We are the real deal! A band made up of family members whose surnames are Williams. Admittedly, it is not hard to form a Williams Family band. There are a lot of Williams around. Fifteen minutes wandering around the food court of any mall should do it. The family part bit is trickier—unless you go in for quick marriages and adoptions. In our case it was simple—we are father, son and daughter. We go by the names of Bill Williams, Lavinia Williams, and Bill Williams. If Lavinia would only change her name, we could call ourselves the Bill Williams Family Band. To ease the confusion, I sometimes go by the handle of Doctor Bill.
Although we call ourselves a “band,” our emphasis is primarily on singing—harmony singing. Our sound is sort of mid-Atlantic, somewhere between that great Yorkshire family group, the Watersons, and Appalachian Sacred Harp singing. We don’t sing “purty,” although sometimes we try. Our sound is rough with lots of open harmonies and plenty of energy. If someone ever writes a Pirates’ Cantata, we’re the lads (and lass) to sing it!
Add a few instruments and we have an Old Timey sound. Did I say a few? Collectively the band owns four guitars, two tenor banjos, two five-string banjos (one fretless), a bouzouki, a regular and an octave mandolin, a lap dulcimer, an autoharp, a fiddle, a bodhrán, a ukulele, several pairs of bones, a tambourine, a fist full of tin whistles, and an antique stoneware jug—generally kept empty. Our goals? To learn how to play some of this stuff some day.
Beans, Bacon and Gravy. The song says that I was born in 1891. That’s a bit of an execration. I was born in 1937, right in the midst of the Great Depression. As a consequence, I have a certain fondness for the songs of that era. According to Mudcat, this song was”written and published in 1871 by a Kentucky riverman turned vaudeville songwriter, Will Hayes. It was recorded in October, 1925 for Edison by Fiddlin’ Cowan Powers and Family, who had waxed an earlier version for Victor, in August, 1924….” Lots of people recorded it, including Pete Seeger and Cisco Houston. Ours may be a rare jug version. By the way, to be “Hooverized” on butter meant that you had to settle for margarine–if you were lucky. Poor President Hoover had to lend his name to a variety of Depression era phenomena: Hoovervilles–shanty towns for the unemployed; Hoover flags–pants pockets turned inside out to show they were empty; etc.
No Depression in Heaven. The Depression hit some folk so hard that it must have seen like the end of the world. At least it encouraged them to imagine “some bright land” where there was no hunger. The Carter Family appear to have been the first to record this, although it may have been written by James David Vaughan