Hank Williams
Hank Williams had scored countless chart-toppers, inspired a generation of singer-songwriters, and earned a title as the King of Country Music all by the age of 29. But he was robbed of the chance to further extend his legacy when he died of alleged heart failure en route to a New Year’s Day gig in 1953.
It’s fair to say that Williams was very much on a self-destructive streak at the time. He’d developed an alcohol addiction as he rose to superstardom, often turning up for shows entirely inebriated. And after a fall on his Tennessee farm, he’d also started to abuse morphine and painkillers (via All Music). In fact, he’d reportedly been injected with the former just before he set off for Ohio on that fateful day.
Williams, whose final lifetime single was ironically titled “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive,” never got to see his second child Jett, who was born five days after his death. Tragically, his namesake son suffered an unspeakable loss of his own when his 27-year-old daughter Katherine died in a car crash in 2020.