If Hank Williams had taken better care of himself, he might be alive today—frail and cranky at 87, but still singing. Instead, he died of a booze-and-morphine-induced heart attack in the back seat of a powder-blue Cadillac convertible. Not a bad way to go, some might say, but at 29 he was way too young to croak.

Nonetheless, his songs live on, and they rarely sound as fresh as they do in the hands of Toronto's New Country Rehab, a band that was explicitly born out of Hank's ashes, as preserved in the monumental 10-CD collection called The Complete Hank Williams.

“I'd just got that big Mercury box set, and it's kind of all I was listening to,” says singer and fiddler John Showman, on the line from our nation's capital, where NCR is about to play the Ottawa Bluesfest. “So I thought, ”˜Well, this would be a good place for us to start.' We started out doing 12 or 13 Hank Williams songs, and these days we probably perform six or seven, still.”

Three of them—“Ramblin' Man”, “The Log Train”, and “Mind Your Own Business”—turn up on New Country Rehab's self-titled debut. Williams's influence extends even further than that, although it's sometimes hard to tell where the onetime King of Country Music leaves off and Showman and his bandmates take over. Consider album opener “Angel of Death”, for instance. It's credited to Showman and NCR guitarist James Robertson, but it's no coincidence that Williams once wrote a song of the same name.

“James wanted to do a version of ”˜Angel of Death', which is a slow country waltz, but he completely reinvented the metre and the feel of it,” explains Showman. “So I was fitting the Hank Williams lyrics to it, and I thought, ”˜Well, why not just rewrite the melody and rewrite the words, and then we'd have an original song?' ”

Several New Country Rehab numbers were built in a similar fashion; it's how Showman is learning the songwriter's trade.

“There's a direct inspiration for all these songs in classic repertoire, from Doc Watson or Hank Williams or Jimmy Martin, all these old bluegrass and country guys,” explains the fiddle virtuoso, who also plays in the Foggy Hogtown Boys and the Creaking Tree String Quartet. “All of our songs come directly from that, even the weird ones.”

The touches of dub, hints of jazz, and liberal doses of manic rock 'n' roll that make New Country Rehab more than just another bunch of Nashville revivalists are unique, however.

“I don't know what we've created, to be honest,” says Showman, laughing. “But I enjoy it!”

For a complete list of who's performing when and on what stage at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, please go to www.thefestival.bc.ca/.