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.

Dar Delights

Last night, Middletown was the recipient of a very special treat in the form of a concert by the ever talented Dar Williams.. As always, Dar delivered intelligent and thought-provoking messages through the angelic beauty of her voice and the simplicity of her guitar playing. She is a natural storyteller and her song introductions came across as if having a conversation with a friend. Dar graduated from Wesleyan in 1989 and it was apparent last night that her experiences there have shaped her songwriting ever since. She had tales to tell about the campus radio station WESU and wove those stories into the introduction of Are You Out There, the song about the deep influence that radio can have on youth. Her lyrics are so emotional and so real and delve so deeply into such painful topics, my friend and I were wondering how she sings her songs without bursting into tears – we certainly did! I thought the biggest tearjerker was “After All”, a song about the struggles of coming into your own self, which last night was introduced also as having developed under the backdrop of Wesleyan.

The audience seemed to be mostly students. One who I spoke to said she had never heard Dar Williams music before. If that student was at all representative of the audience in general, I can hardly imagine the triumph of discovery that this show surely must be for so many who were hearing Dar Williams’s soulful music for the first time. Another person I spoke to was a Dar Williams fan who came from Clinton to see the show. She couldn’t say enough about how impressed she was with the venue and all of the other amazing events, past and upcoming, that were listed in the calendars.

Dar Wiliams Returns to Wes Campus for CFA Concert

Dar Williams (Wesleyan '89) may be the only singer-songwriter to write a lament for the long-gone tavern Sal's. As a Wesleyan student, and like many Wesleyan students before and after, Williams had the unerring instinct to find the bar in town where the drinks were the least expensive. Sal's was it in the eighties. When Sal's Burned Down is an epitaph for the bar, and for the common dreams and comfort lost when it disappeared, but also about the loss of chances not taken.

Dar Williams will be returning again to Wesleyan for a concert, in a double bill with Paul Baker Hernandez, on Thursday March 26 at 8pm in a concert at Crowell Hall.

Here's what the Center for the Arts has to say:

Dar Williams '89 is an American folk musician and activist whose songs touch upon numerous themes such as religion, adolescence, gender issues and relationships. The Boston Globe describes Williams’ music as “lush soundscapes breathing wetly beneath her elegant, operatic groove and seductively conversational vocals feel like one long, loving lullaby for lives in trouble, peppered with useful wisdom.”

Paul Baker Hernandez is a songwriter, performer, and lecturer specializing in the works of Victor Jara. He now lives in a neighborhood of Managua, Nicaragua. There, Paul is co-founder of Café Sandino, Echoes of Silence and the Victor Jara Cultural Workers Movement, all committed to rolling back global warming by making peace, justice and beauty through creative, sustainable lifestyles and agriculture, people-to-people interchange, just trade, and the arts.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Wesleyan's Department of Sociology.

Dar Williams and Paul Baker Hernandez
(Hernandez performs first and Williams second)
Thursday, March 26, 8pm
Crowell Concert Hall
Tickets: $15, $5 Wesleyan Students