There were some surprises in this week’s Pulitzer Prize winners: a ProPublica reporter shared an award with the New York Times, and Next to Normal, with its bi-polar protagonist, has to be the best musical about mental illness since Gypsy (narcissistic personality disorder) or The Music Man (mass hysteria).

The other award no one saw coming went to a dead guy: the Pulitzer Prize Board gave a special citation to Hank Williams, who died in 1953 in the backseat of a car “in a Pure Filling Station on a New Year’s Day/In a car that needed gasoline/He found the only peace of mind he would ever enjoy/In a place he’d never ever seen.”

Those lines are from Steve Yerkey, who wrote one of a handful of great songs about the man who remains country’s greatest songwriter — “a hundred floors above me in the Tower of Song,” as Leonard Cohen sang. Why the Pulitzer chose to honor him now is anybody’s guess, though he’s in interesting company: Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane and Bob Dylan are the only musicians who have been similarly honored. (Now that would make an interesting quartet.)

But you don’t hear a lot of Hank these days, not the real thing, anyway. His songs endure (Norah Jones did a sweet cover of “Cold Cold Heart” on her billions-sold debut album) but modern country stations don’t have much use for him, let alone his only talented offspring, Hank Williams III. Maybe the Pulitzer committee was hoping they could make people rediscover his poetry and pure-as-spring-water singing.

Not that Hank would care, but his alter ego, Luke the Drifter might. This was his handle for his good side, the guy who sang morality tales like “Ramblin’ Man” and “Be Careful of the Stones That You Throw” while bad Hank kept on drinkin’ and fightin’ and cheatin’ through life. That Hank would have missed the awards ceremony luncheon, where they never pour any sour mash anyway.