Hank Williams – There’s a Tear in My Beer

“There’s a Tear in My Beer” is a country song written by Hank Williams that became widely known through a posthumous duet between Hank Williams and his son, Hank Williams Jr. The lyric dates back to around 1950–51, when Williams recorded a demo during his Nashville sessions. Because producer and publisher Fred Rose was wary of explicit drinking songs, Williams did not cut a commercial version for MGM. Instead, he passed the song and demo acetate to fellow performer Big Bill Lister, who recorded and released it on Capitol Records in 1952.

Lister, a Texas-born singer who often opened shows for Williams and the Drifting Cowboys, kept the original acetate for decades. In the 1980s, his wife found the disc in their attic. Lister then delivered the fragile demo to Hank Williams Jr., giving the younger artist access to one of his father’s unissued performances. The discovery provided the foundation for a new recording that would combine Williams’s early-1950s vocal with modern instrumentation and studio technology.

In 1988, Hank Williams Jr. and producers Barry Beckett and Jim Ed Norman transferred the old acetate to tape and built a full band track around it. The overdubbed version features Williams Sr.’s original vocal and guitar, with Williams Jr. adding harmony and lead lines alongside contemporary country backing. Released as a single in January 1989 on Warner Bros./Curb and included on the compilation album Hank Williams Jr.’s Greatest Hits, Vol. 3, the track runs about two minutes and fifty-one seconds and is generally classified as honky-tonk and country.

Lyrically, the song is a straightforward barroom lament. The narrator sits alone, drinking and thinking about a lost love, claiming that he has “shed a million tears” into his beer. The verses focus on the image in the title rather than a detailed storyline, a pattern common in both blues and honky-tonk writing. Williams uses simple, repetitive lines and a modest vocal range, making the song easy to remember and sing while fitting it neatly into the tradition of mid-century drinking songs.

The 1989 release achieved substantial commercial success. On the Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart, “There’s a Tear in My Beer” peaked at No. 7, while also reaching the Top 10 on several other country listings. It helped drive Hank Williams Jr.’s Greatest Hits, Vol. 3 to No. 1 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart, and the compilation was later certified Platinum. For Williams Jr., the single added another major hit to a long run of 1980s successes, and for the Williams catalogue it brought a previously obscure composition into the mainstream.

The accompanying music video, directed by Ethan Russell, was especially notable. Using then-cutting-edge electronic compositing, the production team combined kinescope footage of Hank Williams performing “Hey, Good Lookin'” on the Kate Smith Evening Hour in 1952 with new footage of Hank Williams Jr. The result made it appear that father and son were performing together on the same stage. The video won both the Country Music Association and Academy of Country Music awards for Music Video of the Year and received wide coverage as an example of early digital effects in country music.

In 1990, the duet earned a Grammy Award for Best Country Vocal Collaboration, officially credited to both Hank Williams and Hank Williams Jr. The song has since been included on collections of each artist’s work and continues to be cited in discussions of posthumous collaborations and archival overdubs. For historians, it illustrates how a demo written off in the early 1950s resurfaced four decades later to become a significant late-1980s hit, linking the careers of two generations of Williams performers and preserving one more piece of Hank Williams’s songwriting legacy.