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Hank Williams

Hiram King "Hank" Williams (September 17, 1923 – January 1, 1953) was an American singer-songwriter. He is regarded as one of the most significant and influential American singers and songwriters of the 20th century. Williams recorded 55 singles that reached the top 10 of the Billboard Country & Western Best Sellers chart, five of which were released posthumously, and 12 of which reached No.1.

Born and raised in Alabama, Williams learned guitar from African-American blues musician Rufus Payne. Both Payne and Roy Acuff significantly influenced his musical style. After winning an amateur talent contest, Williams began his professional career in Montgomery in the late 1930s playing on local radio stations and at area venues such as school houses, movie theaters, and bars. He formed the Drifting Cowboys backup band, which was managed by his mother, and dropped out of school to devote his time to his career. Because his alcoholism made him unreliable, he was fired and rehired several times by radio station WSFA, and had trouble replacing several of his band members who were drafted during World War II.

In 1944, Williams married Audrey Sheppard, who competed with his mother to control his career. After recording "Never Again" and "Honky Tonkin' with Sterling Records, he signed a contract with MGM Records. He released the hit single "Move It On Over" in 1947 and joined the Louisiana Hayride radio program. The next year he released a cover of "Lovesick Blues", which quickly reached number one on Billboard Top Country & Western singles chart and propelled him to stardom on the Grand Ole Opry. Although unable to read or notate music to any significant degree, he wrote such iconic hits as "Your Cheatin' Heart", "Hey, Good Lookin', and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry". In 1952, Sheppard divorced him and he married Billie Jean Horton. He was dismissed by the Grand Ole Opry because of his unreliability and alcoholism.

Years of back pain, alcoholism, and prescription drug abuse severely compromised Williams' health, and at the age of 29, Williams suffered from heart failure and died unexpectedly in the back seat of a car near Oak Hill, West Virginia, en route to a concert in Canton, Ohio, on New Year's Day 1953. Despite his relatively brief career, he is one of the most celebrated and influential musicians of the 20th century, especially in country music. Many artists have covered his songs and he has influenced Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones, among others. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1961, the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, the Native American Music Awards Hall of Fame in 1999, and gained a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2010, he was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for his "craftsmanship as a songwriter who expressed universal feelings with poignant simplicity and played a pivotal role in transforming country music into a major musical and cultural force in American life."

Early life

Hank Williams was born Hiram Williams on September 17, 1923, in the rural community of Mount Olive in Butler County, Alabama. He was the third child of Jessie Lillybelle "Lillie" (née Skipper; 1898–1955) and Elonzo Huble "Lon" Williams (1891–1970). Williams was of English ancestry and Welsh ancestry. Elonzo's family came from south and central Alabama, and his father fought during the American Civil War, first on the Confederate side, and then with the Union after he was captured. Elonzo was a railroad engineer for the W. T. Smith lumber company and was drafted during World War I, serving from July 1918 to June 1919. He suffered severe injuries after falling from a truck, breaking his collarbone, and receiving a severe blow to the head.

The Williams' first child, Ernest Huble Williams, died two days after his birth on July 5, 1921. A daughter, Irene, was born a year later. Williams was named after Hiram I of the Book of Kings. His name was misspelled as "Hiriam" on his birth certificate, which was prepared and signed when he was 10 years old. Williams was born with spina bifida occulta, a birth defect of the spinal column that caused him lifelong pain and became a major factor in his later alcohol and drug abuse. At the age of three, Williams sat with his mother as she played the organ at the Mount Olive Baptist Church. Lillie also joined singing the hymns that influenced the singer's later compositions. Williams received his first musical instrument, a harmonica, at the age of six. As a child, he was nicknamed "Harm" by his family and "Herky" or "Skeets" by his friends.

Williams' father frequently relocated for work, and as a result the family lived in several southern Alabama towns. In 1930, when Williams was seven years old, Elonzo began experiencing facial paralysis. After being evaluated at a Veterans Affairs clinic in Pensacola, Florida, doctors determined that he had a brain aneurysm, and Elonzo was sent to the VA Medical Center in Alexandria, Louisiana. He remained hospitalized for eight years and was mostly absent throughout Williams' childhood. From that point on, Lillie assumed responsibility for the family.

In the fall of 1933, Williams was sent to live with his aunt and uncle, Walter and Alice McNeil, in Fountain, Alabama. Their daughter, Opal, went in exchange to live with Lillie to attend school in Georgiana, Alabama. Williams learned to play basic guitar chords from his aunt and listened to music that was played at dances and in area churches. The following year, the Williams family moved to Greenville, Alabama, where Lillie opened a boarding house next to the local cotton gin. The family later returned with Opal McNeil to Georgiana, where Lillie took several side jobs to support the family despite the bleak economic climate of the Great Depression. She worked in a cannery and served as a night-shift nurse in the local hospital. Their first house burned down, and the family lost their possessions. They moved to Rose Street on the other side of town, into a house which Williams' mother soon turned into another boarding house. The house had a small garden in which they grew diverse crops that Williams and his sister Irene sold around Georgiana. At a chance meeting in Georgiana, Williams' sister Irene met U.S. Representative J. Lister Hill while Hill was campaigning across Alabama. She told Hill that her mother was interested in talking to him about her problems. With Hill's help, the family began collecting Elonzo's disability pension. Despite his medical condition, the family managed fairly well financially throughout the Great Depression.

There are several versions of how Williams got his first guitar. While several prominent Georgiana residents later claimed to have bought it for him, his mother said she bought it for him and that she arranged for his first lessons. Williams told Ralph Gleason, who at the time was writing a weekly music column in the San Francisco Chronicle, "When I was about eight years old, I got my first git-tar. A second-hand $3.50 git-tar my mother bought me." Gawky and shy, Williams attached himself to an old black man, Rufus "Tee-Tot" Payne, a street performer whom Williams followed around town. Payne gave Williams guitar lessons in exchange for money or meals prepared by Lillie. Payne's basic musical style was blues; he repeatedly stressed the importance of maintaining good rhythm and time, and he added the showmanship of stoops, bows, laughs and cries to his performances. Later on, Williams recorded "My Bucket's Got a Hole in It", one of the songs Payne had taught him. Williams was also influenced by country acts such as Roy Acuff. In 1937, Williams got into a fight with his physical education teacher about exercises the coach wanted him to do. His mother subsequently demanded that the school board terminate the coach; when they refused, the family moved to Montgomery, Alabama. Payne and Williams lost touch, though Payne also eventually moved to Montgomery, where he died in poverty in 1939. Williams later credited him as the provider of the only musical training he ever had.

1930s

In July 1937, the Williams and McNeils opened a boarding house on South Perry Street in downtown Montgomery. It was at this time that Williams decided to change his name informally from Hiram to Hank. During the same year, he participated in a talent show at the Empire Theater and won the first prize of US$15 singing his first original song "WPA Blues". Williams wrote the lyrics and used the tune of Riley Puckett's "Dissatisfied".

He never learned to read music; instead he based his compositions in storytelling and personal experience. After school and on weekends, Williams sang and played his Silvertone guitar on the sidewalk in front of the WSFA radio studio. His recent win at the Empire Theater and the street performances caught the attention of WSFA producers who occasionally invited him to perform on air with Dad Crysel's band.

In August 1938, Elonzo Williams was temporarily released from the hospital. He showed up unannounced at the family's home in Montgomery. Lillie was unwilling to let him reclaim his position as the head of the household. Elonzo stayed to celebrate his son's birthday in September before he returned to the medical center in Louisiana.

Williams' successful radio show fueled his entry into a music career, and he started his own band for show dates, the Drifting Cowboys. The original members were guitarist Braxton Schuffert, fiddler Freddie Beach, and comedian Smith "Hezzy" Adair. Originally billed as "Hank and Hezzy and the Drifting Cowboys", they frequently appeared as fill-ins at the local dancehall, Thigpen's Log Cabin, just out of Georgiana. The band traveled throughout central and southern Alabama performing in clubs and at private gatherings. James Ellis Garner later played fiddle for him. Lillie Williams became the Drifting Cowboys' manager. Williams dropped out of school in October 1939 so that he and the Drifting Cowboys could work full-time. Lillie Williams began booking show dates, negotiating prices and driving them to some of their shows. Now free to travel without deference to Williams' schooling, the band could tour as far away as western Georgia and the Florida Panhandle. The band started playing in theaters before the screening of films and later they played in honky-tonks. Williams' alcohol use started to become a problem during the tours; on occasion he spent a large part of the show revenues on alcohol. Meanwhile, between tour schedules, Williams returned to Montgomery to host his radio show.

1940s
The American entry into World War II in 1941 marked the beginning of hard times for Williams. While he was medically disqualified from military service after falling from a bull during a rodeo in Texas and suffering a back injury, his band members were all drafted to serve. Many of their replacements quit the band due to Williams' worsening alcoholism, and in August 1942 WSFA fired him for "habitual drunkenness". Backstage during one of his concerts, Williams met Roy Acuff, who warned him of the dangers of alcohol, saying, "You've got a million-dollar voice, son, but a ten-cent brain."

He started a job as a shipfitter's helper for the Alabama Drydock and Shipbuilding Company at Mobile in 1942, working there off and on for about a year and a half during the war. He also worked briefly at Kaiser Shipyards in Portland, Oregon, apparently lured by the free tickets, free accommodations, free training, and good wages offered by the company. In 1943, Williams met Audrey Sheppard at a medicine show in Banks, Alabama. According to Sheppard, she and Williams lived in a hotel in Mobile while they worked together at the shipyard for a short while. Sheppard told Williams that she wanted to help him regain his radio show, and that they should move to Montgomery and start a band. The couple were married in 1944 at a Texaco gas station in Andalusia, Alabama, by a justice of the peace. The marriage was technically invalid, since Sheppard's divorce from her previous husband did not comply with the legally required 60-day reconciliation period.

