Country-music fans are in for a treat this evening when Maine Public Television airs a superb program on the brilliant, troubled life of Hank Williams.

If you think you know everything about country and western’s first superstar, tune in anyway. This PBS “American Masters” profile is short on talk and long on rarely seen snapshots, home movies and a slew of Williams standards such as “Cold Cold Heart” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”

“Just don’t think of the sadness all the time because that’s not what his life was,” says Hank Williams Jr. at the outset of “Hank Williams: Honky Tonk Blues.”

But sadness stained Hiram Williams’ brief life, which began in 1923 in rural Alabama and ended in the back seat of his powder-blue Cadillac on New Year’s Day 1953. As a sickly boy suffering from the chronic back pain of spina bifida, Williams knew loneliness. The only child of Lon Williams, a railroad engineer wounded during World War I, and his wife Lilly, who ran boarding houses of ill repute, escaped into the Deep South’s world of black blues and hillbilly music.

The women in Hank Williams’ life shaped him in a way men never could. His first wife, Audrey, whom he loved but constantly fought with, shoved him into the spotlight. She and the domineering Lilly clashed while sharing the same show-business ambitions for Williams.

Williams finally made it to country music’s “mother church,” the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tenn., but his binge drinking and indifference toward fame jinxed the deal. In an interview, his second wife, Billie Jean Horton, claims he wasn’t kicked off the Grand Ole Opry, but that he “just didn’t show up.” His rowdy reputation didn’t sit well with the family-oriented program, which he left before returning to the Louisiana Hayride show.

Snatches of Williams’ voice are heard while a camera pans around the Ryman’s interior. Cameras also slip inside the Hayride’s Shreveport, La., auditorium where aging announcer Frank Page gets off what may be the program’s most cogent comment: “When [Williams] would hunch over the microphone and look into your eyes and really sing one of those sad-type songs that he wrote, he got through to the audience. I mean, they were spellbound.”

When he died in 1953, ravaged by chronic pain and his inability to hold a drink, Williams was freed from a life seemingly devoid of true friends. At age 29, he remains frozen in time, untouched by age and country music’s later pop-oriented leanings.

Hank Williams III, a dead ringer for his grandfather, is interviewed along with the legendary singer’s stepdaughter, Lycrecia. Members of Williams’ band, The Drifting Cowboys, speak candidly of the real Hank Williams. Missing, however, is any mention of Jett Williams, who claims to be the singer’s daughter.

The program stresses that the hillbilly icon couldn’t cross over into Elvis’ territory and that his songs took him places where he could never go. Video clips show Bob Dylan, Norah Jones, Ray Charles and Tony Bennett performing Williams’ tunes, but the program’s chief drawing card is Hank singing Hank. Dressed in black boots, long trousers, embroidered jacket and wide, white cowboy hat, the world will never see his likes again.

“Hank Williams: Honky Tonk Blues” airs at 8 p.m. Wednesday on Maine Public Television stations. Dick Shaw can be contacted at rshaw@bangordailynews.net or by calling 990-8204.