Hank Williams Jr.'s "Almeria Club" recording may be brand new, although the circumstances behind the title and recording not only pre-date Hank Jr., but are the lore and legend of the Williams family.

The Almeria Club in rural Alabama is where Hank Jr. recorded a good chunk of his 13-song album with a hard blues edge, country and gospel sounds instead of the good time music with which Jr. has been associated with for years.

But what shocked Hank Jr. was that he wasn't even familiar with the out of the way place.

But his daddy apparently sure was.

Williams says in a 90-minute telephone interview from his Nashville office that part of his goal in recording the album was in "trying to draw on the historical significance of this 100-year-old schoolhouse, later honky tonk, that your parents played in when they were actually just kind of struggling along. That was the whole - from the beginning - the whole idea."

"This place is very close to where my little retreat is down there, like a couple of miles," says Williams.

During a visit to the area in January 2001, "we're having quail and catfish and a south Alabama cookout with local buddies of mine."

The subject of the Almeria Club came up.

"I said, 'Almeria,' and I say, 'what's that?' I look it up - a town in Spain on the Mediterranean. I say that's not what this place is."

"We're sitting there with these people that at the time were from 17 to 20," Williams says. "They're now sitting there sitting telling you how your mother went out the window when this guy come out with a shotgun. The old stage is there, and the piano's there, sitting there. I said, 'boy how did this last?'"

The story goes that one muggy evening in 1947, Hank Williams and his wife Audrey were playing at the Almeria. Apparently, an angry boyfriend burst into the club looking for his girl, who was hanging with another man. Gunshots rang out and Hank and Miss Audrey jumped out a backstage window and escaped through the thicket and nearby woods.

According to Hank Jr.'s aunt, her sister and Hank Sr. played the club twice.

Hank Jr., who loves keeping the memory of his father burning ever bright in conversation and song, seemed almost incredulous that he did not know about the club.

"They would take me down there (Alabama) from the time I was seven, eight years old," he says of his mother (his father died when he was not quite 4 in a car accident on New Year's Eve/Day 1953). How could I not be familiar with it in terms of not knowing anything about it? It was a find. It was really a treasured find. It was like going down here and digging up a belt buckle from Battle of Murfreesboro or something, which I do a lot."

"That was a honky tonk and your parents played there when they were very young kids and trying to make their mark," says Williams thinking about the significance of the place.

"I really didn't believe that part for a long time. I just didn't believe it. I've been inundated my whole life about where they've been and where they've played."

"I had a little idea that was born that night - to be able to record (at the club) if it (can) be done. Maybe they won't think I had totally lost my mind. It was just the opposite. Anyone who had anything to do with this - the musicians who said this is the most fun they've ever done - they said, 'two days? Can't we do some more?' It was fun."

The building, used for church groups and weddings, needed very little done to it to make it studio ready. Just some electrical juice needed to be added.

"It was actually quite easy," he says of recording there. "It wasn't hard. It kind of amazed my co-producer, Chuck Howard, and Bob (Campbell-Smith) the engineer. It really amazed them that it was as easy as it was."

Not that it was your typical recording venue.

"Real different," says Williams. "I've been in a lot of studios from one coast to the other. It was real different believe me. Instead of the game rooms and private sleeping areas, meeting areas, business areas, it was just one big room and whatever you drove here in, and that was it. It was quite different. It was quite different from a Nashville or LA studio."

But different doesn't mean the music's any good. Hank Jr. has been better known it seems for a number of years for leading off the Monday Night Football games with a snippet of "All My Rowdy Friends."

The early buzz from Curb Records, Williams' long-time label, was that the music would be different.

Decidedly so. There's hard core honky tonk ("The Cheatin' Hotel," and "Outdoor Lovin' Man") a rock edge (a new studio version of "America Will Survive" recorded post Sept. 11), blues and blues rock ("Last Pork Chop," "Tee Top" and "If the Good Lord's Willin' (and the Creeks Don't Rise)") and gospel ("Cross on the Highway").

Williams is right at home with the blues, a genre that doesn't readily come to mind when talking about Hank Jr.

"I was talking to a musician about that this morning. He said, 'I've seen you in concert in those smoking shows in the '80's, and a lot of people wouldn't believe it's you picking on 'Tee Top,' but a lot of people know about your blues stuff.'"

"So, I play five string banjo on there, a dobro with a slide on there, a jug, regular guitar. It's about me. It's about my songs. My music, and what I'm wanting to do and maybe a little less of computers in the studio."

"I've done a lot of Southern and Northern boogie rock. Now I've got a few more songs that I'm working on."

"If anything, my voice is getting stronger and stronger and stronger as I get older," says Williams, 52.

Probably about the most unexpected part of the album is "The 'F' Word" where good friend Kid Rock sings backing vocals.

The Kid (Bob Ritchie) first went to see Williams in concert at the Pine Knob Music Center in Michigan when he was 13.

"My daughter said, 'you better grab this Rolling Stone. This guy is crazy about you.' I said, 'Who is this? What's that?' I read."

He quickly found out. The two shot a video together and have hung out hunting and doing a "Crossroads" television show as well that aired in February.

The song resulted from a visit from the Kid to Williams at his farm. They were comparing notes about differences between country and rock.

"We determined the main difference is that in country music, you just canÕt use the 'F' word," Williams wrote in the notes on the CD jacket.

Williams also gives advice to his son, fellow musician and rebel Hank Williams III, to "lose the F word" as well.

