![]() ![]() In the event, partly owing to the BBC showing highlights of the Wembley festival, Williams was a great success, both with a hardcore country audience and a wider public. Conn also persuaded the British arm of his record company, ABC, to make Williams’s albums available during a period when UK labels were often reluctant to release country albums for fear that their hip rock image would be tarnished. Williams first visited Britain in 1976 at the invitation of the impresario Mervyn Conn, who promoted the Wembley festival. Among his biggest hits were You’re My Best Friend (1975), written by Wayland Holyfield Tulsa Time (1978), composed by Danny Flowers, guitarist with Williams’s touring band I Believe in You (1980), which became Williams’s only solo US pop hit and Stay Young (1983), a cover of the Gallagher & Lyle song. Williams was to top the country singles charts in the US a further 16 times over the next 12 years. ![]() The songwriter was Al Turney, who had pitched the song while serving Williams at a petrol station. As with most of his later hits, he did not compose this himself. Two more albums followed before I Wouldn’t Want to Live If You Didn’t Love Me gave Williams his first country No 1 hit single in 1974. The result was the album Don Williams Volume One (1973), which contained one of his most praised tracks, Amanda, described by the music historian Bill Malone as combining “the flavour of old-time country music with a middle-of-the-road approach”. However, the low-key ethos of his compositions went against the grain of the dominant, sophisticated “countrypolitan” Nashville sound so, with Reynolds, he decided to record them himself. But he continued to write songs, and when Taylor asked him to contribute to her solo album, Williams took a job within a year with a Nashville music publishing firm headed by Allen Reynolds. Next Williams set up a furniture business with his father-in-law (he had married Joy Bucher in 1960). He said later that “I swore I’d never paint myself into that corner again”, and the trio disbanded in 1971. But the group failed to build on that success and returned to playing in noisy dance halls and bars, which were anathema to Williams. ![]() The trio made records for Columbia, two of which – I Can Make It With You and Look What You’ve Done – became top 40 pop hits in the US. In 1964 they formed a pop-folk trio with Susan Taylor, calling themselves the Pozo-Seco Singers. Returning home, he found work variously as a bread delivery driver, debt collector and oil field operative, while performing in local clubs and bars with a friend, Lofton Cline. By the time Don had graduated from high school in 1958 he was absorbing both country music and rock’n’roll, notably the music of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry.Īfter high school Williams served for two years in the US army. A few years later the family settled in Corpus Christi, east Texas, where his mother taught him to play the guitar. Williams was born in Floydada, Texas, the third son of James, a mechanic, and Loveta Mae (nee Lambert), an amateur musician who entered her son for a local talent competition when he was three. He once described his music as “intensely simple”, but while his love songs were charming and often sentimental and his warm baritone voice was compared to that of Reeves, he also found admirers among the rock music fraternity: both Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend recorded versions of his songs. ![]() At the peak of his popularity in the late 1970s and 80s, Williams, who has died aged 78, headed the bill at the annual Wembley international festival of country music, toured Britain and mainland Europe, and sold LPs by the hundreds of thousands. British fans of country music have tended to favour the unassuming, less flamboyant male exponents of the genre such as Jim Reeves, George Hamilton IV and Don Williams. ![]()
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