Robin Williams Transcript

January 12, 2008

Announcer: You have been listening to Sound Authors Where Authors Sound Off. If you would like more information about Sound Authors and Dr. Kent’s guests, visit soundauthors.com. Now, back to Dr. Kent and friends.

Dr. Kent Gustavson: Welcome back to Sound Authors. On the last segment of every show, we feature an author of sound, and on this show, I am honored to have Robin and Linda Williams on the show. Not only is their music heavenly, drifting from somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line, somewhere where the world must still be untouched by commercialism.Their music made up the soundtrack to my own childhood among countless others. We tuned in every week to Prairie Home Companion to hear the lonesome Gospel quartet, Robin and Linda Williams singing some song, must be from the angels. Welcome to the show today.

Robin Williams: Good afternoon, how are you? Well, it’s afternoon here, I don’t know where you are. Are you on the east coast or the west coast Dr. Kent?

Dr. Kent: I’m on the east coast; I’m up in New York.

Robin: Yeah OK, good afternoon to you too, well greetings from the Shenandoah Valley, sunny Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

Dr. Kent: Thank you sir, how is the weather down there?

Robin: It’s good, started off raining; now we got the sunshine, so it’s a good day, it’s a good day.

Dr. Kent: So, your music is part country, part folk, where does it come from inside you and your wife?

Robin: Well, it just came from a variety of influences and then through the individual prisms of Robin and Linda Williams, it comes out as an individualistic style. If you listen to our music, you can hear a little bit of bluegrass, you can hear a little bit of old time country music. You can hear a little bit of the country music of the 50s and the 60s. It’s, as I said, an individual sound. That was our goal, when we first started out 30 years ago, to find something that people would hear and know exactly who we are, and I think, on some level, we succeeded there.

Dr. Kent: Absolutely. Did you grow up singing?

Robin: Oh yeah. I grew up… my father was a minister. So, there was a lot of music around all the time, mainly in the church. So, I ended up singing in church choirs, and that’s how I first found my voice. Found the fact that there was music in my soul, it was singing in churches. As it turns out, when I met Linda, we had pretty much the same kind of experience. It was singing in churches, and then that lead to high school glee clubs and then at some point, both of us picked up instruments and then went on our way into finding and making a life in music.

Dr. Kent: Do you still enjoy it? I know, I myself am also a musician, and I still have the real joy of it, but I can imagine if you are on the road all the time, does it get tiresome sometimes?

Robin: Well, sometimes it does get tiresome, but only if you get tired. One of the things we decided long time ago was learn how to do this in the right way, so that when we are out there on the road, we make sure that we don’t get so tired that it becomes a grind. The best day of everyday, Kent, is playing music, and that’s what… if you’re on the road, the best part of the day is when you get up in front of people and are able to bring these audiences the music that you want them to hear, the music from your soul.It’s not tiresome; I don’t get tired of that, we live for that. It’s just part of what we are, and part of what we look forward too. I mean, at this point in time, right now, we are fortunate enough to be able to take some time off, and we are working on new material. We got another record that we are going to record at the end of February, and that’s what we are working on, but the reason we are doing this is, so that we can get up in front of people and sing our songs.

Dr. Kent: Well, the newest album is called ‘Radio Songs,’ and that was all recorded live on Prairie Home Companion?

Robin: Yeah, it was. We have been thinking about this for some time. We have been doing this a long time first of all; we have been doing it for over 30 years. We have been getting a lot of questions every once in a while. People would say, “What kind are you… are you thinking about a retrospective?” It’s something been in the back of our minds, and we just thought, “Well, if we are going to do a retrospective, why not see if we could do a retrospective of our stuff on the Prairie Home Companion, because, that would be… you would have some of the material from our repertoire, but then people would also get to see what it is we do with the Prairie Home Companion, which is serve the show.”We love this material on the radio songs, this stuff that we did just one time, and just because that’s what the radio show and Garrison Keillor needed at that time. That’s one of our roles on Prairie Home Companion.

Dr. Kent: I just saw you sing with your wife in Town hall.

Robin: Oh, really?

Dr. Kent: Yeah, and it was a wonderful show. I had never seen a show live before; it sure is fun to see.

Robin: Yeah, it’s a great show. That must have been right after thanksgiving?

Dr. Kent: It sure was.

Robin: Yeah, well then you got an idea of what we do. We come out and serve the show. That’s part of our role and that’s… What makes the show so exciting for us is that you do stuff that you don’t do ever again. Actually, now that we have this recording out on radio, so we’re going back and putting a lot of some of these materials that we’re singing once, putting it back into our repertoire and that’s been a lot of fun.

Dr. Kent: I bet. So, let’s listen to a little bit of a song I picked out here from the new album “50000 Names”.

Robin: Good, good, good.[music]

Dr. Kent: Can you give me a little bit of back story on the song? It’s a beautiful one.

Robin: It’s a Memorial Day show, and Linda and I were familiar with that song, we knew the song having listened to the CD of the author of the song, Jamie O’Hara, and we knew the song. So, in our effort to have something for the Memorial Day show, we worked that song up and we went and sang it on the show. That’s a good example of what I’m talking about in terms of serving the show, and also a good example of having done that song one time. We did that song one time on the show and then moved on with our lives.Then, as we were listening, trying to put things back together for this CD, we found that song again and we are glad we did. We put the song on the CD and almost immediately after having had the CD released, people started coming to the shows and asking to hear that song. Actually, that song gives a good idea of what Robin and Linda Williams are about. We’ve learned a lot of lessons from the country music of the past that we do have one step in modern times and we use what we’ve learned from the past to be up-to-date.

Dr. Kent: I got a little quick little question here for you, we’re running out of time. But, that song about all the names on the wall, your music touches all kinds of people out there - liberals to conservatives, north to south. Had you ever get in to politics?

Robin: Well, not really, not too much. We certainly have our feelings. I think, we’re more on the Democratic side than the Republican side, but I think, people can find our politics in our music, and that’s the way we live our lives, yes. We have our feelings, but we don’t bring it to the stage too often.

Dr. Kent: Well, that said, I’d love to close out the show with one of my favorites “Shotgun Shells on a Christmas Tree,” and this is from a great album called “The First Christmas Gift.” Actually, my good friend, Nick Reeb, from college of King Wilkie, plays on a couple of tracks on that album.

Robin: Wow! Is that right?

Dr. Kent: Yes.

Robin: You went to college with Nick Reeb?

Dr. Kent: I did indeed.

Robin: Oh, golly great! Oh, boy, that’s [indecipherable].

Dr. Kent: Yes, right, well, what can I say. Let’s listen to a little bit of “Shotgun Shells” here.

Robin: Good talking to you.

Dr. Kent: Yes.[music]

Dr. Kent: Thank you to my guests today especially Robin and Linda Williams. Thanks for being on the show, Robin.

Robin: You got it.

Dr. Kent: Thank you to my guests, Eliza Stillwater and William Federer, to engineer Anthony Farabee, host guru Sonia Darte, Executive Producer Charlavan Hart, and Sound Engineer Ruben Columbe.Be safe, and see you next week. Find out more at SoundAuthors.com.

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