Don Williams
Don Williams was a Texas-born country singer and songwriter, known as the “Gentle Giant” for his warm baritone and easygoing manner. Seventeen of his records went to No. 1 on the country chart. He began in the 1960s folk-pop trio the Pozo-Seco Singers, was the Country Music Association’s Male Vocalist of the Year in 1978, and was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2010.
He was born on 27 May 1939 in Floydada, Texas. His mother taught him guitar, and as a teenager he played in country, folk and rock and roll bands. After his Army service he formed the Pozo-Seco Singers in Corpus Christi in 1964 with Susan Taylor and Lofton Cline. The trio recorded several albums for Columbia and placed six records on the pop chart in 1966 and 1967, the best known being “Time.” Two of them reached the pop Top 40. The group broke up in 1969, and Williams worked at several jobs outside music before trying again in Nashville.
There Jack Clement signed him as a writer to his Jack Music publishing company. With Clement and the songwriter and producer Allen Reynolds, Williams sang the company’s demonstration records, and when other artists were slow to take up his songs the three decided he should record them himself. Don Williams, Volume One came out on Clement’s JMI label in 1972, with his own “The Shelter of Your Eyes” (No. 14, 1972) and Bob McDill’s “Come Early Morning” (No. 12, 1973) and “Amanda” (No. 33, 1973). He made one of the first country music videos, for “Come Early Morning.” Volume Two brought his own “Atta Way to Go” and Reynolds’s “We Should Be Together,” his first Top Five hit.
His first No. 1, Al Turney’s “I Wouldn’t Want to Live If You Didn’t Love Me,” came in 1974, the year he moved to ABC-Dot. It began a run of fifteen straight Top Ten hits. That run took in Wayland Holyfield’s “You’re My Best Friend” and “Some Broken Hearts Never Mend,” McDill’s “(Turn Out the Light and) Love Me Tonight,” “Say It Again” and “It Must Be Love,” and Danny Flowers’s “Tulsa Time.” It also included “Till the Rivers All Run Dry,” which he wrote with Holyfield, and his own “Lay Down Beside Me” and “Love Me Over Again.” He became a member of the Grand Ole Opry on 23 April 1976, singing “The Shelter of Your Eyes” and “You’re My Best Friend” that night. In 1978 the CMA named him Male Vocalist of the Year and “Tulsa Time” its Single of the Year, and the Academy of Country Music also chose it as Single of the Year. His songs reached rock musicians too. Eric Clapton took “Tulsa Time” into the pop Top 40 in 1980, and Pete Townshend and Ronnie Lane recorded “Till the Rivers All Run Dry” for their album Rough Mix.
He moved to MCA in 1979, Capitol in 1985 and RCA in 1989, staying until 1992, and later recorded for American Harvest, Giant, RMG and Intersound/Compendia. McDill kept writing for him, most notably “Good Ole Boys Like Me,” and the hits of the 1980s and early 1990s also included Roger Cook and Sam Hogin’s “I Believe in You,” Cook and John Prine’s “Love Is on a Roll,” Dave Loggins’s “We Got a Good Fire Goin’,” “I Wouldn’t Be a Man” by Rory Bourke and Mike Reid, and Dennis Linde’s “Then It’s Love.” Reynolds produced his early records, and Williams later co-produced his own albums with Garth Fundis. He had at least one major hit every year from 1974 to 1991. In all he placed fifty-six records on the country chart, forty-five of them in the Top Ten. I Believe in You went platinum, and two volumes of his greatest hits went gold.
His records sold in the British Isles, Europe, Latin America and Australia. In 1980 readers of the London magazine Country Music People named him Artist of the Decade. He was one of the few country stars to tour Africa, and his 1997 video Into Africa draws on those concerts. At home he kept his touring schedule limited and gave few interviews.
He retired in 2016, two years after his last studio album. He died in Mobile, Alabama, on 8 September 2017, aged 78. That year saw the release of the tribute album Gentle Giants: The Songs of Don Williams, with Garth Brooks, Lady Antebellum and Chris Stapleton among the singers.
