Artists who participated in the album, which has been in the works for almost a decade, expressed their sense of honor at being asked to complete the work of such a monumental musician. “There’s a lot of magic still left in these songs,” said Alan Jackson, who opens the album with “You’ve Been Lonesome, Too.” Ms. Jones, who sings the bluesy, melancholy “How Many Times Have You Broken My Heart,” said she found the idea behind the project “really daunting,” but that “the people who were putting it together were doing it with respect and love and creativity, and I had trust in that.”

Lucinda Williams — whose poet father met Hank Williams the month before the singer died and Ms. Williams was born — felt such an emotional connection to her selection, “I’m So Happy I Found You,” that she sang it immediately before she and her husband exchanged vows at their onstage wedding in 2009. The seeds of the project were planted in 2002 when the all-star Hank Williams tribute album “Timeless” (also with Mr. Dylan, Ms. Williams and Ms. Crow) won the Grammy for country album of the year. One of that record’s executive producers, the veteran manager and A&R executive Mary Martin, was approached by Peggy Lamb, the Hank Williams authority at Williams’s publishing company, Acuff-Rose. Ms. Lamb told her about the cardboard box containing four notebooks and scattered scraps of paper full of Williams’s unrecorded lyrics (66 songs in all) that was locked in a vault in her office. Williams’s family had passed the material to Acuff-Rose soon after the singer died, but its existence wasn’t widely known until a few of the pages were reprinted in the book “Hank Williams: Snapshots From the Lost Highway,”