This recording of Hank Williams's "Cold Cold Heart" appears on Norah Jones's 2001 debut album Come Away with Me, featuring Jones herself on a piano solo. Williams wrote the song in 1951, and it became one of his most enduring compositions, a country classic that crossed over into pop when Tony Bennett recorded a hit version the same year. Jones's interpretation strips the song of its country arrangement and reimagines it as an intimate jazz-tinged ballad at approximately 115 beats per minute in A, with a straight-eighth feel. Her piano solo emerges from the song's emotional center, her jazz-trained touch and harmonic sensibility lending sophistication to Williams's straightforward chord changes. The choice to include a Hank Williams song on the album was emblematic of Jones's genre-defying approach, which drew equally from jazz, country, folk, and pop traditions. Jones grew up in Texas, where country music was part of the cultural fabric, and her affinity for the genre is evident in the naturalness with which she inhabits Williams's lyrics. The Come Away with Me sessions, produced by Arif Mardin at Sorcerer Sound in New York, captured a warmth and intimacy that perfectly suit this kind of cross-genre reinterpretation, where the boundaries between jazz sophistication and country sincerity dissolve entirely.
