Right by Her Roots: Americana Women and Their Songs

3. Victoria Williams: Seriously Free

✻ ✻ ✻ 57 Victoria Williams Seriously Free 3 Victoria Williams is a Louisiana-born, California desert– dwelling jazzy, alternative folk-rock pioneer. Her unfettered approach to singing and songwriting has a way of confronting and dissolving even the strongest inhibitions. In 1993 Victoria Williams’ songs met with a fate that is rare for a recording artist so early in her career and lacking any radio hits to speak of. Big names in the then-ubiquitous genre of alternative rock, and its roots and grunge tributaries, recorded them for a tribute and benefit album—a tribute to and benefit for her—titled Sweet Relief. Thanks in no small part to the participation of acts like Pearl Jam, Lou Reed, and Soul Asylum (and, incidentally, Lucinda Williams and Michelle Shocked), the album raised funds to pay off medical bills for Williams’ multiple sclerosis treatment—and gave her music a deserved boost in visibility, making a convincing argument that she belonged in and mattered to the alternative music scene. 58 ✻ Right by Her Roots ✻ More than a decade and a half after the fact, none of this is on Williams’ mind when she brings up Sweet Relief in our interviews . She does not talk about how it had helped her financially or professionally, nor how it had taken her songs and her name to new audiences. Instead, she remembers how it had helped banish the nagging suspicion that maybe, just maybe, she was not a real songwriter: “That’s why it was so nice when they did that Sweet Relief record and I heard all these people singing my songs. I was so happy. I was like, ‘Wow, I never thought anybody could sing my songs.’ Then I was like, ‘They really are songs.’” It was really not so outlandish that Williams would wonder whether her music was taken seriously: she intends her songs for adult listeners—and welcomes it when kids respond, too—but has never conformed to a lot of the conventions of music aimed at adults, like emotionally heavy or personally revealing songwriting .1 That is not how Williams writes; with her, there is no brooding, no explicit confession. What she does do often is wriggle out of linear song structure or delight in celebrating things that might, on the surface, seem small or silly. As for her singing , her voice has a tender, wobbly, unconventional timbre, and she puts it to wild, fanciful, equally unconventional use. As for her outlook on life, songwriting, and performing, she welcomes gusts of spiritual inspiration, wherever she might be when they hit, and seldom falls in line with mainstream attitudes. Altogether, Williams has accomplished a rare feat: staring the priorities of contemporary, capitalistic, American adulthood in the eye and declining to play along with its rules and priorities , instead favoring the sort of blessedly, brazenly truthful intuition that is not often preserved after youth and a countercultural freedom that is not skeptical of age. It’s Different Out Here That Williams has not had a problem trusting anyone over thirty is a good thing, since she is now in her fifties herself; she was born in 1958 and began her recording career nearly a ✻ Victoria Williams ✻ 59 quarter-century ago. She and her music seemed, and still seem, so free both because and in spite of her roots in Louisiana. The first words she grabs for to describe her upbringing in the modest -sized river city of Shreveport, Louisiana—“in the country, south of town,” to be exact—are “conservative” and “Methodist ,” two things nobody would have accused her of being later on. Still, it was not as though creativity was frowned upon in her family. “My folks,” she points out, “were conservative, yet artists, too; mother a painter, and dad a photographer and wood craftsman.” She can recall her mother getting so absorbed in painting that she would lose all track of time and still be at it, in her pajamas no less, when her father got home from work. So there was that. There was also this: Williams took full advantage of the freedoms she was afforded as a six-year-old living outside of town in 1964. She was an imaginative kid and plenty happy to roam around on her own. She muses, “It was a much more trusting time, I think. . . . [T]hey didn’t lock their doors. I would ride my bike—it was a few miles away...