Heartbeat in the Darkness: R.I.P. Don Williams, Whose Understated Strength Made His Music Perfect to Grow Old With
Don Williams, who died after a brief undisclosed illness on September 8, 2017, was called “The Gentle Giant”, but the first part of his nickname may have been more appropriate than the second.
Don Williams, who died after a brief undisclosed illness on September 8, 2017, was called “The Gentle Giant”, but the first part of his nickname may have been more appropriate than the second.
Williams wasn’t imposing — and, at six feet one, he wasn’t really all that tall — but he certainly did have a gentle touch that paired well with his warm baritone. Combined, his light phrasing and genial drawl conveyed a sense of ease and comfort. “It’s such a hopeful voice…it’s like
everything good, everything figured out, everything kind,” claimed Alison Krauss in an interview promoting Williams’ 2012 comeback And So It Goes, and that assessment hints at perhaps his greatest gift as a vocalist: he could soothe without seeming saccharine.
Such a quality also suggests how Don Williams wasn’t a pure country singer — not in the way George Jones, who sat at the top of the Billboard charts alongside the Gentle Giant in the 1970s and 1980s, was. Jones had a twang in his voice, hiccupping with abandon whenever the tempo quickened, but Williams was smooth, never rushing a song and never raising his voice. Like with any professional artist, this understatement was deliberate. In a 1999 profile by Geoffrey Himes for No Depression, Williams claimed “If somebody’s saying something to me in real life and it’s too over-the-top, I feel like it’s a put-on; it doesn’t ring true. The same thing’s true in music; if the singer’s trying too hard, I’m suspicious.”
Throughout his professional career, which began in 1965 as part of the folk-pop trio the Pozo-Seco Singers and concluded after the 2014 release of Reflections, Williams never seemed like he
was trying at all. A mellowness seemed to emanate from somewhere deep inside his soul, infusing the music he made with producer Garth Fundis — a partnership that began in 1978, the year Don Williams won the CMA for Male Vocalist Of The Year, and continued until his retirement in 2016 — with a soft, reassuring glow. Its proud polish meant that it was ideal music for the radio, and Williams was a fixture on the airwaves from 1974, when he scored the first of his 17 total No. 1s on the Country Songs chart with “I Wouldn’t Want to Live If You Didn’t Love Me,” until 1991, when “Lord Have Mercy On A Country Boy” reached No. 7 in the year country generations definitively shifted.
