Hank Williams Jr. Birth Chart

He was three years old, in Montgomery, Alabama, on the New Year's morning when the news came down. His father, dead in the back of a powder-blue Cadillac somewhere between West Virginia and Ohio, on the way to a show. Five years later, that same boy stood on the stage of the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and sang his father's songs back to a room full of grown men who needed to hear them again. He was eight. He was billed as Hank Williams Jr. He had no real choice in any of it.

If you want to know why a man would spend the next sixty years building a public personality so loud, so deliberately Southern, so insistently his own — sunglasses indoors, beard down to his chest, rowdy friends coming over tonight — you start there. You don't start with the chart. The chart explains how he survived it. It does not explain why he had to.

Randall Hank Williams was born on May 26, 1949, at 3:51 a.m. in Shreveport, Louisiana — a verified birth time, Rodden Rating AA, sourced from his birth certificate via Astro-Databank. That AA matters. Most country-star charts get reconstructed from a parent's hazy memory. This one is on paper. Which means every house cusp, every rising-sign read, every angular aspect we'll discuss is built on a foundation that holds. Few celebrity profiles get to start from there.

His Sun sits at 4°45' Gemini, in the 2nd house — the part of the chart that traditionally rules earned income, possessions, and what an astrologer would call self-worth-through-tangible-things. Gemini is the sign of the communicator, the code-switcher, the person who can talk his way into and out of nearly anything. Drop those two facts into the same body and you get a performer whose job is talking — and who measures his own value, year after year, by what he can build with that talking. Gold records. A catalog. A name that prints money decades after the songs stopped charting.

But here's the cost. Gemini in the 2nd is a placement that ties identity to output. There is no off-switch. The demand to keep producing — keep recording, keep touring, keep being entertaining — is wired into how this person knows he exists. And the complicating cross-placement is Mercury retrograde at 16°48' Gemini, also in the 2nd, sitting right next to his Venus. Mercury Rx in its home sign is one of the more interesting natal positions in astrology: it doesn't break communication, it internalizes it. The Gemini Sun talks; the Mercury Rx in the same room is constantly editing, second-guessing, looping back to the thing he said three songs ago. The public Hank Jr. is loud. The private one, by chart logic, is a re-reader.

His Moon is at 16°46' Taurus, conjunct Mars at 19°25' Taurus, both in the 1st house. The 1st house is the body, the physical presentation, the way you walk into a room. Taurus there is the sign of the bull — slow to move, hard to push, deeply loyal to the senses (food, music, land, drink, women — all the Taurus sacraments). Pile Mars on top of the Moon in that house and what you get, behaviorally, is a person whose emotions live in the body. Anger doesn't get processed; it gets walked off, drunk off, played off, hunted off. Tenderness doesn't get articulated; it gets cooked, gifted, embraced.

The cost: this is also the chart of someone who very nearly died from his own body. On August 8, 1975, Hank Jr. fell roughly 500 feet down Ajax Mountain in Montana, fractured his skull and most of his face, and spent two years in reconstructive surgery. The beard and sunglasses he's worn ever since aren't a costume. They're scaffolding around the place where his face used to be. A 1st-house Moon-Mars in Taurus says: the body is where everything happens. Sometimes that includes the body almost being taken away. The complicating cross-placement is Moon square Pluto (orb 2.42), and we'll come back to that one — it's the engine room of the whole chart.

The Ascendant — the sign that was rising on the eastern horizon at his birth — is Aries at 18°46'. Aries Rising is the warrior's mask. It walks in first, talks first, swings first, apologizes (sometimes) later. Mars rules Aries, which means his chart ruler is that 1st-house Mars in Taurus, three degrees from his Moon. So the public face (Aries) is hard-wired to the body's emotional core (Taurus Moon-Mars). What you see is what he's actually feeling. The persona is not a layer. It's load-bearing.

The cost is what every Aries Rising eventually learns: the swing-first reflex creates enemies the chart-holder didn't mean to make. Hank Jr. has been politically outspoken for forty years and was famously dropped from ESPN's Monday Night Football intro in October 2011 after a televised political comparison the network couldn't stomach. The intro ran from 1989 to 2011 — 22 years of one man's voice. Aries Rising got him the job. Aries Rising also ended it. Fox NFL brought him back in 2017 — the chart's Mars-driven resilience showing up on schedule. The complicating cross-placement is Pluto trine Ascendant (orb 4.42) — a placement that gives this Aries Rising a depth most don't have, but also an underground intensity that makes him polarizing whether he intends it or not.

