The Lonesome Prairie Dogs will once again mark the anniversary of Hank Williams’ passing with a special Hank-O-Rama New Year’s Day show. The country group will perform without an audience at New York’s Bowery Electric on Friday, Jan. 1–the 68th anniversary of Williams’ death–at 8pm. The concert will be streamed through venue owner Jesse Malin’s Rolling Studios platform.

The 17th annual celebration will feature a number of guests, including Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye, Tom Clark, Antibalas’ Jordan McLean, Sean Kershaw and “Your Hostess” Lindy Loo

A note on the event explains: “The Hank-O-Rama features the biggest hits and rarest rarities of country music’s greatest songwriter, including ‘Cold, Cold Heart,’ ‘Jambalaya, ‘Alone and Forsaken’ and many others, performed live by The Lonesome Prairie Dogs. Hank Williams was 29 when he was found dead in the back of his Cadillac on the morning of Jan. 1, 1953, in Oak Hill, West Virginia. He’d been en route to a New Year’s Day gig in Canton, Ohio. The Hank-O is a symbolic rain check for the last show Hank would ever miss. Heidi and Luke Lonesome began playing Hank tunes from their founding of The Lonesome Prairie Dogs as an NYC Country duo in the early 2000s. They conceived of the Hank-O-Rama as a long-overdue tribute to one of the truly unifying musical artists of our time, with the first Hank-O held on Jan. 1, 2005. Since then, it has been held every single New Year’s Day but one, in 2018, when Joe’s Pub hosted the show on Jan. 2.
Only another asteroid strike like the one that killed the dinosaurs could stop the Hank-O-Rama, and The LPD’s will carry on the tradition in 2021 livestreamed from Bowery Electric in NYC.”

Last year’s Hank-O-Rama took place at New York’s Hill Country.