"I'm down in Mississippi," she burbled over a clean phone connection, "and I've just been creekdipping, in a really clean creek. It comes from this spring, and it's crystal clear, and sandy beaches around it — it's kind of in the middle of a forest. It's just really nice. Tiny little fishes in it.

"Ten feet from my feet is a babbling brook down there, birds whistling..." Informed by the interviewer, "I can hear my refrigrator running," she let loose a delightful and very Southern laugh, at once wise and surprised.

No one who is all rainbows and starshine and babbling brooks could succeed in show business without a strong direction. Victoria Williams has always known where she wanted to go. She didn't claw her way to the top; she just kept doing what was fundamental to her dream: She kept creating. "I've always really liked music," she said, when asked the usual question of how she came to be a gifted and beloved interpreter of both her own songs and those of others, of rock, jazz, country, and gospel. "It's been part of my being — just singing, out in the woods, or singing at night just before I'd go to sleep.

"I know that we do have musicians in the family — I think my great-aunt was an opera singer. And my other great-aunt, Judy, she was a piano teacher. My father used to play clarinet, but he never played in a band or anything when I was growing up." But those things didn't have as much of an impact on her, growing up in Shreveport, Louisiana, in the 60s and 70s, as the radio and TV. "We used to watch that show 'The Hallelujah Train,' and I really liked that. That was a local gospel show.

"I took piano lessons when I was in grade school. [But] I felt like there was a great chasm between…" She struggled to explain. "I thought, it's very strange, 'cause I love music, and I liked singing along with music, and I could hear music. And sure, I could sit there and play, looking at the notes, but I thought this is strange — there is a big missing point between reading the notes and the music. If I was just to work something out by ear, I could do that, and it seemed to have more lasting power than when I had to look at the notes. So I just stepped away from the piano for my whole teen years and never came back to the piano until I was in my 20s. And I came back at it with a completely different attitude, just like making up things and not even dealing with notes at all.

"I didn't know what it was — I just knew that there was something…when I went to music on my own, started playing guitar in junior high school, that was so freeing, to be able to learn songs playing the guitar. So when I came back to the piano, I came back to it really as if it was a whole new creature." Again, the knowing laugh. "I'm just gonna learn how to ride this wild creature here and not have to read about riding the creature!"

"Summer of Drugs," on Williams' second album, Swing the Statue!, portrayed something of her youth:

We were too young to be hippies
Missed out on the love
Learned from the teens in the late 70s
In the summer of the drugs.

"Just playing with other musicians is how I got into music, pretty much," said Williams of the beginning of her career. "There were a group of kids that played, and we would make bonfires and play out on the river, on sand banks and places, out on farms. They would play songs, and I would learn to play songs, just kinda keeping up with them." Eventually, peer pressure led her to write songs as well. Her bandmates were doing originals as well as covers of Neil Young and Guy Clark. "I had always written down words; I had kept boxes of just thoughts. And so then I started putting music to the thoughts." "Opelousas" and "Boogieman," two classic Williams compositions, were born in those first days of youthful songwriting.

She was a bit shy about her gifts at first. "When I first began to play in Shreveport, I didn't even play under my own name 'cause I didn't want anyone I knew to come! I played under the name Fred Morgan. I thought that sounded like an insurance salesman."

This is an excerpt from issue #96.