My Dar Williams Story, and I'm Sticking To It

I didn't know Dar Williams 20 years ago when she was a graduating senior from Wesleyan, but I did meet her a year or two later.

I've done a folk music show on WWUH for nearly 25 years. In 1992 I had the bright idea of doing a concert series, to be recorded live, on a new medium at the time - the CD. We would use the CD as a fundraising premium, and give some folk acts lots of exposure. The first event, Folk Next Door, went amazingly well. So the next May when we were looking for talent, my friend, singer-songwriter Nerissa Nields told me about a young woman who she met in a songwriting group in Northampton.

"Her name is Dar Williams," I recall Nerissa telling me. "And she's amazing."

Coincidentally, I was driving to RI for a video shoot a few days later, and listening to a Worcester folk music radio show and I heard Dar perform live. Indeed, she was amazing. She had something a lot of songwriters didn't, the ability to capture in a verse and chorus, complex emotions, deep issues, and a humanity that put flesh on the bones of her songs.

Together Nerissa and I arranged for Dar to be booked as an opening act for a series my friend, and fellow folk show host, Bill Domler, was producing in his print shop in the West End of Hartford. The Nields already had a enthusiastic following, so the tiny print shop was crowded when Dar appeared. In the span of a few songs, she had the crowd captivated.

So when a group of us met to consider talent for Folk Next Door 2 (Honey Hide the Banjo, It's the Folk Next Door Again!) I enthusiastically added Dar's cassette album, All My Heroes Are Dead, to the pile to be considered. I can't be sure, but I think I had the cassette queued up to a song called Calamity John, one I liked in particular, but somehow the song that got played was Flinty Kind of Woman, a hilarious song about New England-style feminist revenge. The audition group didn't get it. They thought it was a too-earnest protest song (in fact it's a parody of a too-earnest protest song). They thought Dar's guitar playing wasn't up to snuff. They (we) were a group of on-the-verge of envious, middle age, white, radio and music guys. The group rejected Dar despite my objections.

Thank god for executive privelege. I put Dar on the "accepted" list, and she was the first act on for the evening portion of that year's concert. She played an amazing version of The Great Unknown, and then she absolutely floored the audience with The Babysitter's Here.

We used The Babysitter's Here on the CD (Dar's first CD recording), and slowly at first, then in a great rush, the world caught onto her genius.

I have a few other vivid Dar memories - hearing an early, unfinished version of a song called When I Was A Boy, which she was performing in a songwriters group in Hartford, calling her and telling her, to some great disappointment, that a musician we both admired, Jane Siberry, had just released an album called, When I Was A Boy, and coincidentally meeting her just after she left the stage following her first performance at the Newport Folk Festival, where she grabbed my hand (her's was still trembling with post-performance adrenaline jitters - once again she had peformed magic on an audience), and led me to meet her mom and dad (I've been introduced to more than one parent of a young singer-songwriter, I think because they want another adult to tell them that their talented son or daughter is following a legitimate path).

Dar, of course, has gone on to great and deserved acclaim, but as you may know, she has a soft spot in her heart for her alma mater, and for Middletown. She's performed benefits for the Green Street Arts Center, and tonight, at Wesleying for her reunion year, she'll be performing a show at the Memorial Chapel (10 PM) to benefit the Johanna Justin-Hinich Scholarship Fund. Tickets are available to the public at the CFA Box Office.