His Mercury at 16°48' Gemini retrograde is the most underrated placement in the chart. Mercury rules speech, writing, and the whole apparatus of how a mind moves. Retrograde in its home sign, conjunct Venus by less than two degrees, sextile Pluto by 2.47, and trine Neptune by 4.21 — this is a songwriter's Mercury. The retrograde gives him the loop-back: the way he'll quote his father in a verse, then break the fourth wall, then pivot to a punchline. 'Family Tradition' (1979) is the structural fingerprint of that Mercury — half autobiography, half deflection, half wink.

Venus at 15°10' Gemini, also 2nd house, conjunct Mercury Rx, trine Neptune (orb 2.57) and sextile Pluto (orb 0.83 — exceptionally tight). Venus is the love-and-money planet. In Gemini, in the house of resources, trine Neptune and sextile Pluto, you get a man who attracts wealth through art (Neptune) with serious staying power (Pluto). The trade-off: Venus in Gemini is famously restless in love. The 2nd house location stabilizes the financial side of Venus more than the romantic side. He has been married five times. That's not a chart failure; it's a chart honestly expressing itself.

Mars at 19°25' Taurus in the 1st, conjunct the Moon, trine Midheaven (applying, orb 7.84). Mars in Taurus is the slow-burn fighter — the man who doesn't pick fights but, once committed, simply does not quit. Trine MC is one of the cleanest career-energy aspects in the book: the action you take in the world (Mars) flows into your public reputation (MC) without resistance. This is part of why the post-1975 reinvention worked. He had the chart for it. For a Gemini Sun comparison, see <a href="/blog/johnny-depp-birth-chart-gemini-astrology-2026">Johnny Depp's chart</a> — another Gemini Sun who rebuilt a public identity after a public unmaking.

His Sun in Gemini squares Saturn at 29°51' Leo in the 5th house. Saturn at the anaretic 29th degree of Leo, in the house of creative self-expression, squaring his Sun — this is the most autobiographical aspect in the chart. The pattern: a permanent inner pressure to prove, a sense that creative output is never sufficient, an inheritance of authority that feels less like a gift and more like a debt. The cost is the lived experience of being measured, eternally, against a father who died young enough to never disappoint anyone. Saturn square Sun makes you build, and build, and build. It does not let you rest in what you built.

This is the engine. Moon in Taurus square Pluto at 14°21' Leo in the 5th. The pattern: emotional life is volcanic underneath a calm surface; control and loss-of-control sit on a hair-trigger; intimacy is felt as life-or-death, never casual. The cost is a tendency toward extremes — the addiction-recovery arc that's well-documented in his autobiographical writing tracks this aspect almost too neatly. Moon-Pluto people don't do moderation easily. They do depth, and they do depth's collapse, and they do the climb back. Repeat.

Chiron is the wound that becomes the work. Sun opposite Chiron — and at 1.30 of orb, this is tight — is the chart of someone whose core identity formed in a wound he didn't cause. He didn't ask to be the namesake of an American myth. He didn't ask to lose his father at three. He didn't ask to have his face rebuilt at 26. The pattern: identity gets forged through injury, and the public role becomes 'the one who survived.' The cost is that the wound never quite closes. Every successful album is also, somewhere in the chart, another lap around the same scar.

Neptune at 12°36' Libra in the 6th, squaring his Capricorn MC at 11°35'. Neptune-MC squares are the fog-on-the-career aspect. The pattern: the public sees you through a haze; the image and the person separate; legend overtakes biography. For Hank Jr., this shows up as the costume — the beard, glasses, hat that make 'Bocephus' a brand more than a man. The cost is that the brand can eat the artist. There are stretches of his catalog where you can hear him fighting his own legend. That's Neptune square MC, applying, doing exactly what it does.

The two trines that make the chart functional are Sun trine Jupiter (orb 2.64) and Sun trine Neptune (applying, orb 7.84). Jupiter in Aquarius in the 10th house trine the Sun is one of the most reliable 'public success' signatures in natal astrology — luck in the career sector, an audience that wants this person to win. Sun trine Neptune adds the artistic charisma, the way he can make a song feel mythic even when the lyric is plain.

But the aspect that complicates the hero narrative is Saturn sextile Uranus (orb 0.71), one of the tightest in his chart. This is the 'old form, new rebellion' aspect — and it's why he could fuse outlaw country with Southern rock in the late '70s and make it stick. He wasn't reinventing the wheel; he was welding two existing wheels together with a 0.71-degree weld. Most artists who try this fail. He didn't.

The chart promised a performer. Jupiter in the 10th house in Aquarius, trine the Sun, is the textbook signature for someone whose career becomes a public institution. Add Mars trine MC and the Country Music Hall of Fame induction in 2020 reads less as an achievement and more as the chart finally cashing a check it had been holding since 1949.

