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Miller Williams is perhaps most famous, beyond poetry circles, for delivering the poem at President Clinton’s second inauguration. Recently retired from teaching at the University of Arkansas, Williams has published, edited, and translated over thirty books. His early stints at universities across the South compose part of the growing legend of his daughter’s career, as do his friendships with the likes of Flannery O’Connor, James Dickey, Charles Bukowski, and country singer George Jones. The itinerant but always lively childhood of Lucinda Williams meant exposure to writers, musicians, and a different town every couple of years, until the Williamses finally settled in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Though poetry was always somewhere in the background, music was her first love.
Lucinda Williams traces her defining musical moment back to a night when she was twelve, when one of her father’s students dropped by and put on Bob Dylan’s newest album, Highway 61 Revisited. For Williams, the album proved enormously influential, wedding the literary and musical impulses so abundant in her home. “He was the first artist who actually managed to incorporate both of the worlds I came out of, which was the more traditional folk music of America and the poetic, literary world. That’s when I decided what I wanted to achieve.”