Vivian Williams (1938–2023) and Phil Williams (1936–2017)

For almost 60 years, Vivian and Phil Williams of Seattle, Washington, distinguished themselves as musicians, authors, scholars, music promoters, festival organizers, publishers, music editors, teachers, historians, field-recordists, and recorded music producers. Each of these skills is significant itself, but all are part of a continuum that bears appreciation in entirety.Because Vivian and Phil did so much important work as a team, as well as the fact that no obituary for Phil appeared in the Journal of American Folklore after his 2017 passing, it seems appropriate to memorialize the two of them together.Beginning as early as 1960, Vivian and Phil Williams have had a profound effect on maintaining Anglo-American and other regional fiddle and string band traditions in the Pacific Northwest. That year, the Williamses began their lifelong project of recording thousands of hours of performances by traditional musicians, many of them older, in both the Pacific and the Intermountain Northwest. These efforts have preserved performance styles generally unknown outside these regions.Vivian Tomlinson Williams was born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1938, to a Jewish mother who had fled Germany ahead of the Nazi takeover and a Methodist-raised father from Minnesota. Phil Williams was born in Olympia, Washington, to a Jewish mother from Helena, Montana, and a Kentucky-born father raised near Missoula, Montana.Vivian traced her interest in traditional music to her mother's love of Roma violin and her father's harmonica playing. As a child, she took violin lessons, and one of her teachers gave her a book of fiddle tunes. She also remembered hearing Bill Monroe's “Footprints in the Snow” on a jukebox at Mount Rainier National Park, where her father had a summer job.Phil ascribed his interest in music to his father who taught him finger-style guitar. His father had played music professionally in a swing band aboard an ocean liner on the Seattle–Japan route before becoming an attorney and practicing law in Olympia, Washington. Growing up, Phil was known as a “science-fair wiz” with his various electronics projects, learning skills that likely led to his eventual mastery of audio-engineering skills.Phil and Vivian met each other as part of a nascent folk revival scene during their undergraduate years at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, in the mid1950s. Inspired by Pete Seeger's appearance on campus, a number of Reed students, including Phil and Vivian, took up the five-string banjo. After moving to Seattle, Vivian began to learn tunes from the old-time string-band repertoire. In Murphy Hicks Henry's 2013 book Pretty Good for a Girl: Women in Bluegrass, Vivian is quoted as having said she “took up fiddle in self-defense against the banjo.”In 1962, Vivian completed an MA in Anthropology with a specialty in ethnomusicology at University of Washington. Her thesis, an analysis of Skagit music, was based on her collaboration with Skagit/Swinomish elder Martin Sampson. Phil attended University of Washington Law School and became a practicing business attorney in Seattle. His knowledge of law became useful as he and Vivian helped four important Washington folk-music-related organizations attain nonprofit status.In 1965, Vivian and Phil joined the emerging Washington Old Time Fiddlers Association. The same year, Phil used his legal expertise to incorporate the association as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. For decades, the Williamses organized, directed, and taught at its fiddle contests, camps, workshops, and dances.Also in the 1960s, in Seattle, Phil and Vivian became involved in a group of folk music enthusiasts who eventually started the Seattle Folklore Society. In 1966, Phil helped the society incorporate as a nonprofit organization. During the years when the Williamses were active in the society, they brought such important traditional performers as Lightnin’ Hopkins and Bill Monroe to Seattle venues, and the Seattle Folklore Society continues to sponsor performances and music-related gatherings to this day.Another early collaborative success was Vivian and Phil's outreach to the traditional musicians of the Darrington area in the North Cascades Range. Locally known as “Tar Heels,” because the majority had come from western North Carolina, these families had relocated there and in the nearby Skagit River Valley to work in the timber industry. They arrived during the early and middle twentieth century and had continued to maintain strong ties with their home state. At the advice of a banjo-playing friend, Phil and Vivian started going to Darrington to attend informal jam sessions. Vivian was an available fiddler at a time when the Washington Tar Heels were missing that core of their musical tradition, and she and Phil became regulars at Darrington musical gatheringsThe Williamses’ promotion of the Washington Tar Heels’ musical traditions was pivotal in initiating urban interest in Appalachian string-band music in the Pacific Northwest. Phil and Vivian worked with musicians, music fans, and community leaders in Darrington to develop what in 1977 became the Darrington Bluegrass Festival.Vivian and Phil also began to record the traditional music of a community of Missourians who had relocated to Whatcom County, Washington, near the Canadian border. Because of Vivian's skill as a fiddler and their repeated attendance at, and participation in, the National Oldtime Fiddlers’ Contest and Festival in Weiser, Idaho, they became acquainted with and eventually recorded and promoted a broad range of traditional fiddlers and their music from the greater American