In 1945, back in Montgomery, Williams returned to WSFA radio. He attempted to expand his repertoire by writing original songs, and he published his first songbook, Original Songs of Hank Williams, containing "I'm Not Coming Home Anymore" and several more original songs, nine in all, including one not written by him, "A Tramp on the Street". With Williams beginning to be recognized as a songwriter, Sheppard became his manager and occasionally sang and substituted on guitar when a band member did not make the show.

On September 14, 1946, Williams auditioned for Nashville's Grand Ole Opry at the recommendation of Ernest Tubb, but was rejected. After the failure of his audition, Williams and Audrey attempted to interest the recently formed music publishing firm Acuff-Rose Music. They approached Fred Rose, the president of the company, during one of his daily ping-pong games at WSM radio studios. Audrey asked Rose if her husband could sing a song for him at that moment, Rose agreed, and perceived that Williams had much promise as a songwriter. Rose signed Williams to a six-song contract, and leveraged this deal to sign Williams with Sterling Records. On December 11, 1946, in his first recording session, Williams recorded "Wealth Won't Save Your Soul", "Calling You", "Never Again (Will I Knock on Your Door)", and "When God Comes and Gathers His Jewels", which was misprinted as "When God Comes and Fathers His Jewels". The Sterling releases of Williams' songs became successful, and Rose decided to find a larger label for future releases. The producer then approached the newly formed recording division of the Loews Corporation, MGM Records.

Williams signed with MGM Records in 1947 and released "Move It on Over", which became a country hit. In 1948, he moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, and joined the Louisiana Hayride, a radio show broadcast on KWKH that brought him into living rooms all over the Southeastern United States, appearing in weekend shows. As part of the arrangement, Williams got a program on the station and bookings through the Hayride artist service to perform across western Louisiana and eastern Texas, always returning on Saturdays for the show's weekly broadcast. After a few more moderate hits, in 1949 he released his version of the 1922 Cliff Friend and Irving Mills song "Lovesick Blues", made popular by Rex Griffin. Williams' version was a hit; the song stayed at number one on the Billboard charts for four consecutive months. Following the success of the releases of "Lovesick Blues" and "Wedding Bells", Williams signed a management contract with Oscar Davis. Davis then booked the singer on a Grand Ole Opry package show, and he later negotiated Williams' induction into the musical troupe.

On June 11, 1949, Williams made his debut at the Grand Ole Opry, where he received six encores. He brought together Bob McNett (guitar), Hillous Butrum (bass), Jerry Rivers (fiddle) and Don Helms (steel guitar) to form the most famous version of the Drifting Cowboys. That year Audrey Williams gave birth to Randall Hank Williams (Hank Williams Jr.). During 1949, he joined the Grand Ole Opry's first European tour, performing in military bases in Germany and Austria. Williams had five songs that ranked in the top five Billboard Hot Country Singles that year including: "Wedding Bells", "Mind Your Own Business", "You're Gonna Change (Or I'm Gonna Leave)", "My Bucket's Got a Hole in It", and "Lovesick Blues", which reached No. 1.

1950s
By 1950, Williams earned an estimated $1,000 per show. That year, he began recording as "Luke the Drifter" for his moral-themed songs, many of which are recitations rather than singing. Fred Rose had been concerned how it would affect the jukebox operators who serviced the machines at the honky-tonks where William's songs were most commonly played if a customer punched a "Hank Williams" selection on a jukebox and heard a sermon rather than the music expected. It was he who requested that Hank use a pseudonym for these recitations to avoid leading people astray. Although the real identity of Luke the Drifter was supposed to be unknown, Williams often performed part of the recorded material on stage. Most of the material was written by Williams himself, although Fred Rose wrote at least one piece, and others, according to his son Wesley, were collaborations between Williams, Rose, and himself. The songs depicted Luke the Drifter traveling around from place to place, narrating stories of different characters and philosophizing about relationships gone awry, injustice in society, and death. Performances of the compositions included only Williams' voice, an organ, a bass fiddle, and Helms' steel guitar.

Around this time Williams released more hit songs, such as "My Son Calls Another Man Daddy", "Why Should We Try Anymore", "Long Gone Lonesome Blues", "Why Don't You Love Me", and "I Just Don't Like This Kind of Livin'". In 1951, "Dear John" became a hit, but it was the B-side, "Cold, Cold Heart", that became one of his most recognized songs. A pop cover version by Tony Bennett released the same year stayed on the charts for 27 weeks, peaking at number one.

Williams' career reached a peak in the late summer of 1951 with his Hadacol tour of the U.S. with Bob Hope and other actors. On the weekend after the tour ended, Williams was photographed backstage at the Grand Ole Opry signing a motion picture deal with MGM. In October, Williams recorded a demo, "There's a Tear in My Beer" for a friend, "Big Bill Lister", who had recorded "Beer Drinking Blues", a beer drinking song that sold well, and needed another one. The session was recorded by the head of A&R for Capitol Records, Ken Nelson. Afterwards Lister stored the demo acetate, with no markings, in a box of records kept at his house, and then when he moved, in his yard under a tarp for several years. He eventually gave the acetate to Hank Williams, Jr., who had a hit with it and an accompanying video which depicted the son playing with his father in an overdubbed dream sequence. The following month, MGM Records released Williams' debut album, Hank Williams Sings. On November 14, 1951, Williams drove with Bill Lister and the Drifting Cowboys to New York where he appeared on television for the first time with Perry Como on CBS's Perry Como Show. There he sang "Hey Good Lookin'", and the next week Como opened the show wearing a cowboy hat and singing the same song, with apologies to Williams.

On May 21, 1951, Williams was admitted to North Louisiana Sanitarium in Shreveport for treatment of his alcoholism and his back problem, and was released on May 24. In November of the same year, he fell trying to leap across a gully on a squirrel hunting trip with his fiddler Jerry Rivers in Franklin, Tennessee. The fall aggravated his congenital spinal condition, and on December 13, 1951, he underwent a spinal fusion at Vanderbilt University Hospital. He was discharged against medical advice on Christmas Eve wearing a back brace and consuming more painkillers, to the detriment of his already compromised health.

In the spring of 1952, Williams flew to New York City twice with his band and a Grand Ole Opry troupe to appear on two episodes of the nationally broadcast The Kate Smith Evening Hour. On March 26, he performed "Hey Good Lookin'" and joined the rest of the cast in singing "I Saw the Light." On April 23, he performed "Cold, Cold Heart" and sang a truncated "I Can't Help It (If I'm Still in Love with You)" with Anita Carter, and later joined the cast in singing "Glory Bound Train." During the same year, Williams had a brief extramarital affair with dancer Bobbie Jett, resulting in the birth of their daughter, Jett Williams.

In June 1952, he recorded "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)", "Window Shopping", "Settin' the Woods on Fire", and "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive". Audrey Williams divorced him that year; the next day he recorded "You Win Again" and "I Won't Be Home No More". Around this time, he met Billie Jean Jones, a girlfriend of country singer Faron Young, at the Grand Ole Opry. As a girl, Jones had lived down the street from Williams when he was with the Louisiana Hayride, and now Williams began to visit her frequently in Shreveport, causing him to miss many Grand Ole Opry appearances.

On August 11, 1952, Williams was dismissed from the Grand Ole Opry for habitual drunkenness and missing shows. He returned to Shreveport to perform on KWKH and WBAM shows and in the Louisiana Hayride, for which he toured again. His performances were acclaimed when he was sober, but despite the efforts of his work associates to get him to shows sober, his abuse of alcohol resulted in occasions when he did not appear or his performances were poor. In October 1952 he married Billie Jean Jones.

During his last recording session on September 23, 1952, Williams recorded "Kaw-Liga", along with "Your Cheatin' Heart", "Take These Chains from My Heart", and "I Could Never Be Ashamed of You". By the end of 1952, Williams started to have heart problems. He met Horace "Toby" Marshall in Oklahoma City, who said that he was a doctor. Marshall had been previously convicted for forgery, and had been paroled and released from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in 1951. Among other fake titles, he said that he was a Doctor of Science. He purchased the DSC title for $25 from the Chicago School of Applied Science; in the diploma, he requested that the DSc be spelled out as "Doctor of Science and Psychology". Under the name of Dr. C. W. Lemon he prescribed Williams with amphetamines, Seconal, chloral hydrate, and morphine, which made his heart problems worse. The final concert of his 1952 tour was held in Austin, Texas, at the Skyline Club on December 19. Williams' last known public performance took place in Montgomery, on December 21, where he sang at a benefit held by the local chapter of the American Federation of Musicians for a radio announcer who had polio.

Personal life
On December 15, 1944, Williams married Audrey Sheppard. It was her second marriage and his first. Their son, Randall Hank Williams (now known as Hank Williams Jr.), was born on May 26, 1949. The marriage was always turbulent and rapidly disintegrated, and Williams developed serious problems with alcohol, morphine, and other painkillers prescribed for him to ease the severe back pain caused by his spina bifida occulta. The couple divorced on May 29, 1952.

In June 1952, Williams moved into a house on the corner of Natchez Trace and Westwood Avenue in Nashville, sharing it with singer Ray Price. Price left soon after due to Williams' alcoholism. Following an unsuccessful tour of California and several stints in a sanitorium, Williams moved to his mother's boardinghouse by September. A relationship with a woman named Bobbie Jett during this period resulted in a daughter, Jett Williams, who was born five days after Williams died. His mother adopted Jett, who became a ward of the state after her grandmother's death. She was adopted and raised by an unrelated couple and did not learn that she was Williams' daughter until the early 1980s.

