“A record producer ought to put his taste and judgment at the service of the artists,” Keillor claims. “It’s as simple as that. A performer doesn’t necessarily need direction so much as he or she needs an outside perspective. It’s a bruising, confusing business, and you are grateful for the critical opinions of someone who loves you. A producer would not ever want to be party to these folks looking bad; you are there to prevent that from happening, and you’re there to encourage them to look for their best.
“For example, I had to fight hard to keep the old Loretta/Conway duet ‘You’re The Reason Our Kids Are Ugly’ off the thing, and there was a sentimental attachment to some old Butterbeans & Susie numbers that needed to be broken. But the kids have pretty good taste, or at least they know which of their several tastes is good. I did hold us to the ideal of a very minimal instrumentation, because I wanted the voices to come through fully. These guys are simply great singers; you can tell that from this album.”
Robin and Linda Williams were born a few months apart in 1947, but their paths might never have crossed if not for an accidental meeting in 1971. Robin was the son of a Presbyterian minister who moved from church to church along the Appalachian range in Virginia and North Carolina. It was in those churches that Robin first appreciated the power of music and the vitality of rural culture.
“I have vivid memories of the differences between the way country people sang and the way city people sang,” he says. “My dad always had a church in town, but he would also go out and preach in the countryside. If you sang ‘Amazing Grace’ in the big church in town, there’d be an organ and people would sing with their faces in the hymn books, but out in the country they’d rear their heads back and just belt it out.
“And up in the mountains, the singing was so raw it was spine-tingling. The mountain singing was as different from the country singing as the country singing had been from the city singing. It was the difference between George Jones and Roscoe Holcomb. Growing up, I didn’t know what to do with that information, but when I decided I wanted to be a musician and had to decide what kind of music I wanted to do, all that information was there to draw on. And I went where the big chill led me.”
Linda spent her formative years in Montgomery, Alabama; when she was in the fourth grade, her family moved first to St. Louis and then to the Detroit suburbs. But those early years in the South shaped her musical tastes. She never got over how hard it was to find a country music radio station in Michigan.
“I had relatives in Greenville, Alabama, where Hank Williams was from,” she points out. “My mother and father loved Hank, and when I first heard the radio, that’s what I heard. Everyone I knew in Alabama had a Hank Williams story. If you were a little kid like me who liked to sing, these were the songs you sang, because they were in the air.
“My father’s family is from Georgia, and they were poor, rural people. They had large families, and they didn’t have much money. The church was the one place where they could let go, where they could let something come over them and be ‘bathed in the spirit.’ Hymns such as ‘Wayfaring Stranger’ were what they called ‘comfort songs,’ because they promised that even though this is a hard life, the next one will be much better.”
Robin and Linda turned 18 in 1965, the year the Beatles released Rubber Soul and Bob Dylan released Highway 61 Revisited, and they got swept up in the political, cultural and musical upheavals of the day. They both graduated from college in 1969. Linda wound up teaching sixth grade in Benton Harbor, Michigan, and singing in bars on weekends, while Robin took advantage of his 4-F draft exemption to travel around the country as a full-time folk singer in college coffeehouses.
By the summer of 1971, they had each reached a personal and musical crossroads. Linda realized that her heart was in music, not in teaching, but she needed some way to make a living. And Robin found that the folk-pop singer-songwriter path was not very satisfying, financially or creatively. As it happened, both sets of parents had moved to South Carolina, and both 24-year-olds were visiting at the same time.
“The first night I was in South Carolina,” Linda remembers, “I went to this bar in Myrtle Beach that was having an open-mike night. Robin was singing when I walked in, and I was on next. I told him, ‘Hey, you can really sing,’ and we made plans to get together. He came over the next day and sang me this song he had written, ‘Daughter Of McLeod’, and I thought it was one of the best songs I’d ever heard. I still do. I had planned to travel that summer, but I spent it with Robin instead.”
Linda did go back to Michigan for another year of teaching, but Robin stayed with her whenever he came off the road. As they spent hours talking about music and singing songs, they soon discovered that their Southern childhoods had given them very similar tastes. Linda quit her job at the end of the school year, and the couple moved to Nashville together.
“We’re lucky,” Linda admits, “in that we stumbled upon each other in this small window when we were in the same town at the same time. But we were also smart enough to recognize that there was something special there, this was someone we didn’t want to let go of. We’ve taken some huge leaps of faith all along, and here we are, still together, 31 years later.”
“In Nashville, we started singing in these pass-the-hat clubs,” Robin recalls. “We began to notice that people were putting money in the hat and that the other performers were telling us we were good. So we worked up some more songs so we could get more money in the hat. At the same time we were getting more serious about this marriage deal, so we decided to get more serious about the music deal, too.”
