Part of getting more serious was finding a musical direction. Unlike many of their peers, who still dismissed country music in 1972, these two Southerners realized that most of their favorite songwriters — Townes Van Zandt, Steve Young, Merle Haggard, John Prine, Hank Williams — all shared a hillbilly tinge.
“I tried to figure out why I liked these people more than the more pop songwriters,” Robin explains, “and I realized it was their country imagery and melodies. I’d hear Dylan’s ‘With God On Our Side’, and then I’d hear the Clancy Brothers sing the old Irish tune ‘The Patriot Song’, and I’d realize it was the same song. Or I’d hear Steve Young’s ‘The White Trash Song’ and realize it was based on ‘Little Maggie’.
“That got me listening to traditional music, which opened the floodgates for me creatively. I’d hear an old song, and I’d remember that I had heard it in the mountains when I was growing up. I’d remember that I had stood next to a mountain kid my age singing that song and that I could sing as loudly as he could. When I sang it again, I felt that release I had felt in those old country churches. It all started coming back to me.”
“At the time,” Linda adds, “I was looking for a new kind of music, because James Taylor didn’t turn me on anymore; Judy Collins didn’t turn me on anymore. When I met this boy who had also grown up in the South but had never left and was still into country music, I felt a sigh of relief. I said, ‘Oh, this is what I’ve been missing. This is me; this is where I come from.'”
The Williamses were married in 1973 and launched their professional career as a duo the same year. The following year they moved from Nashville to Middlebrook, Virginia, a town so small it doesn’t appear on most maps. In 1975, they recorded their self-titled debut album in Minneapolis with local musicians including Peter Ostroushko and Dakota Dave Hull.
Minnesota had always been one of Robin’s strongest areas when he was a solo performer, and the same became true for the duo. Ostroushko, who often accompanied them onstage, told them about a friend of his who had just started a radio show called “A Prairie Home Companion” in St. Paul.
“I first heard Robin and Linda play in a student center at a college in Menomonie, Wisconsin,” Keillor says of their encounter in 1975. “They performed a few feet from a cash register that went ker-chunk every half minute or so, in the midst of pinball machines dinging, and people talking, and there was no stage lighting whatsoever. They stood up there in that hellish situation and sang with great humor and dignity.
“Then they came over to my table and sat down and I said, ‘I can get you something better. You can sing on the radio.’ After what they’d just been through, they found that a thrilling idea. And you know something, it really was.”
“The show had been around six months or so at that point,” Robin emphasizes, “and it was having so much trouble that it had to stop renting a theater. So our first show was just the three of us in a studio. But even then, you knew this guy was special. The writing was not only funny but also quite evocative. Plus he knew how to use music really well.”
“We were game to do whatever he wanted us to do,” Linda agrees. “When he went national after five years, he asked us to come out to Minnesota specifically to do shows. We’d hang out at his house and work on music and scripts. He’d say, ‘Put together a train medley and figure out how to work Chet Atkins and Jethro Burns into it.’ And the next week we’d find ourselves onstage teaching songs to Chet and Jethro, wondering, ‘How did this happen?’
“Hanging around his house, we realized how hard he worked, how disciplined he was, how seriously he took his art. We were typical musicians; we stayed up late and wrote when the inspiration struck us. But he was writing all the time, and we realized that that’s what it takes to keep improving your craft. So we changed our whole approach to our music and our songwriting.”
This new commitment to songwriting produced a gusher of strong material and a trilogy of albums that stand as the duo’s finest work. Working closely with lyricist Jerry Clark, himself a successful magazine writer, Robin and Linda Williams created the song-suite equivalent of “A Prairie Home Companion” with 1996’s Sugar For Sugar, 1998’s Devil Of A Dream, and 2000’s In The Company Of Strangers.
Like Keillor’s monologues, these records captured not only the funny sides of small-town America, but the painful, poignant aspects as well. The songs are set against rural landscapes of “a gravel country road” and a “wind-blown and rain-soaked prairie,” where folks struggle with drink, divorce and the devil and survive to value “the lessons of the years.” “My dreams do not take wings,” Linda sings on “Green Summertime”, “for I’m captive to familiar things.”
By this time, the Williamses no longer traveled as a duo. They added bassist Jim Watson, a founding member of the Red Clay Ramblers, in 1988, and dobroist Kevin Maul in 1990. Billing themselves as Robin & Linda Williams & Their Fine Group, the quartet had enough rhythmic oomph to move out of folk coffeehouses and into bluegrass festivals and country nightclubs.
For the Williamses, these genres form a seamless continuum. For what is country music, after all, but folk music that has kept pace with its rural Southern audience? The same Carolina small towns that listened to Clarence Ashley in the 1930s and the Stanley Brothers in the 1950s now listen to Alan Jackson and Lee Ann Womack, so why can’t the Williamses sing it all?
“We see ourselves more than anything as singers of American music,” Linda insists. “You can’t have Jimmie Rodgers or Bob Wills without blues or jazz. You can’t have the Stanley Brothers or the Carter Family without gospel music. You can’t have Merle Haggard or Hank Williams without a commercial country music industry. Somehow it all goes together.
“To us, it doesn’t matter if a song was written on a front porch for the neighbors or in a Nashville studio to get a hit. It’s not the motivation so much as the result. If the song sounds real, that’s all that matters.”
ND contributing editor Geoffrey Himes interviewed Garrison Keillor by e-mail for this article. The final question was, “Why have Robin Williams’ movies gone steadily downhill since Mrs. Doubtfire?” The 59-year-old Keillor wrote back, “Every comedian’s career ebbs at around 35 or 40. You can’t be funny after 45, period. But thank goodness Robin can still sing ‘Rambling Man’ and blow the harp.”
