Your Cheatin' Heart

Hank Williams recorded "Your Cheatin' Heart" on September 23, 1952, at Castle Studio in Nashville, in what turned out to be the final session of his life. Produced by his publisher Fred Rose, the session also yielded "Kaw-Liga", "I Could Never Be Ashamed of You" and "Take These Chains from My Heart". Backing Williams were Tommy Jackson on fiddle, Don Helms on steel guitar, Chet Atkins on lead guitar, Jack Shook on rhythm guitar and Floyd "Lightnin'" Chance on bass. Williams told his friend Braxton Schuffert, as he prepared to play the song for him, that it was the best heart song he had ever written.

The lyrics had come quickly that summer. While driving with his fiancée Billie Jean Jones from Nashville to Shreveport, Louisiana, to announce their wedding to her parents, Williams spoke about his first wife Audrey Sheppard, calling her a "cheatin' heart" and saying she would one day have to pay. He then dictated the words to Jones, who wrote them in his notebook. The couple had divorced that May, and Williams had begun struggling with morphine and painkillers prescribed for back pain following an operation for spina bifida.

The single was released at the end of January 1953. Weeks earlier, Williams had been found dead in the back seat of a car during a stop in Oak Hill, West Virginia, while traveling to a New Year's show in Canton, Ohio. Propelled by his death, the record sold over a million copies and topped Billboard's Top C&W Records for six weeks.