I GUESS YOU would call them redneck bars. They line rural highways throughout the South and West, claustrophobic, smoke-filled little places with sawdust on the floors--places where if you look someone in the eye you're prepared to fight or say, "Gee, I thought you were a buddy of mine. Can I get you a beer?" They smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke, with maybe a tinge of reefer wafting up from a distant corner, and there's always puke on the floor, it seems. And out in every parking lot is a half-crazed drunken fool loading a pistol in a half-paid-for pick-up truck.

It was a habit I got into, I guess, in my senior year in high school, going to the Town & Country Lounge at Big Chimney, the Meadowbrook Inn at Mill Creek, or the Bridge at Spencer. I'd talk to the construction workers who drank hard liquor every night and went to work every morning at six, to the whores with the piled-up hair the construction workers screwed every weekend, to the pool sharks and the bootleggers. All that was interesting, but what really pulled me there on Friday and Saturday nights when my friends had dates was the music. In every joint there is a Wurlitzer filled with country music, and maybe a little K.C. & the Sunshine Band thrown incongruously in for dancing and revisionism. The best songs in the jukebox were progressive country: Jerry Jeff Walker, Waylon Jennings (and the Waylors), Willie Nelson, Jessi Colter, Emmy Lou Harris, along with Jimmy Buffet in a more folk-pop direction and Merle Haggard in a more mainstream country tradition. With his Friends album, Hank Williams, Jr. joins this group.

Progressive country music is marked by a strong rhythm section, especially a driving bass line more rock-and-roll than country. It generally features a prominent lead electric guitar--a distinct break from the older country tradition where the guitar work often consisted of two guys thumping away on six-string acoustics, both playing rhythm. Progressive country is also characterized by its willingness to use the keyboard instruments scorned by older country music. The movement owes its origins to the music of Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams, with a more than perfunctory nod in the direction of Bob Wills.

ONE MORE CRITICAL feature of the progressive country movement is that is exists mainly outside the Nashville area. Walker, Jennings and Nelson work from an Austin, Texas base, while Haggard is responsible for a Bakersfield, California sound. Nashville can provide the most sophisticated recording studios and technicians in the world, but its eminence is being superceded by studios in places like Doraville, Georgia, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where Williams recorded the major portion of his new album.

Hank Williams, Jr. was barely two years old on the December night his father died in the back seat of a Cadillac in southern West Virginia, minutes after finishing his last gig. Williams pere casts an awesome shadow over country music--"Jambalaya," "Hey Good Lookin'" and "Your Cheatin' Heart" have entered the pantheon of American popular music.

The spectre of Hank Williams hangs most heavily over his son. Hank Jr. has been a country singer since his late teens, but only with the Friends album has he been able to break out of the pattern of bland and banal country tunes that marked his previous albums. Still, he is haunted by comparisons with a ghost he must feel hovers at his shoulder. The best song on Friends is "Living Proof," a testament to what it means to be the son of Hank Williams:

When I sing them old songs of Daddy's

Seems everyone comes true.

Lord, please help me, do I have to be The living proof.

Just the other night after the show

An old drunk came up to me

He said you ain't as good as your daddy, boy

And you never gonna be

Then a young girl in old blue jeans

Said I'm your biggest fan