In 1993, Dar Williams made her first trip to the Kerr- ville Folk Festival. There, she leapt into the fray of countless campfire singers who flock to the Folk Mecca every year around Memorial Day weekend like some sort of endangered species returning to its spawning ground after a long migratory absence. Strangely enough, Williams admits she was initially reticent about making that journey.
"I decided to go even though I was from Boston in terms of folk music," the singer recalls. "Boston for me has always been a place where everyone loved the music, but kind of got caught up in the knots of the bureaucracy of how to make a living out of making music. So I assumed that Kerrville was going to be the same."
Not true. "It was the opposite," says Williams, "It was really a music-for-music's-sake Mecca that I always dreamed existed." And when that dream came true, it had a huge impact on the course of her life and career. "It really saved me," she says. "It was just at a time when I needed to recharge my batteries. I came back from Kerrville feeling like a person who really loved music and I knew that's why I was making music."
Two months after Kerrville '93, Williams went into the studio to record her first album, The Honesty Room (Razor and Tie), which was greeted by uproarious critical acclaim, strong sales, and lots of NPR airplay. The album's first and most poignant cut, "When I Was a Boy," a meditation on gender roles, was partially written at Kerrville.
While driving back to Massachusetts, Williams came up with another idea: to write a book. "I decided to do The Tofu Tollbooth, a directory of natural foods stores. I was excited about that because I figured if I wanted to stay honest with music, I should probably find another source of income."
But that idea suffered an ironic fate.
"The book bombed," Williams laughs, "and music has been my living ever since. I think somewhere along the way I decided in my heart of hearts that music was going to be my living and I wasn't going to compromise. That decision really took on a pure form in Kerrville."
On the strength of The Honesty Room, Williams made her first official appearance at last year's festival, and returns this year (June 2) in support of her latest Razor and Tie offering, Mortal City. She'll also be stopping by the Cactus Cafe for two shows, June 4 and 5, and though she finds the Hill Country atmosphere and attitude around these parts much more appealing, Williams has no regrets about her years in Boston.
"I lived in Boston for two and a half years. At the time, I was cantankerous about the whole slightly bureaucratic, hierarchical music scene. I think I learned an enormous amount of things in Boston. It taught me things like I need to improve my diction, I need to strengthen my upper register, I need to improve my guitar playing, I need to find a better pick-up for my guitar and stuff like that. So I learned all that stuff and then I left." Left for Northampton, Massachusetts, that is, where she now lives with her manager Charlie Hunter.
Williams is a child of the Seventies from the upper-middle-class suburb of Chappaqua, New York, where she was introduced to the music of the Fifties and Sixties via her father's and sister Julie's record collections. Among her biggest influences from that time are Joan Baez, Judy Collins, the Beatles, the Byrds, The Mamas & the Papas, and Don McLean. She even includes lolly-popsters like Herman's Hermits and Air Supply on the list. "I liked to harmonize with that stuff," she laughs. "It was back before I knew what love was."
Being a folk and musical purist in general, Williams doesn't always garner the respect in the rest of the world that she does in the comfy confines of Kerrville. She has many bad memories of label dealings before she made her commitment to Razor and Tie in 1993.
"A bunch of people approached me," she remembers, "who were very nice for one minute and then their little fangs would start to show. They'd say, `This is good, but I just want to let you know that I call folk the four-letter word,' and then they'd laugh as if they were the first people to make the joke. It was funny to see all these people present this facade of really caring about the music and trusting my integrity and then suddenly showing their actual face. There are lots of frustrated musicians at record companies who'd just as soon watch you disintegrate as not.
"In pop music," she concludes, "you work with who can make you famous. In folk music, you work with who you can trust." n