On October 18, 1952, Williams and Billie Jean Jones were married by a justice of the peace in Minden, Louisiana. The next day, two public marriage ceremonies were held at the New Orleans Civic Auditorium, where 14,000 seats were sold for each. After Williams' death, a judge ruled that the wedding was not legal because Jones' divorce had not become final until 11 days after she married Williams. His first wife and his mother were the driving forces behind having the marriage declared invalid, and they pursued the matter for years.

A man named Lewis Fitzgerald (born 1943) claimed to be Williams' illegitimate son; he was the son of Marie McNeil, Williams' cousin. Fitzgerald was interviewed, and he suggested that Lillie Williams operated a brothel at her boarding house in Montgomery. A friend of the family denied his claims, but singer Billy Walker remembered that Williams mentioned to him the presence of men in the house who were led upstairs.

Death
Williams was scheduled to perform at the Municipal Auditorium in Charleston, West Virginia, on December 31, 1952. Advance ticket sales totaled $3,000. That day, Williams could not fly because of a snow storm in the Montgomery area; he hired a college student, Charles Carr, to drive him to the concerts. On December 30, Williams and Carr stopped at the Redmont Hotel in Birmingham, Alabama. The following morning, they continued to Fort Payne, and then to Knoxville, Tennessee. Williams and his driver then took a flight to Charleston, but the plane returned to Knoxville due to bad weather. Back in Knoxville, the two arrived at the Andrew Johnson Hotel, and Carr requested a doctor for Williams, who was affected by the combination of the chloral hydrate and alcohol he had consumed on the way to Knoxville. Dr. P. H. Cardwell injected Williams with two shots of vitamin B12 that also contained a quarter-grain of morphine. Carr and Williams checked out of the hotel, but the porters had to carry Williams to the car. Carr later mentioned that Williams had severe hiccups, while the porters said that he had made a coughing sound twice. Carr spoke with Toby Marshall on the phone, who informed him on behalf of the tour's promoter, A.V. Bamford, that the show in Charleston was cancelled and he ordered him instead to drive Williams to Canton, Ohio, for a New Year's Day concert there.

Around midnight on January 1, 1953, the two crossed the Tennessee state line and arrived in Bristol, Virginia. Carr stopped at a small all-night restaurant and asked for a relief driver from a local taxi company, as he felt exhausted after driving for 20 hours. Driver Don Surface left the restaurant with Carr and Williams. They drove on until they stopped for fuel and coffee at a gas station in Oak Hill, West Virginia, where they realized that Williams had been dead for so long that rigor mortis had already set in. The station's owner called the local police chief. Dr. Ivan Malinin performed the autopsy at the Tyree Funeral House. He found hemorrhages in the heart and neck and pronounced the cause of death as "acute rt. ventricular dilation". He also wrote that Williams had been severely beaten and kicked in the groin recently (during a fight in a Montgomery bar a few days earlier), and local magistrate Virgil F. Lyons ordered an inquest into Williams' death concerning a welt that was visible on his head. That evening in Canton, when Williams' death was announced to the gathered crowd, a few people started laughing because they thought it was a joke. Akron deejay Cliff Rodgers assured the crowd that it was no joke and that Hank Williams was indeed dead. When Hawkshaw Hawkins and other performers started singing Williams' song "I Saw the Light" as a tribute to him, the crowd began to sing along.

On January 2, Williams' body was transported to Montgomery, Alabama, where it was placed in a silver casket that was displayed at his mother's boarding house for two days. His funeral took place on January 4 at the Montgomery Auditorium, with his casket placed on the flower-covered stage. Mourners came to Montgomery from all over the South, and beyond. An estimated 15,000 to 25,000 people were outside the auditorium, and inside were 2,750, with the balcony set aside for about 200 black mourners. Hundreds passed by the casket. Backed by the Drifting Cowboys, Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb and Red Foley performed "I Saw the Light", "Beyond the Sunset" and "Peace in the Valley". Williams' remains are interred at the Oakwood Annex in Montgomery.

In late January 1953, MGM Records told Billboard magazine that the label had to reduce their planned releases for the month from 12 records to 6 to satisfy the demand for Williams' music. The label estimated that the amount of back orders of his records, and those by other artists would cover the production of their Bloomfield, New Jersey, pressing plant until April 1953. Meanwhile, MGM Records received 3,000 direct requests for pictures of the singer, that combined with the requests from the distributors made the company outsource their printing and shipment. According to Acuff-Rose Music, the sales from the two Williams song folios jumped from their average of 700 per week to 5,000 in three weeks.

Williams' final single, released in November 1952 while he was still alive, was titled "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive". His song "Your Cheatin' Heart" was written and recorded in September 1952, but released in late January 1953 after his death. The song, backed by "Kaw-Liga", was No. 1 on the country charts for six weeks. "Take These Chains From My Heart" was released in April 1953 and reached No. 1 on the country charts. Released in July, "I Won't Be Home No More" went to No. 4. Meanwhile, "Weary Blues From Waitin'" reached No. 7.

Legacy
The Country Music Hall of Fame stressed that Williams "set the agenda for contemporary country songcraft" and the "standard by which success is measured in country music". Encyclopædia Britannica considers him "country music's first superstar" and an "immensely talented songwriter and an impassioned vocalist". The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame praised the "straightforward approach" of Williams' songs, which they deemed "brutally honest" and written in the "language of the everyman". To AllMusic, Williams "established the rules for all the country performers who followed him and, in the process, much of popular music".

Entertainment Weekly TV critic, Ken Tucker, wrote: "despite being a pop-culture titan and rightly dubbed "father of country music", Hank Williams was possibly the least likable — least warm and sympathetic — figure in modern music. Reeking of self-pity, he wrote and sang some of the greatest woe-is-me music of the century [...] Brimming with an anger that regularly spilled over into misogyny, Williams was also a master of spite". Hank Williams, Jr. wrote in his autobiography: "To hear the tributes, one would think that the entire city [Nashville] took turns kissing Daddy while he was still alive. [...] While he was alive, he was despised and envied; after he died, he was some kind of saint."

Alabama governor Gordon Persons officially proclaimed September 21 "Hank Williams Day". The first celebration, in 1954, featured the unveiling of a monument at the Cramton Bowl that was later placed at the gravesite of Williams. The ceremony featured Ferlin Husky interpreting "I Saw the Light". Williams had 11 number one country hits in his career ("Lovesick Blues", "Long Gone Lonesome Blues", "Why Don't You Love Me", "Moanin' the Blues", "Cold, Cold Heart", "Hey, Good Lookin'", "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)", "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive", "Kaw-Liga", "Your Cheatin' Heart", and "Take These Chains from My Heart"), as well as many other top 10 hits.

Many artists of the 1950s and 1960s, including Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Jerry Lee Lewis, Merle Haggard, Gene Vincent, and Ricky Nelson and Conway Twitty were influenced by Williams.

When Downbeat magazine took a poll the year after Williams' death, he was voted the most popular country and Western performer of all time. On February 8, 1960, Williams' star was placed at 6400 Hollywood Boulevard on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1961, and into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in 1985.

In 1964, the biographical film Your Cheatin' Heart starring George Hamilton as Williams was released. The American Truckers Benevolent Association, a national organization of CB truck drivers, voted "Your Cheatin' Heart" as their favorite record of all time in the fourth annual Truck Drivers' Country Music Awards, in 1978. In 1987, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame under the category "Early Influence", and he was given the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He was ranked second in CMT's 40 Greatest Men of Country Music in 2003, behind only Johnny Cash who recorded the song "The Night Hank Williams Came To Town". His son, Hank Jr., was ranked on the same list. Canadian singer Sneezy Waters performed as Williams in the stage play Hank Williams: The Show He Never Gave. A 1980 movie adaptation also starring Waters was produced for television.

In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked him number 74 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. In 2005, the BBC documentary series Arena featured an episode on Williams.

In 2010, Williams' 1949 MGM number one hit, "Lovesick Blues", was inducted into the Recording Academy Grammy Hall of Fame. The same year, Hank Williams: The Complete Mother's Best Recordings ...Plus! was honored with a Grammy nomination for Best Historical Album. In 1999, Williams was inducted into the Native American Music Hall of Fame. On April 12, 2010, the Pulitzer Prize Board awarded Williams a posthumous special citation that paid tribute to his "craftsmanship as a songwriter who expressed universal feelings with poignant simplicity and played a pivotal role in transforming country music into a major musical and cultural force in American life".

Several of Williams' descendants became musicians: son Hank Williams Jr., daughter Jett Williams, grandsons Hank Williams III and Sam Williams, and granddaughters Hilary Williams and Holly Williams are also country musicians. In July 2020, his granddaughter Katherine (Hank Jr.'s daughter) died in a car crash at the age of 27. His great-grandson Coleman Finchum, son of Hank Williams III, released his debut single credited to IV and the Strange Band in 2021. Meanwhile, Lewis Fitzgerald's son Ricky billed himself as Hank Williams IV following his father's claim of being Williams' son.

According to reportage in the Los Angeles Times, on his road trips Williams carried a brown leather briefcase containing notebooks in which he wrote musings, lines and verses of song lyrics, as well as jottings on whatever had been handy. After he died, the cache of sixty-six unpublished songs in four notebooks was stored in a fireproof vault at the Nashville offices of his publishing firm, Acuff-Rose Publications. The vault was moved in 2002 to the offices of Sony ATV Music when it acquired Acuff-Rose.

After the 2001 tribute album, "Hank Williams: Timeless" won a Grammy Award for country album of the year, there was heightened interest in similar projects. A&R executive Mary Martin, one of the producers of "Timeless", was consulted about other means of drawing attention to material from the Williams archive. She said that Bob Dylan was given the first opportunity to perform 12 songs for a CD compilation. Dylan approached Williams' granddaughter Holly Williams at a show where he gave her a sheaf of song lyrics he wanted her to read. She later said that although Dylan had said nothing about them at first, she recognized them immediately as her grandfather's work. He then said he had been asked to possibly cut an entire album, or that he might have other artists perform them. She heard nothing more about it for two years until Mary Martin revived the project and she got a phone call from her publishing company saying it was time for her to pick up some samples of the available material.

