Don Williams rarely gets namechecked in roll calls of larger-than-life country music heroes or outlaw legends, but fans of roots music should not sleep on the Gentle Giant and his legacy. Between the early 1970s and the 1990s, the Texas native was among the richest and coolest voices on the radio, delivering 17 No. 1 country hits and building a worldwide audience like nobody before him.
He didn’t lean into trends to achieve his acclaim either. Williams set a tone of bluesy ease and mellow authority on his first album and pretty much held to that brand of spare, song-forward delivery until his retirement. Wore the same hat too. For his consistent quality control and uncanny connection with his audience, he became a Country Music Hall of Famer in 2010. He died in 2017 as an understated icon.
Don Williams is now getting a fresh listen and a new look because of Epilogue: The Cellar Tapes, a collection curated from recordings that surfaced after decades in a Cheatham County basement, the home where Williams lived and raised his family. The reasons these songs went unreleased at the time isn’t entirely clear, except possibly what we now call a lack of bandwidth. They were made between 1979 to 1984, one of the most fertile and successful stretches of Williams’s career, when he released five albums and some of his most important singles, including “I Believe In You,” “Lord I Hope This Day Is Good” and “It Must Be Love.”
The new release sounds like a fully coherent album from that era. It includes legendary songwriters from the Don Williams inner circle, including Bob McDill and Wayland Holyfield. We hear Don’s very personal version of Rodney Crowell’s hit “Leaving Louisiana In The Broad Daylight.” The album opens with “Try Me Again,” a charming song that’s getting its day 40 years after it was written by Nashville Songwriter Hall of Famer Layng Martine, Jr. Never properly released in its day, Martine put it on his own album in 2023, and it sounds here like Williams may have missed a shot at another Top 10 hit.
Another one worth spotlighting is “I’m The One,” a co-write by Williams and Holyfield that is presented here in two versions, one spare and ballad-like with strings, the other with more pep and a Waylon-like bass line. Yet it’s the same vocal performance on each version. And here lies the real story of this record, because this was more involved than just discovering some old tape and releasing it.
Tim Williams, Don’s son, worked with Don’s manager to transfer the old multi-tracks to a digital environment where they could see what they had. And it was a mixed bag, with certain instrumental parts missing or just not sounding good. What was there in all cases, was Williams’s sonorous baritone.
“I started from scratch on some of them, because we had to replace what didn't survive the transfer,” Tim said in the interview with WMOT presented here. He decided that overdubbing contemporary musicians to flesh out the tracks would be the way to go, and to do that he enlisted the help of Garth Fundis, who produced most of Don Williams’s records from the late 70s on. Fundis remembered most of the sessions and certainly the feeling that Williams was going for. So in all the cases he could, he called on musicians who’d been with Williams in the day.
“They knew the subtleties - what to play and how Don liked it, you know?” Fundis says. “So they could replicate the performance for the acoustic guitar that was missing - a piano that was missing - whatever. You build a new music track basically to accompany that vocal, and that's what made it. It just worked out great.”
“Each one was a little different. Some things survived and some things didn't,” says Tim. “But that's as much as anything why I wanted Garth involved. Because for things that maybe were a little more scarce, as far as what was left, I just wanted it to sound as much as possible like a record that (Don Williams) did.”
In this conversation, recorded at Sound Emporium studio on Belmont Boulevard where Williams did these and the bulk of his work in his heyday, Fundis remembers Williams as a “courteous” gentleman who had a clear sense of his artistry. “He was very, very respectful of the songs, when he picked out the things that he felt like he could sing, and feel like it had a resonance of who he was,” he says.
“It absolutely starts with a song” for Don Willians, says Tim “He just thought that a really well-written song, if you delivered it authentically, would be what people wanted to hear. He was just all about songs delivered where they could live and speak. (They) would sell themselves.”
Listen to our full conversation above. And tune in to WMOT on Tuesday, June 23 at 7 pm, when Jessie Scott plays tape of Tim Williams and Garth Fundis talking through the album cut by cut.