West.Recording jam sessions and performances at Darrington, Weiser, and elsewhere, ultimately led Phil and Vivian to establish Voyager Records (later renamed Voyager Recordings and Publications) in 1967. Phil's electronics expertise and canny ability to locate, purchase, and utilize appropriate equipment led them to start issuing 45s on Crossroad Records, a label they established in the mid1960s. Profits from its sale of locally recorded country-western, rhythm and blues, bluegrass, and square dance music allowed them to purchase the equipment they needed to start issuing LPs, which they did after founding Voyager in 1967. Voyager Recordings and Publications has publicized and made the music of several generations of older performers available to younger musicians and fans, eventually having over 70 records available in its catalogue. The Williamses were especially committed to featuring musicians from the Pacific and Inland Northwest. In an interview by James W. Edgar, cited in his 2021 East Tennessee State University master's thesis in Appalachian Studies, Vivian remembered: As time went on, we realized that not only is there a whole bunch of cool Southern kind of stuff happening here, but there is also a mixture of stuff from the Midwest and from Canada, and some homegrown stuff, which is completely ignored. And so that when people say, “Old Time,” they mean, you know, “If it ain't from West Virginia, it ain't Old Time.” So, then we started getting all pissed-off with that. . . . Because we figured, okay here we are, right in the middle of all this stuff, and we have the capacity to do this record thing, and so we did. So, one of the things was, “Okay, now nobody has any excuse to not know about it.”Much of Voyagers’ music, which was digitized by Phil, eventually became available online as well. Apart from their released recordings, Voyagers’ website (www.voyagerrecords.com) offers free streaming of 360 tunes by 110 musicians. The site also streams 215 videos of live string-band music the Williamses recorded. In the last year of her life, Vivian negotiated its purchase by Smithsonian Folkways.Despite the Williamses’ emphasis on recording musicians playing in Northwest styles, they also promoted and recorded musicians from elsewhere who had relocated to Washington, including influential Texas fiddler Benny Thomasson, and North Dakota fiddler Joe Pancerzewski. Recordings of Northwest string-band music were not Voyagers’ only product. The label also released recordings of Zimbabwean mbira, jazz, Russian balalaika music, a classical choral record, and cassettes of Jewish stories.Phil's audio-engineering expertise, developed over decades of experience, is reflected in the 1998 book Professional Microphone Techniques, which he co-authored with David Miles Huber.When, in 1970, the National Park Service and the National Folk Festival Association (now the National Council for the Traditional Arts) were looking for an organization to sponsor a folk festival in the Pacific Northwest, they contacted the Seattle Folklore Society and Phil and Vivian Williams. Phil took charge of organizational chores while Vivian helped find the 400 or so performers who graced the stages of what became the first Northwest Folklife Festival in 1971, some coming from as far away as Alaska. Phil ensured that the festival attained its own nonprofit status the following year.For over 50 years, this four-day Memorial Day weekend event with over 200 stages has drawn pre-COVID-19-pandemic audiences of up to 250,000 visitors to Seattle Center, a 74-acre plaza built by the city for the 1962 Seattle World's Fair. Working with local volunteers and community organizations, this multicultural festival, known locally simply as “Folklife,” showcases the many community, ethnic, and Indigenous traditions in the Pacific Northwest. In the article “Let Spirit of Folklife Carry Us All Year,” Jerry Large, a Seattle Times reporter, wrote, on May 31, 2015: At the Folklife Festival, people embrace their own cultures and share others—an approach we should take all year. The festival is a celebration of the many cultural roots that nurture our community, and it's organized in a way that encourages everyone to get at least a little taste of something outside their usual world. . . . Seattle is changing by the minute, but Folklife remains a moment of something essential and hopeful.Phil, in a 1974 article in the Seattle Folklore Society Journal, wrote that “the concept of the festival is to present to the public the things people do in their homes and community halls to entertain themselves . . . rather than as a commercial product.”In her 2022 letter to the National Heritage Fellowships Selection Panel, Irene Namkung of the legacy booking agency Traditional Arts Services maintained that [Phil and Vivian] were adamant that the festival be free, welcoming, and inclusive of all the hundred plus ethnic groups in the Pacific Northwest. Vivian stayed on the board well into the 1990s to shepherd Folklife's maturation into an exemplary festival and a regional institution which brings a quarter of a million attendees to Seattle Center every year.In 1990, at the Williamses’ urging, the Northwest Folklife Festival, Inc., became Northwest Folklife, an organization with a broader mission than the festival itself. Apart from the main event, Northwest Folklife developed programming for public schools, state parks, and Humanities Washington, and it sponsored off-season concerts.Vivian and Phil also distinguished themselves with several important research projects about Western traditional music, out of which they developed educational materials and presentations. Working with University of Missouri folklorist Howard