Consequently, several other musicians got involved in the project, their main task being to create music that suited the lyrics. Dylan chose a song called "The Love That Faded" and fashioned a "honky-tonk waltz through heartache", while Holly Williams combed through the songs and songs fragments and chose one called "Blue Is My Heart", which had only eight lines. She wrote two more and added a bridge. The completed album, named The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams,  included the contributions of Bob Dylan and Holly Williams, as well as recordings by Alan Jackson, Jack White, Jakob Dylan, Lucinda Williams, Norah Jones, Vince Gill, Rodney Crowell, Patty Loveless, Levon Helm, Sheryl Crow, and Merle Haggard. The album was released on October 4, 2011.

Material recorded by Williams, originally intended for radio broadcasts to be played when he was on tour or for its distribution to radio stations nationwide, resurfaced over the years. In 1993, a double-disc set of recordings of Williams for the Health & Happiness Show was released. Broadcast in 1949, the shows were recorded for the promotion of Hadacol. The set was re-released on Hank Williams: The Legend Begins in 2011. The album included the unreleased songs "Fan It" and "Alexander's Ragtime Band", recorded by Williams at age 15; the homemade recordings of him singing "Freight Train Blues", "New San Antonio Rose", "St. Louis Blues" and "Greenback Dollar" at age 18; and a recording for the 1951 March of Dimes.

In May 2014, further radio recordings by Williams were released. These were recordings of The Garden Spot Programs, 1950, a series of publicity segments for plant nursery Naughton Farms originally aired in 1950. The recordings were found by collector George Gimarc at radio station KSIB in Creston, Iowa. Gimarc contacted Williams' daughter Jett, and Colin Escott, a music historian and biographer of Williams. The material was restored and remastered by Michael Graves and released by Omnivore Recordings. The release won a Grammy Award for Best Historical Album.

Williams was portrayed by English actor Tom Hiddleston in the 2016 biopic I Saw the Light, based on Colin Escott's 1994 book Hank Williams: The Biography. In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked Williams at No. 30 on their list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time. For the 100th anniversary of his birth, the Hank Williams Museum organized a three-day event in Montgomery that consisted of a series of concerts at the Davis Theater at Troy University and a wreath-laying ceremony at Williams' graveside as the closing event. At the ceremony, September 17, 2023 was proclaimed Hank Williams Day. Meanwhile, in Nashville, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum organized a concert featuring artists including Rodney Crowell and Williams' grandchildren Holly, Hillary, and Sam among others. On the anniversary, Billboard commented that Williams was a "breakthrough songwriter" who "remains a mythological figure".

Lawsuits over the estate
Williams died without leaving a will. In May 1953, Audrey Williams filed a lawsuit in Nashville against MGM Records and Acuff-Rose. The suit demanded that both of the publishing companies continue to pay her half of the royalties from Hank Williams' records. Williams had an agreement giving his first wife half of the royalties, but allegedly there was no clarification that the deal was valid after his death. Because Williams left no will, the disposition of the remaining 50 percent was considered uncertain; those involved included Williams' second wife, Billie Jean Horton and Williams' mother and sister.

At the time of his death, Williams' estate was estimated to be US$13,329.25 between cash, a cashier's check and his possessions. Lilly Williams considered the legality of Billie Jean's marriage to her son doubtful and she filed for the control of the estate. Billie Jean's lawyer argued that although she married Williams ten days before the finalization of her divorce to Harrison Eshlimar, Louisiana law considered the union legal since she married "in good faith".

Doubtful of the legality of the marriage in Tennessee and Alabama, Lilly Williams and her lawyers made several offers to settle out of court with Billie Jean that reached a final of US$30,000. On August 19, 1953, Billie Jean signed an agreement accepting the money. It required that she stopped making appearances billing herself as "Mrs. Hank Williams", to reveal the location of Williams' Tennessee Walking Horse, and the return of a saddle and three suitcases that belonged to him. With the agreement, Lilly became the legal guardian of the estate on behalf of Hank Williams, Jr.

Soon after giving birth, Bobbie Jett left her and Williams' daughter at Lilly's boardinghouse. Williams' mother expressed to the Montgomery County Department of Public Welfare in January 1953 her intention to adopt the child. While Irene Williams opposed the adoption, Williams' mother was granted the custody over the child she renamed "Cathy". Upon Lilly's death in 1955, Irene Williams assumed control of the estate. She became thus the legal guardian of Williams' son, while refused to adopt Cathy. Irene made an attempt to contact Bobbie Jett, who was at the time married and lived in California. Jett refused to take the child since her husband did not know of the existence of her daughter with Williams. Cathy was then put up for adoption and granted money from the estate of Lilly Williams, to be paid at the age of 21.

In 1963, Wesley Rose contacted Irene regarding the copyright renewals with Acuff-Rose: Rose offered US$25,000, which Irene accepted to prevent Williams' daughter from making a claim in the future. In 1966, an Alabama judge determined that the guardianship of Williams' estate belonged to Irene Williams, and he confirmed the validity of the copyright renewal deal. Cathy's adoptive parents were contacted by a lawyer, but they refused to contest the ruling of the court. In 1967, Hank Williams, Jr. was declared the only heir to the estate by a second judge. In 1969, the guardianship of the estate was transferred to lawyer Robert Stewart after Irene was arrested and sentenced to a jail term for possession of cocaine by a Texas court. Hank Williams, Jr. reached legal adulthood in 1970.

On October 22, 1975, a federal judge in Atlanta, Georgia, ruled that Billie Jean Horton was Williams' common-law wife, and that part of the copyright renewals of the songs belonged to her. At the age of 21, Cathy learned that Hank Williams was her biological father. In 1981, she found her half-siblings in California, and she learned of a 1951 contract between her biological parents that recognized her as Williams' daughter. She also learned that the court decisions of the 1960s ignored her existence. After a decision by the Supreme Court of Alabama in 1989, she was recognized as an heir of the estate of Williams. She later changed her name to Jett Williams.

WSM's Mother's Best Flour
In 1951, Williams hosted a 15-minute show for Mother's Best Flour on WSM radio. Due to Williams' tour schedules, some of the shows were previously recorded to be played in his absence. During the mid-1960s, WSM staff photographer Les Leverett rescued acetates that were thrown away by the station. At a later point, the recordings were duplicated. In the 1980s, he shared the acetates with Williams' former band member Jerry Rivers. A decade later, Leverett made a deal with former Drifting Cowboy Hillous Brutum, who did not appear on the recordings, for a commercial release of the copies.

The Legacy Entertainment Group, based in Brentwood, Tennessee, was sued by PolyGram and the heirs of Williams to block the release in 1997. While the original acetates of the shows made their way to the possession of Jett Williams, the lawyer of Legacy Entertainment Group claimed that they belonged to the label and he made an attempt to prevent the heirs of Williams to work on their own release of the recordings. Leverett then told The Tennessean that the original acetates did not belong to Butrum, and that the two of them made a deal to share the profits of the planned Legacy Entertainment Group release. The Universal Music Group, the parent company of Polygram, then claimed ownership of the shows.

In January 2006, the Tennessee Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling stating that Williams' heirs—son, Hank Williams Jr, and daughter, Jett Williams—have the sole rights to sell his recordings. In 2008, Time-Life released Unreleased Recordings, a selection of numbers pertaining to the Mother's Best Flour shows. In 2010, the company released a 15-CD box-set containing all of the recordings remastered by sound engineer Joe Palmaccio entitled The Complete Mothers' Best Recordings... Plus!.

title: Hank Williams


text:
The Rite of Spring

The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps) is a ballet and orchestral concert work by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company; the original choreography was by Vaslav Nijinsky with stage designs and costumes by Nicholas Roerich. When first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913, the avant-garde nature of the music and choreography caused a sensation. Many have called the first-night reaction a "riot" or "near-riot", though this wording did not come about until reviews of later performances in 1924, over a decade later. Although designed as a work for the stage, with specific passages accompanying characters and action, the music achieved equal if not greater recognition as a concert piece and is widely considered to be one of the most influential musical works of the 20th century.

Stravinsky was a young, virtually unknown composer when Diaghilev recruited him to create works for the Ballets Russes. Le Sacre du printemps was the third such major project, after the acclaimed Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911). The concept behind The Rite of Spring, developed by Roerich from Stravinsky's outline idea, is suggested by its subtitle, "Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts"; the scenario depicts various primitive rituals celebrating the advent of spring, after which a young girl is chosen as a sacrificial victim and dances herself to death. After a mixed critical reception for its original run and a short London tour, the ballet was not performed again until the 1920s, when a version choreographed by Léonide Massine replaced Nijinsky's original, which saw only eight performances. Massine's was the forerunner of many innovative productions directed by the world's leading choreographers, gaining the work worldwide acceptance. In the 1980s, Nijinsky's original choreography, long believed lost, was reconstructed by the Joffrey Ballet in Los Angeles.

Stravinsky's score contains many novel features for its time, including experiments in tonality, metre, rhythm, stress and dissonance. Analysts have noted in the score a significant grounding in Russian folk music, a relationship Stravinsky tended to deny. Regarded as among the first modernist works, the music influenced many of the 20th-century's leading composers and is one of the most recorded works in the classical repertoire.

