Hinson's mama sung him traditional western-folk 'til she vanished when he was ten. His daddy, by the man's own account, was unknown. He run off from home at fourteen, hooked up with a six-truck carny workin' the deep south fairs, and earned his keep pickin' guitar and bitin' the heads off live chickens as a sideshow act. Yeh-yeh.
In the summer of 1963, at twenty-one years old, he was framed for the murder of his boss at the carnival, one of several unjust crimes that placed him in the Illinois State Penitentiary for thirty long years. He spent most of that stretch pickin' guitar and studyin' at the feet of whichever chart-topper the warden saw fit to pipe through the prison radio.
Some folks say he's a four-hundred-year-old vampire. Some say he just looks like one. The King says: "If people believes in Santy Claus or the Easter Bunny, or calls me a vampire, I'm gonna let 'em. Don't bother me none."
He walked out the prison gate in 1993, ready to reclaim what was his, and proceeded to record an unbroken streak of chart-toppers, terrorize honky-tonks from Nashville to Knoxville, and carry the country western torch through the darkest stretch the genre ever run.
Yeh-Yeh.Baker dreamed up Unknown Hinson in the early nineties for The Wild Wild South, a Charlotte public-access sketch show he made with his partner Don Swan. When Swan passed in 1995, Baker spun the character off into The Unknown Hinson Show, which won Creative Loafing Charlotte's "Best Of" poll for Best Public-Access Television Show four years running.
In 1999 he hit the road. Over the next twenty years he became a cult figure on the rockabilly and psychobilly circuit, sharing stages with Hank III (who has Hinson's face tattooed on his bicep), the Reverend Horton Heat, Marty Stuart, and Ed King. Capitol Records signed him. His song "Torture Town" won Best Alternative Country at the 2009 Independent Music Awards. He played bass and lead guitar in Billy Bob Thornton's Boxmasters under the name Danny Baker. For those gigs he showed up without the widow's peak, without the fangs, and without the bolo tie.
From 2005 to 2019 he voiced Early Cuyler, the bellicose hillbilly squid, across fifteen seasons of Adult Swim's Squidbillies. Plenty of late-night viewers became Unknown Hinson fans without knowing it.
He quit the road in 2020 when osteoarthritis made pickin' impossible, and has been recovering ever since. He never broke character, and he never stopped being the King of Country Western Troubadours.
A handful of the King's finest. Click any one to go pickin' on YouTube.
The Hinson dialect is a living, chart-toppin' thing. Here's the essential vocabulary for any apprentice troubadour.
Country music produces self-appointed kings by the dozen. Unknown Hinson is one of the few who earned the title. He stayed in character for thirty years without once blinking. He played guitar well enough that Hank III put his face on a tattoo. He wrote a song called "Torture Town" that won Best Alternative Country in 2009. And somewhere inside the fangs and the widow's peak and the fake thirty-year prison sentence, Stuart Daniel Baker was quietly one of the finest American guitar players of his generation. Long live the King.