Marshall, they researched the traditional music of the Missouri Valley and the repertoires of dance musicians on the Western frontier. While doing this research, the Williamses uncovered the Peter Beemer Manuscript, a collection of dance tunes played in 1860s Idaho mining camps. They also discovered the Willamette Valley Haynes Family Manuscript, 65 dance tunes handed down through several generations of three families who came west to Oregon over the Oregon Trail from Ohio, Kentucky, Iowa, and Missouri between 1847 and 1853. Voyager published editions of these unique “tune books,” edited by Vivian.Voyager published other books as well, including Pleasures of Home, a collection of fiddle tunes from his native North Dakota compiled by fiddler Joe Pancerzewski; a new edition of Howard Marshall's Now That's a Good Tune, a compilation of classic Missouri fiddle tunes, accompanied by two CDs; and two volumes of Brand New Old Time Fiddle Tunes, composed by contemporary fiddlers and selected, transcribed and edited by Vivian Williams.Over several decades, Vivian and Phil developed and presented in-person educational programming based on the knowledge they gained from their research. There were programs in public schools, state parks, public libraries, civic clubs, and many other venues, many sponsored by Humanities Washington. Among the topics presented were the likely repertoire of the two fiddlers who accompanied Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their expedition, Missouri Valley fiddle music, and fiddle music along the Oregon Trail and of the Alaska Gold Rush. From a 2010 compilation of Humanities Washington Inquiring Minds Series program evaluations: The strongest part of the presentation was the enthusiasm the musicians had for their subject—it brought vitality to the evening. In addition, of course, was their extensive knowledge of the history of fiddling and music and life of the settlers and early America.In the mid-1990s, Phil began a major project to digitize the field recordings so that they would be more easily archived and accessible to researchers. Upon completion of this project, Howard Marshall arranged to have both the original analog materials and copies of the digital versions deposited in the archives of the State Historical Society of Missouri. In the last year of her life, Vivian negotiated their transfer, along with the Voyager catalogue, to Smithsonian Folkways. Jeff Place of the Smithsonian Folkways’ Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections has called it “a great representation of the folklore of the Pacific Northwest over the last 50–60 years and a great addition [to the collection].”A skilled performer on banjo, guitar, and mandolin, Phil was a member of at least a half-dozen bluegrass bands and, with Vivian, several old-time and contradance bands. For almost 50 years, Vivian taught folk fiddle to numerous aspiring musicians from her home in Seattle and at fiddle camps in Montana, Oregon, and Washington. Although much of Vivian's interest in fiddle styles was primarily Western Anglo-American, she also learned, performed, and taught Canadian and Scandinavian tunes and styles, all part of repertoires of traditional Pacific Northwest musicians.Vivian Williams won numerous fiddle contests since the first she entered and won in 1964. Among the many are the Old-Time Fiddle Contest at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, numerous first places at the National Old Time Fiddlers Contest in Weiser, including three Grand Championships, and many others, all performed in Northwest dance fiddler style, as opposed to the flashy style typical of such competitions. In a 2022 letter of recommendation for the Bess Lomax Hawes National Heritage Fellowship, fellow Seattle fiddler Stuart Williams (no relation) noted: [Vivian] has soaked up the best of the fiddling technique and repertoire from many of the best of the older generation of dance fiddlers of the region and is a stellar example of solid, traditional Northwestern style fiddling. Whether playing rapid fire hoedowns for a square dance, a Western Canadian jig adapted to the contemporary contra dance format, one of the many Scandinavian couple and pattern dances popular in the rural Northwest or one of her own beautiful compositions for a waltz, she plays with a grace, power, and depth of knowledge of tradition rarely seen.Vivian was inducted into the National Old Time Fiddlers Contest Hall of Fame, in Weiser, Idaho, in June 2013 and the North American Old Time Fiddlers Hall of Fame, in Osceola, New York, in July 2013. In 2008, Seattle Metropolitan Magazine listed Vivian and Phil Williams among the 50 most influential musicians in the Pacific Northwest, placing them in the company of Jimi Hendrix, Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, and Nirvana. Vivian and Phil were nominated for National Heritage Fellowships several times, and in 2022, Vivian was nominated for the Bess Lomax Hawes National Heritage Fellowship.For almost 50 years, Vivian and Phil's home in Seattle's Leschi neighborhood was a hub of musical and music-related social activity, and a brass bed in their guest room was known as the “bed to the stars,” as it had hosted, among others, Bill Monroe, Ralph Stanley, Tommy Jarrell, and Doc Watson. John Ullman of Traditional Arts Services, interviewed by James W. Edgar in his 2021 MA thesis “All Roads Lead to Darrington,” remembered:Until COVID-19 came to Seattle in Spring 2020, Vivian was still hosting monthly jam sessions at her home.In the words of former Northwest Folklife director, Scott Nagel, “Phil was the spokesperson and the advocate. But [Vivian] was the one who made things happen. It was the two of them, together.”