Background
Igor Stravinsky was the son of Fyodor Stravinsky, the principal bass singer at the Imperial Opera, Saint Petersburg, and Anna, née Kholodovskaya, a competent amateur singer and pianist from an old-established Russian family. Fyodor's association with many of the leading figures in Russian music, including Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Mussorgsky, meant that Igor grew up in an intensely musical home. In 1901 Stravinsky began to study law at Saint Petersburg University while taking private lessons in harmony and counterpoint. Stravinsky worked under the guidance of Rimsky-Korsakov, having impressed him with some of his early compositional efforts. By the time of his mentor's death in 1908, Stravinsky had produced several works, among them a Piano Sonata in F♯ minor (1903–04), a Symphony in E♭ major (1907), which he catalogued as "Opus 1", and a short orchestral piece, Feu d'artifice ("Fireworks", composed in 1908).

In 1909 Feu d'artifice was performed at a concert in Saint Petersburg. Among those in the audience was the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who at that time was planning to introduce Russian music and art to western audiences. Like Stravinsky, Diaghilev had initially studied law, but had gravitated via journalism into the theatrical world. In 1907 he began his theatrical career by presenting five concerts in Paris; in the following year he introduced Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov. In 1909, still in Paris, he launched the Ballets Russes, initially with Borodin's Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor and Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. To present these works Diaghilev recruited the choreographer Michel Fokine, the designer Léon Bakst and the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. Diaghilev's intention, however, was to produce new works in a distinctively 20th-century style, and he was looking for fresh compositional talent. Having heard Feu d'artifice he approached Stravinsky, initially with a request for help in orchestrating music by Chopin to create new arrangements for the ballet Les Sylphides. Stravinsky worked on the opening Nocturne in A-flat major and the closing Grande valse brillante; his reward was a much bigger commission, to write the music for a new ballet, The Firebird (L'oiseau de feu) for the 1910 season.

Stravinsky worked through the winter of 1909–10, in close association with Fokine who was choreographing The Firebird. During this period Stravinsky made the acquaintance of Nijinsky who, although not dancing in the ballet, was a keen observer of its development. Stravinsky was uncomplimentary when recording his first impressions of the dancer, observing that he seemed immature and gauche for his age (he was 21). On the other hand, Stravinsky found Diaghilev an inspiration, "the very essence of a great personality". The Firebird was premiered on 25 June 1910, with Tamara Karsavina in the main role, and was a great public success. This ensured that the Diaghilev–Stravinsky collaboration would continue, in the first instance with Petrushka (1911) and then The Rite of Spring.

Synopsis and structure
In a note to the conductor Serge Koussevitzky in February 1914, Stravinsky described Le Sacre du printemps as "a musical-choreographic work, [representing] pagan Russia ... unified by a single idea: the mystery and great surge of the creative power of Spring". In his analysis of The Rite, Pieter van den Toorn writes that the work lacks a specific plot or narrative, and should be considered as a succession of choreographed episodes.

The French titles are given in the form as written in the four-part piano score published in 1913. There have been numerous variants of the English translations; those shown are from the 1967 edition of the score.

Conception
Lawrence Morton, in a study of the origins of The Rite, records that in 1907–08 Stravinsky set to music two poems from Sergey Gorodetsky's collection Yar. Another poem in the anthology, which Stravinsky did not set but is likely to have read, is "Yarila" which, Morton observes, contains many of the basic elements from which The Rite of Spring developed, including pagan rites, sage elders, and the propitiatory sacrifice of a young maiden: "The likeness is too close to be coincidental". Stravinsky himself gave contradictory accounts of the genesis of The Rite. In a 1920 article he stressed that the musical ideas had come first, that the pagan setting had been suggested by the music rather than the other way round. However, in his 1936 autobiography he described the origin of the work thus: "One day [in 1910], when I was finishing the last pages of L'Oiseau de Feu in Saint Petersburg, I had a fleeting vision ... I saw in my imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watching a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of Spring. Such was the theme of the Sacre du printemps."

By May 1910 Stravinsky was discussing his idea with Nicholas Roerich, the foremost Russian expert on folk art and ancient rituals. Roerich had a reputation as an artist and mystic, and had provided the stage designs for Diaghilev's 1909 production of the Polovtsian Dances. The pair quickly agreed on a working title, "The Great Sacrifice" (Russian: Velikaia zhertva); Diaghilev gave his blessing to the work, although the collaboration was put on hold for a year while Stravinsky was occupied with his second major commission for Diaghilev, the ballet Petrushka.

In July 1911 Stravinsky visited Talashkino, near Smolensk, where Roerich was staying with the Princess Maria Tenisheva, a noted patron of the arts and a sponsor of Diaghilev's magazine World of Art. Here, over several days, Stravinsky and Roerich finalised the structure of the ballet. Thomas F. Kelly, in his history of the Rite premiere, suggests that the two-part pagan scenario that emerged was primarily devised by Roerich. Stravinsky later explained to Nikolai Findeyzen, the editor of the Russian Musical Gazette, that the first part of the work would be called "The Kiss of the Earth", and would consist of games and ritual dances interrupted by a procession of sages, culminating in a frenzied dance as the people embraced the spring. Part Two, "The Sacrifice", would have a darker aspect; secret night games of maidens, leading to the choice of one for sacrifice and her eventual dance to the death before the sages. The original working title was changed to "Holy Spring" (Russian: Vesna sviashchennaia), but the work became generally known by the French translation Le Sacre du printemps, or its English equivalent The Rite of Spring, with the subtitle "Pictures of Pagan Russia".

Composition
Stravinsky's sketchbooks show that after returning to his home at Ustilug in Ukraine in September 1911, he worked on two movements, the "Augurs of Spring" and the "Spring Rounds". In October he left Ustilug for Clarens in Switzerland, where in a tiny and sparsely-furnished room—an 8 by closet, with only a muted upright piano, a table and two chairs —he worked throughout the 1911–12 winter on the score. By March 1912, according to the sketchbook chronology, Stravinsky had completed Part I and had drafted much of Part II. He also prepared a two-hand piano version, subsequently lost, which he may have used to demonstrate the work to Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes conductor Pierre Monteux in April 1912. He also made a four-hand piano arrangement which became the first published version of Le Sacre; he and the composer Claude Debussy played the first half of this together, in June 1912.

Following Diaghilev's decision to delay the premiere until 1913, Stravinsky put The Rite aside during the summer of 1912. He enjoyed the Paris season, and accompanied Diaghilev to the Bayreuth Festival to attend a performance of Parsifal. Stravinsky resumed work on The Rite in the autumn; the sketchbooks indicate that he had finished the outline of the final sacrificial dance on 17 November 1912. During the remaining months of winter he worked on the full orchestral score, which he signed and dated as "completed in Clarens, March 8, 1913". He showed the manuscript to Maurice Ravel, who was enthusiastic and predicted, in a letter to a friend, that the first performance of Le Sacre would be as important as the 1902 premiere of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande. After the orchestral rehearsals began in late March, Monteux drew the composer's attention to several passages which were causing problems: inaudible horns, a flute solo drowned out by brass and strings, and multiple problems with the balance among instruments in the brass section during fortissimo episodes. Stravinsky amended these passages, and as late as April was still revising and rewriting the final bars of the "Sacrificial Dance". Revision of the score did not end with the version prepared for the 1913 premiere; rather, Stravinsky continued to make changes for the next 30 years or more. According to Van den Toorn, "[n]o other work of Stravinsky's underwent such a series of post-premiere revisions".

Stravinsky acknowledged that the work's opening bassoon melody was derived from an anthology of Lithuanian folk songs, but maintained that this was his only borrowing from such sources; if other elements sounded like aboriginal folk music, he said, it was due to "some unconscious 'folk' memory". However, Morton has identified several more melodies in Part I as having their origins in the Lithuanian collection. More recently Richard Taruskin discovered in the score an adapted tune from one of Rimsky-Korsakov's "One Hundred Russian National Songs". Taruskin notes the paradox whereby The Rite, generally acknowledged as the most revolutionary of the composer's early works, is in fact rooted in the traditions of Russian music.

Realisation
Taruskin has listed a number of sources that Roerich consulted when creating his designs. Among these are the Primary Chronicle, a 12th-century compendium of early pagan customs, and Alexander Afanasyev's study of peasant folklore and pagan prehistory. The Princess Tenisheva's collection of costumes was an early source of inspiration. When the designs were complete, Stravinsky expressed delight and declared them "a real miracle".

Stravinsky's relationship with his other main collaborator, Nijinsky, was more complicated. Diaghilev had decided that Nijinsky's genius as a dancer would translate into the role of choreographer and ballet master; he was not dissuaded when Nijinsky's first attempt at choreography, Debussy's L'après-midi d'un faune, caused controversy and near-scandal because of the dancer's novel stylised movements and his overtly sexual gesture at the work's end. It is apparent from contemporary correspondence that, at least initially, Stravinsky viewed Nijinsky's talents as a choreographer with approval; a letter he sent to Findeyzen praises the dancer's "passionate zeal and complete self-effacement". However, in his 1936 memoirs Stravinsky writes that the decision to employ Nijinsky in this role filled him with apprehension; although he admired Nijinsky as a dancer he had no confidence in him as a choreographer: "the poor boy knew nothing of music. He could neither read it nor play any instrument". Later still, Stravinsky would ridicule Nijinsky's dancing maidens as "knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas".

Stravinsky's autobiographical account refers to many "painful incidents" between the choreographer and the dancers during the rehearsal period. By the beginning of 1913, when Nijinsky was badly behind schedule, Stravinsky was warned by Diaghilev that "unless you come here immediately ... the Sacre will not take place". The problems were slowly overcome, and when the final rehearsals were held in May 1913, the dancers appeared to have mastered the work's difficulties. Even the Ballets Russes's sceptical stage director, Serge Grigoriev, was full of praise for the originality and dynamism of Nijinsky's choreography.

