“I love you, baby / but you gotta understand, / when the Lord made me / he made a ramblin’ man.” – Hank Williams

The song “Ramblin’ Man,” written and sung by Hank Williams, ends with these words:

“And when I’m gone /

And at my grave you stand /

Just say God’s called home your ramblin’ man.”

Hank was 29 when he expired in the back of a car being driven by a college kid he’d hired on the way to another gig in the middle of America.

Exhaustion, chloral hydrate, morphine, alcohol, amphetamines, nicotine, caffeine, probably a few other drugs, and very, very little food for a very, very long time can be said to be the direct cause/s of his death, i.e. his sudden heart failure in the middle of the night in the back of a car blasting across the American heartland.

Neil Young, who’s 80 now (the age Dolly Parton was when she passed on), and who had his own big-time drug and alcohol problems, and who is a direct descendant of Hank Williams, like Dolly, Leonard Cohen, and Bob Dylan, once said in a song, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”

Machine Gun Kelly (MGK) says in his song “27,” “They say I need to slow down, but I don’t know how.”

Those twelve words strike me as being one of the best explanations for the 27 Club I’ve ever heard.

The best singers do not sing only about themselves, just as the best writers do not write only about themselves – they sing and write about all of us, very often when it looks like (on the surface) they are writing or singing mostly about themselves, like Hank in “Ramblin’ Man.”

AND IT’S UP TO US TO MAKE THAT IMAGINATIVE CONNECTION, INSTEAD OF SITTING BACK IN OUR COMFY CHAIR WITH OUR EXTRA-LARGE BAG OF BUTTERED POPCORN AND TOSSING SPITBALLS AT THE ONE WHO IS TRYING SO MUCH HARDER THAN WE ARE.

And some real artists (everything in our world is either real or fake), when they live long enough, learn how to slow down – at least enough, for a while.

(The song “Ramblin’ Man,” as performed by Hank, is very close to a spoken word poem, which is probably why Sam Shepard loved the song so much and used it so often.)

In honor of these departed kids and others of their ilk, whether “famous” or not, HERE is a list of twelve members of the 27 Club. They weren’t all 27 exactly (at their passing). Some were 29, like Hank, or 26, like Mac Miller and Nick Drake, or 25, like Tupac Shakur. (8 of 12 were exactly 27.)

Hank Williams. Robert Johnson. Mac Miller. Tupac Shakur. Janis Joplin. Amy Winehouse. Brian Jones. Jimi Hendrix. Jim Morrison. “Pigpen” McKernan. Nick Drake. Kurt Cobain.

Dale Barrigar (Images by Dale Barrigar)