone…

…and that was that, until I started fooling around with it a few weeks ago and it suddenly hit me in a different way. Because, years ago, I had a relationship with a woman whom I loved, and she seemed to love me, but there was something in what Hank called her “lonesome past” — I don’t know exactly what had happened, but the result was that she couldn’t trust anyone who seemed to love her. I wouldn’t have said her heart was cold, at all, and that’s something I misunderstood about this song; I took it as a criticism of the woman, accusing her of being coldhearted. But that isn’t what it says. I don’t know how Hank meant it, but I now hear it as being about someone who was hurt badly in the past and can’t get over it, so feels as if something inside her was frozen, and when I hear that way, it feels painfully familiar. Which, of course, is what made Williams such a great songwriter; his songs hit people in deeply personal ways.

So, overdone or not, here’s my take on a classic — one of many, and I’m sure there will be many more, and that’s why it’s a classic.