The conductor Pierre Monteux had worked with Diaghilev since 1911 and had been in charge of the orchestra at the premiere of Petrushka. Monteux's first reaction to The Rite, after hearing Stravinsky play a piano version, was to leave the room and find a quiet corner. He drew Diaghilev aside and said he would never conduct music like that; Diaghilev managed to change his mind. Although he would perform his duties with conscientious professionalism, he never came to enjoy the work; nearly fifty years after the premiere he told enquirers that he detested it. In old age he said to Sir Thomas Beecham's biographer Charles Reid: "I did not like Le Sacre then. I have conducted it fifty times since. I do not like it now". On 30 March Monteux informed Stravinsky of modifications he thought were necessary to the score, all of which the composer implemented. The orchestra, drawn mainly from the Concerts Colonne in Paris, comprised 99 players, much larger than normally employed at the theatre, and had difficulty fitting into the orchestra pit.

After the first part of the ballet received two full orchestral rehearsals in March, Monteux and the company departed to perform in Monte Carlo. Rehearsals resumed when they returned; the unusually large number of rehearsals—seventeen solely orchestral and five with the dancers—were fit into the fortnight before the opening, after Stravinsky's arrival in Paris on 13 May. The music contained so many unusual note combinations that Monteux had to ask the musicians to stop interrupting when they thought they had found mistakes in the score, saying he would tell them if something was played incorrectly. According to Doris Monteux, "The musicians thought it absolutely crazy". At one point—a climactic brass fortissimo—the orchestra broke into nervous laughter at the sound, causing Stravinsky to intervene angrily.

The role of the sacrificial victim was to have been danced by Nijinsky's sister, Bronislava Nijinska; when she became pregnant during rehearsals, she was replaced by the then relatively unknown Maria Piltz.

Premiere
Paris's Théâtre des Champs-Élysées was a new structure, which had opened on 2 April 1913 with a programme celebrating the works of many of the leading composers of the day. The theatre's manager, Gabriel Astruc, was determined to house the 1913 Ballets Russes season, and paid Diaghilev the large sum of 25,000 francs per performance, double what he had paid the previous year. The programme for 29 May 1913, as well as the Stravinsky premiere, included Les Sylphides, Weber's Le Spectre de la Rose and Borodin's Polovtsian Dances. Ticket sales for the evening, ticket prices being doubled for a premiere, amounted to 35,000 francs. A dress rehearsal was held in the presence of members of the press and assorted invited guests. According to Stravinsky, all went peacefully. However, the critic of L'Écho de Paris, Adolphe Boschot, foresaw possible trouble; he wondered how the public would receive the work, and suggested that they might react badly if they thought they were being mocked.

On the evening of 29 May, Gustav Linor reported, "Never ... has the hall been so full, or so resplendent; the stairways and the corridors were crowded with spectators eager to see and to hear". The evening began with Les Sylphides, in which Nijinsky and Karsavina danced the main roles. Le Sacre followed. Some eyewitnesses and commentators said that the disturbances in the audience began during the Introduction, and grew noisier when the curtain rose on the stamping dancers in "Augurs of Spring". But Taruskin asserts, "it was not Stravinsky's music that did the shocking. It was the ugly earthbound lurching and stomping devised by Vaslav Nijinsky." Marie Rambert, who was working as an assistant to Nijinsky, recalled later that it was soon impossible to hear the music on the stage. In his autobiography, Stravinsky writes that the derisive laughter that greeted the first bars of the Introduction disgusted him, and that he left the auditorium to watch the rest of the performance from the stage wings. The demonstrations, he says, grew into "a terrific uproar" which, along with the on-stage noises, drowned out the voice of Nijinsky who was shouting the step numbers to the dancers. Two years after the premiere the journalist and photographer Carl Van Vechten claimed in his book Music After the Great War that the person behind him became carried away with excitement, and "began to beat rhythmically on top of my head with his fists". In 1916, in a letter not published until 2013, Van Vechten admitted he had actually attended the second night, among other changes of fact.

At that time, a Parisian ballet audience typically consisted of two diverse groups: the wealthy and fashionable set, who would be expecting to see a traditional performance with beautiful music, and a "Bohemian" group who, the poet-philosopher Jean Cocteau asserted, would "acclaim, right or wrong, anything that is new because of their hatred of the boxes". Monteux believed that the trouble began when the two factions began attacking each other, but their mutual anger was soon diverted towards the orchestra: "Everything available was tossed in our direction, but we continued to play on". Around forty of the worst offenders were ejected—possibly with the intervention of the police, although this is uncorroborated. Through all the disturbances the performance continued without interruption. The unrest receded significantly during Part II, and by some accounts Maria Piltz's rendering of the final "Sacrificial Dance" was watched in reasonable silence. At the end there were several curtain calls for the dancers, for Monteux and the orchestra, and for Stravinsky and Nijinsky before the evening's programme continued.

Among the more hostile press reviews was that of Le Figaro's critic Henri Quittard, who called the work "a laborious and puerile barbarity" and added "We are sorry to see an artist such as M. Stravinsky involve himself in this disconcerting adventure". On the other hand, Gustav Linor, writing in the leading theatrical magazine Comœdia, thought the performance was superb, especially that of Maria Piltz; the disturbances, while deplorable, were merely "a rowdy debate" between two ill-mannered factions. Emile Raudin, of Les Marges, who had barely heard the music, wrote: "Couldn't we ask M. Astruc ... to set aside one performance for well-intentioned spectators? ... We could at least propose to evict the female element". The composer Alfredo Casella thought that the demonstrations were aimed at Nijinsky's choreography rather than at the music, a view shared by the critic Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, who wrote: "The idea was excellent, but was not successfully carried out". Calvocoressi failed to observe any direct hostility to the composer—unlike, he said, the premiere of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902. Of later reports that the veteran composer Camille Saint-Saëns had stormed out of the premiere, Stravinsky observed that this was impossible; Saint-Saëns did not attend. Stravinsky also rejected Cocteau's story that, after the performance, Stravinsky, Nijinsky, Diaghilev and Cocteau himself took a cab to the Bois de Boulogne where a tearful Diaghilev recited poems by Pushkin. Stravinsky merely recalled a celebratory dinner with Diaghilev and Nijinsky, at which the impresario expressed his entire satisfaction with the outcome. To Maximilien Steinberg, a former fellow-pupil under Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky wrote that Nijinsky's choreography had been "incomparable: with the exception of a few places, everything was as I wanted it".

Initial run and early revivals
The premiere was followed by five further performances of Le Sacre du printemps at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, the last on 13 June. Although these occasions were relatively peaceful, something of the mood of the first night remained; the composer Giacomo Puccini, who attended the second performance on 2 June, described the choreography as ridiculous and the music cacophonous—"the work of a madman. The public hissed, laughed—and applauded". Stravinsky, confined to his bed by typhoid fever, did not join the company when it went to London for four performances at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Reviewing the London production, The Times critic was impressed how different elements of the work came together to form a coherent whole, but was less enthusiastic about the music itself, opining that Stravinsky had entirely sacrificed melody and harmony for rhythm: "If M. Stravinsky had wished to be really primitive, he would have been wise to ... score his ballet for nothing but drums". The ballet historian Cyril Beaumont commented on the "slow, uncouth movements" of the dancers, finding these "in complete opposition to the traditions of classical ballet".

After the opening Paris run and the London performances, events conspired to prevent further stagings of the ballet. Nijinsky's choreography, which Kelly describes as "so striking, so outrageous, so frail as to its preservation", did not appear again until attempts were made to reconstruct it in the 1980s. On 19 September 1913 Nijinsky married Romola de Pulszky while the Ballets Russes was on tour without Diaghilev in South America. When Diaghilev found out he was distraught and furious that his lover had married, and dismissed Nijinsky. Diaghilev was then obliged to re-hire Fokine, who had resigned in 1912 because Nijinsky had been asked to choreograph Faune. Fokine made it a condition of his re-employment that none of Nijinsky's choreography would be performed. In a letter to the art critic and historian Alexandre Benois, Stravinsky wrote, "[T]he possibility has gone for some time of seeing anything valuable in the field of dance and, still more important, of again seeing this offspring of mine".

With the disruption following the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 and the dispersal of many artistes, Diaghilev was ready to re-engage Nijinsky as both dancer and choreographer, but Nijinsky had been placed under house arrest in Hungary as an enemy Russian citizen. Diaghilev negotiated his release in 1916 for a tour in the United States, but the dancer's mental health steadily declined and he took no further part in professional ballet after 1917. In 1920, when Diaghilev decided to revive The Rite, he found that no one now remembered the choreography. After spending most of the war years in Switzerland, and becoming a permanent exile from his homeland after the 1917 Russian Revolution, Stravinsky resumed his partnership with Diaghilev when the war ended. In December 1920 Ernest Ansermet conducted a new production in Paris, choreographed by Léonide Massine, with the Nicholas Roerich designs retained; the lead dancer was Lydia Sokolova. In his memoirs, Stravinsky is equivocal about the Massine production; the young choreographer, he writes, showed "unquestionable talent", but there was something "forced and artificial" in his choreography, which lacked the necessary organic relationship with the music. Sokolova, in her later account, recalled some of the tensions surrounding the production, with Stravinsky, "wearing an expression that would have frightened a hundred Chosen Virgins, pranc[ing] up and down the centre aisle" while Ansermet rehearsed the orchestra.

Later choreographies
The ballet was first shown in the United States on 11 April 1930, when Massine's 1920 version was performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra in Philadelphia under Leopold Stokowski, with Martha Graham dancing the role of the Chosen One. The production moved to New York, where Massine was relieved to find the audiences receptive, a sign, he thought, that New Yorkers were finally beginning to take ballet seriously. The first American-designed production, in 1937, was that of the modern dance exponent Lester Horton, whose version replaced the original pagan Russian setting with a Wild West background and the use of Native American dances.

