I’ve heard so many people do beautiful versions of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” that I never felt a need to perform it myself. I’ve known it forever, and sometimes sang it for my own pleasure, but there is no way I was going to even approach the haunted power of Hank Williams’s original — kind of the same problem I have with some Townes Van Zandt songs.

I’ve heard great versions that didn’t have that degree of pain — in particular, I heard Little Richard sing it three times within two weeks, and every time was different and memorable: once, he played it by himself at the piano; once, he called over his guitarist to sit with him on the piano stool, and just sang it with the guitar; once he had the whole band shaping a soulful background. The band never knew how he would do it on a given night, and it was always fresh and brilliant.

Anyway, since this project is about the songs in my head, I’ve been thinking about posting a version of this one for years, but never came up with an arrangement that felt like it was anything but a pale imitation of Hank or other people. Then, this summer, I set myself the project of keeping my guitar in open G for two months and working on slide. It’s mostly been blues, but I was inspired by a piece I was writing about my friend Steve James, and he had some nice licks in which slide lines flowed into fingered notes, and I was fooling around with some of those and at some point found myself playing the first part of this arrangement.

That was the beginning, and then I began hearing little programmatic things I could do behind or around the lyrics. A lot of white rural music (and more Black rural music than is often acknowledged) was influenced by 19th century concert and “parlor” guitar playing, and if you go through the old guitar books, there are a lot of pieces that use programmatic effects: harmonics for church bells, bass rolls to imitate galloping horses, sliding notes with a notation saying “like a distant bugle…”

These days that sort of thing is considered corny, but as Ray Charles said about his ABC concept albums, “Corny? Hell, yes, but I’m a corny cat.” So I use the slide to play the whining train, the falling leaves, the falling star…

…and in some ways the result is more amusing than soulful, but it freed me up to sing the lyric more comfortably than I ever sang it when I was trying to summon existential pain — maybe because the pain was never genuine, but the amusement is. As Bob Dylan said, the problem with a lot of young blues singers is they’re trying to get into the blues, but the old guys were singing to get out of the blues.

I still know a lot of Hank Williams songs I’m not posting, but after figuring out how to do this, and a version of “You Win Again” that mixes influences from Lightnin’ Hopkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, I’m hoping the others will eventually come around.