Most people don’t associate Shakespeare with anything except long plays, love sonnets … and Hank Williams Sr.
At least that’s the way ETSU’s Dr. Robert Sawyer looks at it. Sawyer is an associate English professor and the author of a paper named “‘Country Matters’: Shakespeare and Songs of the American South.” Sawyer’s research examines how Shakespeare has influenced and appeared in country music.
In his research, one of Sawyer’s goals is to disprove the theory that Shakespeare wrote for an elite crowd. He says that for the last hundred years there has been a stigma about Shakespeare and the people who read him.
“Shakespeare was writing for everybody,” Sawyer said.
Sawyer has discovered many instances in country music in which Shakespeare or his works appear: Dolly Parton’s “Romeo,” Diamond Rio’s “This Romeo Ain’t Got Julie Yet,” and Lucida Williams’s “Little Brother, Little Angel.”
The research, one of Sawyer’s side projects, is what he calls “an intersection between high culture and popular culture.”
“If they’re [students] interested in Shakespeare or country music, they’ll be interested [in the lecture],” Sawyer said.
A portion of Sawyer’s research is specific to a connection between the Bard of Avon and country music legend Hank Williams, Sr.
“The late Williams was often called the ‘Hillbilly Shakespeare’ and ‘Shakespeare of the Common Man’,” Sawyer said.
“Slogan writers may have been more accurate in their description than they realized … the two men had similar family backgrounds, including troublesome relationships with their fathers and difficulties with women who exhibited a ‘Cold, Cold Heart.’ Most significantly, both writers had a way of speaking for the disenfranchised during times of rapid cultural change.”
Sawyer is the author of Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare and has co-edited two other books on Shakespeare. He will give the results of his research in a lecture to the general public on Monday, Jan. 31, from 11:30 a.m.-12:25 p.m. in Room 302 of Burleson Hall.
For more information, call Sawyer at 439-6670 or e-mail sawyerr@etsu.edu.

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