In 1944 Massine began a new collaboration with Roerich, who before his death in 1947 completed a number of sketches for a new production which Massine brought to fruition at La Scala in Milan in 1948. This heralded a number of significant post-war European productions. Mary Wigman in Berlin (1957) followed Horton in highlighting the erotic aspects of virgin sacrifice, as did Maurice Béjart in Brussels (1959). Béjart's representation replaced the culminating sacrifice with a depiction of what the critic Robert Johnson describes as "ceremonial coitus". The Royal Ballet's 1962 production, choreographed by Kenneth MacMillan and designed by Sidney Nolan, was first performed on 3 May and was a critical triumph. It has remained in the company's repertoire for more than 50 years; after its revival in May 2011 The Daily Telegraph's critic Mark Monahan called it one of the Royal Ballet's greatest achievements. Moscow first saw The Rite in 1965, in a version choreographed for the Bolshoi Ballet by Natalia Kasatkina and Vladimir Vasiliev. This production was shown in Leningrad four years later, at the Maly Opera Theatre, and introduced a storyline that provided the Chosen One with a lover who wreaks vengeance on the elders after the sacrifice. Johnson describes the production as "a product of state atheism ... Soviet propaganda at its best".

In 1975 modern dance choreographer Pina Bausch, who transformed the Ballett der Wuppertaler Bühnen to Tanztheater Wuppertal, caused a stir in the dance world with her stark depiction, played out on an earth-covered stage, in which the Chosen One is sacrificed to gratify the misogyny of the surrounding men. At the end, according to The Guardian's Luke Jennings, "the cast is sweat-streaked, filthy and audibly panting". Part of this dance appears in the film Pina. Bausch's version had also been danced by two ballet companies, the Paris Opera Ballet and English National Ballet. In America, in 1980, Paul Taylor used Stravinsky's four-hand piano version of the score as the background for a scenario based on child murder and gangster film images. In February 1984 Martha Graham, in her 90th year, resumed her association with The Rite by choreographing a new production at New York State Theater. The New York Times critic declared the performance "a triumph ... totally elemental, as primal in expression of basic emotion as any tribal ceremony, as hauntingly staged in its deliberate bleakness as it is rich in implication".

On 30 September 1987, the Joffrey Ballet performed in Los Angeles The Rite based on a reconstruction of Nijinsky's 1913 choreography, until then thought lost beyond recall. The performance resulted from years of research, primarily by Millicent Hodson, who pieced the choreography together from the original prompt books, contemporary sketches and photographs, and the recollections of Marie Rambert and other survivors. Hodson's version has since been performed by the Kirov Ballet, at the Mariinsky Theatre in 2003 and later that year at Covent Garden. In its 2012–13 season the Joffrey Ballet gave centennial performances at numerous venues, including the University of Texas on 5–6 March 2013, the University of Massachusetts on 14 March 2013, and with the Cleveland Orchestra on 17–18 August 2013.

The music publishers Boosey & Hawkes have estimated that since its premiere, the ballet has been the subject of at least 150 productions, many of which have become classics and have been performed worldwide. Among the more radical interpretations is Glen Tetley's 1974 version, in which the Chosen One is a young male. More recently there have been solo dance versions devised by Molissa Fenley and Javier de Frutos and a punk rock interpretation from Michael Clark. The 2004 film Rhythm Is It! documents a project by conductor Simon Rattle with the Berlin Philharmonic and choreographer Royston Maldoom to stage a performance of the ballet with a cast of 250 children recruited from Berlin's public schools, from 25 countries. In Rites (2008), by The Australian Ballet in conjunction with Bangarra Dance Theatre, Aboriginal perceptions of the elements of earth, air, fire and water are featured.

Concert performances
On 18 February 1914 The Rite received its first concert performance (the music without the ballet), in Saint Petersburg under Serge Koussevitzky. On 5 April that year, Stravinsky experienced for himself the popular success of Le Sacre as a concert work, at the Casino de Paris. After the performance, again under Monteux, the composer was carried in triumph from the hall on the shoulders of his admirers. The Rite had its first British concert performance on 7 June 1921, at the Queen's Hall in London under Eugene Goossens. Its American premiere occurred on 3 March 1922, when Stokowski included it in a Philadelphia Orchestra programme. Goossens was also responsible for introducing The Rite to Australia on 23 August 1946 at the Sydney Town Hall, as guest conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

Stravinsky first conducted the work in 1926, in a concert given by the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam; two years later he brought it to the Salle Pleyel in Paris for two performances under his baton. Of these occasions he later wrote that "thanks to the experience I had gained with all kinds of orchestras ... I had reached a point where I could obtain exactly what I wanted, as I wanted it". Commentators have broadly agreed that the work has had a greater impact in the concert hall than it has on the stage; many of Stravinsky's revisions to the music were made with the concert hall rather than the theatre in mind. The work has become a staple in the repertoires of all the leading orchestras, and has been cited by Leonard Bernstein as "the most important piece of music of the 20th century".

In 1963, 50 years after the premiere, Monteux (then aged 88) agreed to conduct a commemorative performance at London's Royal Albert Hall. According to Isaiah Berlin, a close friend of the composer, Stravinsky informed him that he had no intention of hearing his music being "murdered by that frightful butcher". Instead he arranged tickets for that particular evening's performance of Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro, at Covent Garden. Under pressure from his friends, Stravinsky was persuaded to leave the opera after the first act. He arrived at the Albert Hall just as the performance of The Rite was ending; composer and conductor shared a warm embrace in front of the unaware, wildly cheering audience. Monteux's biographer John Canarina provides a different slant on this occasion, recording that by the end of the evening Stravinsky had asserted that "Monteux, almost alone among conductors, never cheapened Rite or looked for his own glory in it, and he continued to play it all his life with the greatest fidelity".

General character
Commentators have often described The Rite's music in vivid terms; Paul Rosenfeld, in 1920, wrote of it "pound[ing] with the rhythm of engines, whirls and spirals like screws and fly-wheels, grinds and shrieks like laboring metal". In a more recent analysis, The New York Times critic Donal Henahan refers to "great crunching, snarling chords from the brass and thundering thumps from the timpani". The composer Julius Harrison acknowledged the uniqueness of the work negatively: it demonstrated Stravinsky's "abhorrence of everything for which music has stood these many centuries ... all human endeavour and progress are being swept aside to make room for hideous sounds".

In The Firebird, Stravinsky had begun to experiment with bitonality (the use of two different keys simultaneously). He took this technique further in Petrushka, but reserved its full effect for The Rite where, as the analyst E.W. White explains, he "pushed [it] to its logical conclusion". White also observes the music's complex metrical character, with combinations of duple and triple time in which a strong irregular beat is emphasised by powerful percussion. The music critic Alex Ross has described the irregular process whereby Stravinsky adapted and absorbed traditional Russian folk material into the score. He "proceeded to pulverize them into motivic bits, pile them up in layers, and reassemble them in cubistic collages and montages".

The duration of the work is about 35 minutes.

Instrumentation
The score calls for a large orchestra consisting of the following instruments:

Woodwinds
 * 1 piccolo
 * 3 flutes (third doubling second piccolo)
 * 1 alto flute
 * 4 oboes (fourth doubling second cor anglais)
 * 1 cor anglais
 * 3 clarinets in B♭ and A (third doubling second bass clarinet)
 * 1 clarinet in E♭ and D
 * 1 bass clarinet
 * 4 bassoons (fourth doubling second contrabassoon)
 * 1 contrabassoon

Brass
 * 8 horns (seventh and eighth doubling tenor Wagner tubas)
 * 1 piccolo trumpet in D
 * 4 trumpets in C (fourth doubling bass trumpet in E♭)
 * 3 trombones
 * 2 bass tubas

Percussion
 * 5 timpani (requiring two players)
 * bass drum
 * tam-tam
 * triangle
 * tambourine
 * cymbals
 * antique cymbals in A♭ and B♭
 * güiro

Strings
 * violins I, II
 * violas
 * cellos
 * double basses

Despite the large orchestra, much of the score is written chamber-fashion, with individual instruments and small groups having distinct roles.

Part I: The Adoration of the Earth
The opening melody is played by a solo bassoon in a very high register, which renders the instrument almost unidentifiable; gradually other woodwind instruments are sounded and are eventually joined by strings. The sound builds up before stopping suddenly, Hill says, "just as it is bursting ecstatically into bloom". There is then a reiteration of the opening bassoon solo, now played a semitone lower.

The first dance, "Augurs of Spring", is characterised by a repetitive stamping chord in the horns and strings, based on E♭ dominant 7 superimposed on an F♭ major triad, F♭, A♭, and C♭. White suggests that this bitonal combination, which Stravinsky considered the focal point of the entire work, was devised on the piano, since the constituent chords are comfortable fits for the hands on a keyboard. The rhythm of the stamping is disturbed by Stravinsky's constant shifting of the accent, on and off the beat, before the dance ends in a collapse, as if from exhaustion. Alex Ross has summed up the pattern (italics = rhythmic accents) as follows:  one two three four five six seven eight one two three four five six seven eight one two three four five six seven eight one two three four five six seven eight

According to Roger Nichols "At first sight there seems no pattern in the distribution of accents to the stamping chords. Taking the initial quaver of bar 1 as a natural accent we have for the first outburst the following groups of quavers: 9, 2, 6, 3, 4, 5, 3. However, these apparently random numbers make sense when split into two groups:  9 6 4 3 2 3 5

Clearly the top line is decreasing, the bottom line increasing, and by respectively decreasing and increasing amounts ...Whether Stravinsky worked them out like this we shall probably never know. But the way two different rhythmic 'orders' interfere with each other to produced apparent chaos is... a typically Stravinskyan notion."

