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Hasil Adkins (true rockanroller and crazy man) R.I.P.
Biography
Hasil Adkins was a one of a kind rockabilly lunatic whose life and music were bizarre enough that if they had been a work of fiction, no one with any sense would have ever believed it. A frantic one-man band who bashed out ultra-crude rock & roll tunes about sex, chicken, and decapitation into a wheezing reel-to-reel tape machine in a West Virginia shack, Adkins spent most of his life making music in utter obscurity until he was discovered in the 1980s and became a cult favorite in the last two decades of his life.
Hasil Adkins was born to a poor family in Madison, WV, in 1939. Adkins developed a passion for music from listening to the radio as a boy; one day, after hearing a
Hank Williams record, Adkins struck upon the notion that since no one else was credited,
Williams must have played all the instruments himself, and while in time he learned that wasn't the case, he had already begun teaching himself to perform as a one-man band, using foot pedals to play the drums while using his hands to rock out on guitar. While Adkins' roots were in country music, when rock & roll hit in the mid-'50s, he took to it like a duck to water, and after putting together a primitive home-recording setup, he began committing his own rockabilly songs to tape.
Adkins' lyrical perspective wasn't what most folks were accustomed to — he wrote a number of songs about a lascivious but nonexistent dance craze called "the Hunch," recorded another tune about eating peanut butter on the moon, and in one of his best-known songs, "She Said," he compared the woman of his affections to "a dying can of that commodity meat."
Adkins self-released several country sides in the 1970s, and as was his habit he always mailed a copy of each record to the sitting president of the United States; as a result, Hasil actually received a thank-you letter from Richard Nixon.
The wild man was found dead in his Madison home on April 26, 2005