The tension is this: the chart promised a performer. It did not specify which one. From age 8 (the Ryman debut) through his early twenties, he was performing his father's catalog — a Gemini Sun in the 2nd house literally monetizing someone else's voice. The Ajax Mountain fall in 1975 functioned, astrologically, as a hard reset. Transiting Pluto was crossing his natal Saturn; transiting Saturn was approaching his Sun. The chart was demanding he become himself or stop being anyone. He chose the first.

What he built afterward — the rowdy-friends persona, the Monday Night Football theme that ran from 1989 to 2011, the 70-plus albums — is the chart of a Gemini Sun finally writing in his own voice. It just took 26 years and a near-death event to get there. For a parallel resilient-rebel arc, see <a href="/blog/seth-rogen-birth-chart-aries-sun-pluto-knocked-up-2026">Seth Rogen's Aries Rising chart</a> — different territory, same Mars-driven public re-emergence.

His 7th house cusp is Libra at 18°46', ruled by Venus in Gemini. Venus in Gemini wants variety, conversation, mental match. The 7th-house Libra cusp wants partnership, fairness, beauty. When those two pull in different directions, you get a relationship history that is documented and complicated. He has been married five times. His most recent marriage was to Mary Jane Thomas, whom he'd been with since 1990 and who died on March 22, 2022. Saturn was transiting his Aquarius 10th-11th when she died — a Saturnian period, by definition.

The trade-off here is not moralistic. Venus in Gemini in the 2nd, sextile Pluto, trine Neptune, conjunct Mercury Rx, is a placement that loves intensely and loves several — and a chart-honest reading admits both rather than picking one. The 1st-house Taurus Moon-Mars adds a need for someone physically present and physically loyal. Those two needs (variety + presence) don't always cohabit. The chart, in this respect, is honest about the cost.

Of every transit currently active or approaching for Hank Williams Jr. in May 2026, the one to watch — by a margin — is transiting Uranus crossing his natal Gemini Sun. Uranus entered Gemini in July 2025 and will be slow-moving through the early degrees of the sign through 2026. His Sun sits at 4°45' Gemini. By late spring and into summer 2026, transiting Uranus will be making its first conjunction to that Sun — an aspect that happens once in an 84-year cycle. He is 76 in 2026. The last time Uranus was on his Sun, he was an infant his father was holding for the only time anyone alive can remember.

What the transit does, behaviorally: Uranus on the Sun is a release of pressure that's been building under the identity. It does not cause new circumstances so much as it forces the chart-holder to stop tolerating circumstances that weren't his choice in the first place. For a Gemini Sun in the 2nd house, this often shows up as decisions about catalog, ownership, what gets recorded vs. archived, what the family name means going forward. Mid-2026 also features <a href="/blog/mercury-square-pluto-taurus-aquarius-may-2026-transit">Mercury moving through Gemini</a> and the broader <a href="/blog/gemini-season-2026-sun-ingress-uranus-conjunction">Gemini-season ingress</a> — meaning the transit isn't isolated. Multiple bodies will be hitting that 2nd-house Gemini stellium throughout the year.

The concrete implication: any major announcement, catalog deal, autobiography, or public-statement-of-record made by Hank Williams Jr. between roughly May 2026 and February 2027 will carry unusual weight. Uranus-on-Sun transits are not subtle. They tend to define what the chart-holder is remembered for in the final third of his life. The reading isn't predictive — it's structural. Watch the next ten months. For a comparable late-career Mars-Taurus reinvention pattern, <a href="/blog/john-daly-birth-chart-taurus-sun-mars-60-2026">John Daly's chart</a> shares the Taurus engine on the Sun side rather than the Moon side, and his late-career arc rhymes structurally with Hank's.

The contrarian observation, which most Hank Williams Jr. profiles miss, is this: the rowdy-friends persona is not the rebellion. It's the protection. The actual rebellion in this chart is the Sun-square-Saturn refusal to die young like his father did. Hank Sr. died at 29. Hank Jr. is 76 in 2026. That fact is the chart's deepest accomplishment, and it's almost never read that way.

The chart asks the reader to reckon with what survival actually costs when you inherit someone else's myth. The Aries Rising swagger, the Taurus body that took a 500-foot fall and rebuilt itself, the Gemini Sun that wrote 70 albums — those aren't separate stories. They're one organism's response to a single load-bearing problem: how do you become yourself when your name was already famous before you could speak it? The chart's answer, written in aspects formed in May 1949, is that you do it loudly, you do it physically, you do it with a guitar in your hand, and you do it for fifty years until the difference between the man and the legend stops mattering. Whether that's a victory or a draw is, in the end, the question every reader of this chart has to answer for themselves.