The "Ritual of Abduction" which follows is described by Hill as "the most terrifying of musical hunts". It concludes in a series of flute trills that usher in the "Spring Rounds", in which a slow and laborious theme gradually rises to a dissonant fortissimo, a "ghastly caricature" of the episode's main tune.

Brass and percussion predominate as the "Ritual of the Rival Tribes" begins. A tune emerges on tenor and bass tubas, leading after much repetition to the entry of the Sage's procession. The music then comes to a virtual halt, "bleached free of colour" (Hill), as the Sage blesses the earth. The "Dance of the Earth" then begins, bringing Part I to a close in a series of phrases of the utmost vigour which are abruptly terminated in what Hill describes as a "blunt, brutal amputation".

Part II: The Sacrifice
Part II has a greater cohesion than its predecessor. Hill describes the music as following an arc stretching from the beginning of the Introduction to the conclusion of the final dance. Woodwind and muted trumpets are prominent throughout the Introduction, which ends with a number of rising cadences on strings and flutes. The transition into the "Mystic Circles" is almost imperceptible; the main theme of the section has been prefigured in the Introduction. A loud repeated chord, which Berger likens to a call to order, announces the moment for choosing the sacrificial victim. The "Glorification of the Chosen One" is brief and violent; in the "Evocation of the Ancestors" that follows, short phrases are interspersed with drum rolls. The "Ritual Action of the Ancestors" begins quietly, but slowly builds to a series of climaxes before subsiding suddenly into the quiet phrases that began the episode.

The final transition introduces the "Sacrificial Dance". This is written as a more disciplined ritual than the extravagant dance that ended Part I, though it contains some wild moments, with the large percussion section of the orchestra given full voice. Stravinsky had difficulties with this section, especially with the final bars that conclude the work. The abrupt ending displeased several critics, one of whom wrote that the music "suddenly falls over on its side". Stravinsky himself referred to the final chord disparagingly as "a noise", but in his various attempts to amend or rewrite the section, was unable to produce a more acceptable solution.

Influence and adaptations
The music historian Donald Jay Grout has written: "The Sacre is undoubtedly the most famous composition of the early 20th century ... it had the effect of an explosion that so scattered the elements of musical language that they could never again be put together as before". The academic and critic Jan Smaczny, echoing Bernstein, calls it one of the 20th century's most influential compositions, providing "endless stimulation for performers and listeners". Taruskin writes that "one of the marks of The Rite's unique status is the number of books that have been devoted to it—certainly a greater number than have been devoted to any other ballet, possibly to any other individual musical composition ..." According to Kelly the 1913 premiere might be considered "the most important single moment in the history of 20th-century music", and its repercussions continue to reverberate in the 21st century. Ross has described The Rite as a prophetic work, presaging the "second avant-garde" era in classical composition—music of the body rather than of the mind, in which "[m]elodies would follow the patterns of speech; rhythms would match the energy of dance ... sonorities would have the hardness of life as it is really lived". The work is regarded as among the first examples of modernism in music.

Among 20th-century composers most influenced by The Rite is Stravinsky's near contemporary, Edgard Varèse, who had attended the 1913 premiere. Varèse, according to Ross, was particularly drawn to the "cruel harmonies and stimulating rhythms" of The Rite, which he employed to full effect in his concert work Amériques (1921), scored for a massive orchestra with added sound effects including a lion's roar and a wailing siren. Aaron Copland, to whom Stravinsky was a particular inspiration in the former's student days, considered The Rite a masterpiece that had created "the decade of the displaced accent and the polytonal chord". Copland adopted Stravinsky's technique of composing in small sections which he then shuffled and rearranged, rather than working through from beginning to end. Ross cites the music of Copland's ballet Billy the Kid as coming directly from the "Spring Rounds" section of The Rite. For Olivier Messiaen The Rite was of special significance; he constantly analysed and expounded on the work, which gave him an enduring model for rhythmic drive and assembly of material. Stravinsky was sceptical about over-intellectual analysis of the work. "The man has found reasons for every note and that the clarinet line in page 3 is the inverted counterpoint of the horn in page 19. I never thought about that", he allegedly replied to Michel Legrand when asked about Pierre Boulez's take on the matter.

After the premiere the writer Léon Vallas opined that Stravinsky had written music 30 years ahead of its time, suitable to be heard in 1940. Coincidentally, it was in that year that Walt Disney released Fantasia, an animated feature film using music from The Rite and other classical compositions, conducted by Stokowski. The Rite segment of the film depicted the Earth's prehistory, with the creation of life, leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs as the finale. Among those impressed by the film was Gunther Schuller, later a composer, conductor and jazz scholar. The Rite of Spring sequence, he says, overwhelmed him and determined his future career in music: "I hope [Stravinsky] appreciated that hundreds—perhaps thousands—of musicians were turned onto The Rite of Spring ... through Fantasia, musicians who might otherwise never have heard the work, or at least not until many years later". In later life Stravinsky claimed distaste for the adaptation, though as Ross remarks, he said nothing critical at the time; according to Ross, the composer Paul Hindemith observed that "Igor appears to love it".

Recordings
Before the first gramophone disc recordings of The Rite were issued in 1929, Stravinsky had helped to produce a pianola version of the work for the London branch of the Aeolian Company. He also created a much more comprehensive arrangement for the Pleyela, manufactured by the French piano company Pleyel, with whom he signed two contracts in April and May 1921, under which many of his early works were reproduced on this medium. The Pleyela version of The Rite of Spring was issued in 1921; the British pianolist Rex Lawson first recorded the work in this form in 1990.

In 1929 Stravinsky and Monteux vied with each other to conduct the first orchestral gramophone recording of The Rite. While Stravinsky led L'Orchestre des Concerts Straram in a recording for the Columbia label, at the same time Monteux was recording it for the HMV label. Stokowski's version followed in 1930. Stravinsky made two more recordings, in 1940 and 1960. According to the critic Edward Greenfield, Stravinsky was not technically a great conductor but, Greenfield says, in the 1960 recording with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra the composer inspired a performance with "extraordinary thrust and resilience". In conversations with Robert Craft, Stravinsky reviewed several recordings of The Rite made in the 1960s. He thought Herbert von Karajan's 1963 recording with the Berlin Philharmonic, was good, but "the performance is ... too polished, a pet savage rather than a real one". Stravinsky thought that Pierre Boulez, with the Orchestre National de France (1963), was "less good than I had hoped ... very bad tempi and some tasteless alterations". He praised a 1962 recording by The Moscow State Symphony Orchestra for making the music sound Russian, "which is just right", but Stravinsky's concluding judgement was that none of these three performances was worth preserving.

As of 2013 there were well over 100 different recordings of The Rite commercially available, and many more held in library sound archives. It has become one of the most recorded of all 20th century musical works.

Editions
The first published score was the four-hand piano arrangement (Edition Russe de Musique, RV196), dated 1913. Publication of the full orchestral score was prevented by the outbreak of war in August 1914. After the revival of the work in 1920 Stravinsky, who had not heard the music for seven years, made numerous revisions to the score, which was finally published in 1921 (Edition Russe de Musique, RV 197/197b. large and pocket scores).

In 1922 Ansermet, who was preparing to perform the work in Berlin, sent to Stravinsky a list of errors he had found in the published score. In 1926, as part of his preparation for that year's performance with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Stravinsky rewrote the "Evocation of the Ancestors" section and made substantial changes to the "Sacrificial Dance". The extent of these revisions, together with Ansermet's recommendations, convinced Stravinsky that a new edition was necessary, and this appeared in large and pocket form in 1929. It did not, however, incorporate all of Ansermet's amendments and, confusingly, bore the date and RV code of the 1921 edition, making the new edition hard to identify.

Stravinsky continued to revise the work, and in 1943 rewrote the "Sacrificial Dance". In 1948 Boosey & Hawkes issued a corrected version of the 1929 score (B&H 16333), although Stravinsky's substantial 1943 amendment of the "Sacrificial Dance" was not incorporated into the new version and remained unperformed, to the composer's disappointment. He considered it "much easier to play ... and superior in balance and sonority" to the earlier versions. A less musical motive for the revisions and corrected editions was copyright law. The composer had left Galaxy Music Corporation (agents for Editions Russe de la Musique, the original publisher) for Associated Music Publishers at the time, and orchestras would be reluctant to pay a second rental charge from two publishers to match the full work and the revised Sacrificial Dance; moreover, the revised dance could only be published in America. The 1948 score provided copyright protection to the work in America, where it had lapsed, but Boosey (who acquired the Editions Russe catalogue) did not have the rights to the revised finale.

The 1929 score as revised in 1948 forms the basis of most modern performances of The Rite. Boosey & Hawkes reissued their 1948 edition in 1965, and produced a newly engraved edition (B&H 19441) in 1967. The firm also issued an unmodified reprint of the 1913 piano reduction in 1952 (B&H 17271) and a revised piano version, incorporating the 1929 revisions, in 1967.

The Paul Sacher Foundation, in association with Boosey & Hawkes, announced in May 2013, as part of The Rite's centenary celebrations, their intention to publish the 1913 autograph score, as used in early performances. After being kept in Russia for decades, the autograph score was acquired by Boosey & Hawkes in 1947. The firm presented the score to Stravinsky in 1962, on his 80th birthday. After the composer's death in 1971 the manuscript was acquired by the Paul Sacher Foundation. As well as the autograph score, they have published the manuscript piano four-hands score.

In 2000, Kalmus Music Publishers brought out an edition where former Philadelphia Orchestra librarian Clint Nieweg made over 21,000 corrections to the score and parts. Since then a published errata list added some 310 more corrections. Then in 2021, Serenissima Music published a newer Nieweg edition, incorporating 2,200 more corrections based on Stravinsky's autograph manuscript score, superseding the older 2000 edition.

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