The chorus to the humorous song goes, "No no in country music you just can't say the F Word/Oh we've come a long way, but it's best if that one's not heard/oh we've had some hells and damns/But we donÕt say bitch, we say, why yes ma'am/'Cause in country music, you just don't use the F word."

Williams says, "We've all kinds of kinds of hells and damns in country. But we don't have that other. We' haven't progressed that far yet or degenerated. Who knows?"

"There are a few that are trying it. It's true. Some of these guys say it 500 times. I said (to Kid Rock), 'how many times do you say it on an album - 500 times? He just has that little grin."

Hank Sr. has been part and parcel of his son's musical life. Jr.'s first forays into music were singing and recording his father's songs. He has continued to keep the mantle alive for decades.

Growing up in Nashville, Hank debuted at eight and made his Opry debut three years later.

His mother Audrey was behind his career, which resulted in his first recording at 14 on his father's label, MGM.

The father-son connection was quite obvious with Hank Jr. recording as Luke the Drifter Jr. and album like "Songs My Father Left Me," The Legend of Hank WIlliams in Story and Song" and a duets album with his father.

But on "Almeria Club," he does something a bit different. He recorded the "If the Good Lord's Willin' (And the Creeks Don't Rise)" with words by father and music by the son.

"I've had that since I was small," says Hank Jr. of the lyrics. "I have some personal items. I've had these things for a long long long time. Just written down on pieces of paper."

The title was Hank Sr.'s motto at his shows.

Writing the music was not hard, according to Williams. "It's kind of a '40's big band, early early country (sound)," he says, adding that the writing took "5 minutes, 10 minutes on the bus. Right outside that Almeria...I have a little talent for that. You work fast on your word processer, and I can work pretty fast."

"It just came to me, bang. It's got to be good. Gosh it's swing. It's (got a) melody. It's great. It was very easy. There were a lot of big smiles down there. There wasn't a lot of apprehension about anything. It was a breath of fresh air."

Don't expect more collaborations between father and son. "Not a bunch," says Williams when asked if he has more lyrics from his father without being specific. "Let's say I've got some. You're talking about a man who was pretty prolific and dies at 29 and had that many good songs."

"I seriously doubt there will be any workable (songs)," says Williams. "I'm not sure. The right time came. There is a smattering of lines here and there, just like we all do. (With some lyrics, Williams says) This idea is no good and put a big cross through it and start something else. This one is where it should be."

While about five songs were recorded at Almeria, another batch was done at the Louisiana Hayride Stage in Shreveport, La. in May 2001. That was the same venue where Hank Sr. played for almost a year until the Grand Ole Opry came calling in 1949.

"Cross on the Highway" was recorded in Kansas City, Kan. at the Greater Pentecostal Temple as a tribute to his friend the late Kansas City Chiefs football star Derrick Thomas, killed as a result of a car crash just over two years ago.

Williams' involvement in football has been going strong for more than a dozen years with his image and voice asking fans "Are you ready for some football?"

The son of Roone Arledge, the ABC exec who spearheaded Monday Night Football, played Hank Jr.'s tapes a lot.

"I think that's what got it started," says WIlliams." He said, 'we got to do something to liven up the whole show...It was a one-year deal that turned into what it's turned into with three Emmys sitting in the cabinet. Boy was that wonderful."

While he still may be popular with the football crowd, that has not always been the case with the country crowd. He has had his career ups and downs with the downs dominating moreso in recent years.

Searching for his own musical path, by the early 1970's, Hank Jr. veered towards more of a Southern rock sound with "Living Proof" and "Bocephus."

But Williams' career was detoured when he fell off a mountain in Montana where he still goes for vacation and suffered severe facial damage in 1975. He did not perform for nine months.

He left MGM for Warner and then Elektra where finally in 1979, his career was on the upturn.

He had hits with "Family Tradition" and "Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound" late in 1979.

Less than two years later, Hank Jr. would hit paydirt again with such number ones as "Texas Women," "Dixie on My Mind," All My Rowdy Friends (Have Settled Down)" and "Honky Tonkin'."

He had a string of other number 1s and Top 10s throughout the decade, including "Born to Boogie" and "A Country Boy Can Survive."

In 1987 and 1988, Williams was the Country Music Association Entertainer of the Year.

But by the end of the decade. Williams' run of hit albums and singles was coming to a close. His last top 10 singles hit was "Good Friends, Good Whiskey, Good Lovin'" from 1990.

He still put out music in the '90's, albeit less frequently and with hat acts dominating the charts, there was not much of a place for the rowdiness of Hank Jr.

But Williams isn't crying in his beer.

"I'm a guy that went on Billboard in '64, and I'm still in there thank goodness. I have seen (radio station executives say), 'oh God, we can't play that. That's got a steel guitar on that. And that's where we are now. I've seen it go that way, leave and then go back. Who wants to hear that? That's too country? That's Hank Jr. Oh no, that's too rock."

Williams says he doesn't listen to much country. "It's really pop. It really is."

"Several years ago, I had to just forget about that. You just got to sit down with little dobro and write them like you feel them and see them. Maybe that's why Almeria's got a dobro and a banjo. I'm a guy that is from that world. Yeah, I had (Marshall Tucker Band) Toy Caldwell and (former Allman Brothers Band member) Dickie Betts around and also had Flatt & Scruggs too. I think that's what that's about. And now Bob Ritchie."

Not to mention his father. Hank Jr. says it's "pride and the genuine interest and the look on people's faces when they touch his lyrics here or his guitar, and it doesn't matter if it's the biggest rock guitarist or whoever. They're all the same when it comes to that. He was one of the first American superstars."