Hank Williams – They’ll Never Take Her Love from Me

“They’ll Never Take Her Love from Me” is a country song written by Leon Payne and popularized by Hank Williams with His Drifting Cowboys in 1950. Payne, a prolific Texas songwriter sometimes called “The Blind Balladeer,” first recorded the song himself in 1948; it was released on the Bullet label the following year. Hank Williams cut his version on June 14, 1950 at Castle Studio in Nashville with producer Fred Rose, and MGM issued it in August 1950 as single 10760, on the B-side of Williams’s own composition “Why Should We Try Anymore.” The publishing was handled by Acuff-Rose, which had already been working with both Payne and Williams.

The June 1950 Nashville session brought together the core players of Williams’s early-1950s sound. Discographies list Sammy Pruett on lead guitar, Don Helms on steel guitar, Jerry Rivers on fiddle, Ernie Newton on bass, and either Jack Shook or Rusty Gabbard on rhythm guitar, with Rose supervising from the control room. The performance runs under three minutes and is set in a slow to mid-tempo country and western style, often described as honky-tonk with strong country-blues shading. The arrangement is sparse, relying on steel guitar and fiddle fills around Williams’s vocal rather than elaborate instrumentation.

Lyrically, the song is voiced from the perspective of a man whose partner has been taken from him—by circumstances, by another man or by fate—but who insists that “they’ll never take her love from me.” The verses describe poverty, imprisonment and social scorn, yet the narrator claims that her affection remains his only consolation. The text is concise and heavily imagistic, focusing on a few key situations rather than a detailed narrative. This structure, combined with a memorable title line, makes the song easy to follow while leaving room for interpretation, which has helped it travel across different performers and eras.

On the U.S. country charts, Williams’s version outperformed its nominal A-side. While “Why Should We Try Anymore” peaked at No. 9 on the Billboard country best-seller list, “They’ll Never Take Her Love from Me” reached No. 5 in 1950, reflecting audience preference for the Payne composition over Williams’s own bleak marital ballad. Commentators such as biographer Colin Escott have noted that this result underlined a pattern: jukebox and radio programmers in 1950 often favored brisker or more immediately melodic material, even when history later judged Williams’s “heart songs” among the finest in the genre.

Questions about authorship have arisen in later years. While Leon Payne is the credited writer and is widely accepted as the composer, Kentucky historian W. Lynn Nickell and others have argued that an uncredited lyricist named Paul Gilley may have contributed or written the words, pointing to anecdotes about Gilley giving a handwritten lyric sheet to a neighbor and predicting radio success. However, these claims remain debated, and mainstream discographies and copyright records continue to list Payne as the official songwriter. Regardless of the exact authorship, Hank Williams’s 1950 recording is the version that brought the song to a broad national audience.

Over time, “They’ll Never Take Her Love from Me” has become a standard in the country repertoire. It has appeared on numerous Hank Williams compilations, including 40 Greatest Hits and The Complete Hank Williams, and has been recorded by a wide range of artists. Roy Acuff cut an influential version in 1958, Johnny Horton had a 1961 country hit with his rendition, and later covers have come from George Jones, Don Gibson, Mac Wiseman, Mel McDaniel, Waylon Jennings, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson and Elvis Costello, among others. These interpretations, spanning traditional country, outlaw country and roots-oriented rock, have helped keep the song in circulation well beyond its original 1950 chart run.

Within Hank Williams’s catalogue, the track is often grouped with other outside compositions that he made his own, such as Payne’s “Lost Highway” and Claude Boone’s “Wedding Bells.” Its combination of stark, fatalistic imagery, simple melodic line and restrained accompaniment showcases his ability to inhabit a lyric that he did not write and give it a definitive reading. As a result, the 1950 MGM single remains the reference version of “They’ll Never Take Her Love from Me” and a key example of how Williams, Payne and the Nashville studio musicians of the era helped define the sound and emotional range of postwar honky-tonk music.