How Did Bob Dylan Learn to Write Songs From Hank Williams?

David Senra, reading Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One, says Dylan studied Hank Williams while he was still studying the greats. Dylan writes that he did not have to live Hank's life to know what the songs were about. He later learned that Hank had died in the back seat of a car on New Year's Day. He hoped that was not true, and it was.

In those records Dylan heard the archetype rules of poetic songwriting. The forms were like marble pillars, and they had to be there. He learned how a song is built by listening until the records were internalized. A few years later, the folk and jazz critic for the New York Times said Dylan breaks all the rules of songwriting except having something to say. Dylan's account is that those rules, whether the critic knew it or not, were Hank's rules.

Senra then reads Dylan asking what it would take to get into a studio and get signed to a folk label, and answering that the future was nothing to worry about. It was awfully close.