Did it never occur to people that maybe they don’t like the music? I hate to say it.” And if you’re good enough, that’s what gets you in the door – not what sex you are. “Maybe I’m naive, but I used to believe then, and I still do now, that the cream rises to the top. And there is a lot of talk that country radio doesn’t play as many female artists as male artists. She interjected: “I keep getting asked that question, over and over, and I understand why the question is being asked, because it’s the topic of the day. I asked if she thought her gender – and the way in which the music industry markets female musicians – played a role in this categorisation. “Bob Dylan did Nashville Skyline and nobody said, ‘Oh, it’s country!’ They just said: ‘It’s Bob Dylan.’ That’s what I aspired to.” The artists she loved in the 1960s and 1970s didn’t seem concerned with genre in the way the labels she encountered were. “I wanted to rock way before I was able to,” she writes in her memoir. It is the home of the country music scene that wasn’t interested in her work in the 1980s. Since the mid-1980s, Williams has moved between Los Angeles and Nashville, where she and Overby live today. “Who are we kidding? There’s always that.” And I wanted daddy’s approval, you know,” she giggled, suddenly childlike. I wanted his approval, as an artist and a writer. “I still liked to know what he thought about my writing. Until his death in 2015, Williams would often send her father drafts of her song lyrics. “The southern gothic was my everyday life,” she writes in her recent memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You. Later, she realised that the trauma of her childhood – the constant moving, her mother’s mental illness, the friends and family members lost to suicide – was an unconscious constant in her songwriting, giving her music a dark edge. Charles Bukowski was known to attend, while her father described Flannery O’Connor as “his greatest teacher”, she said.Īs a teenager, Williams became enamoured with O’Connor’s depictions of the grotesque characters and southern settings she had grown up around. She didn’t finish high school, but the creative writing workshops her father held at home were an education beyond the classroom, as were the wild parties that descended afterwards. Her mother, Lucille, experienced manic depression and schizophrenic tendencies, and so Williams and her two siblings were raised mostly by their father, Miller.Ī poet and university professor who would go on to read at Bill Clinton’s second inauguration in 1997, he introduced Williams to the world of literature through “osmosis”, she said, smiling. Born in Lake Charles, Louisiana in 1953, she lived in 12 cities and three countries before she was 18. Persistence is a theme of Williams’s life. Science and Technical Research and Development.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.Information and Communications Technology.HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management.
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