Victoria Williams – Sings Some Ol’ Songs (2002)

Unvinyl #11

American singer-songwriter Victoria Williams was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the early 90s, not long before the release of her third (and best) album ‘Loose’, which I already covered thoroughly in a previous post.

As explained, she never reached widespread success, but her work was praised by many great colleagues, and that’s how I got to know her back then, more specifically when the benefit cd ‘Sweet Relief’, a collection of Victoria’s songs performed by artists like Pearl Jam, Lou Reed and Maria McKee, was released.

She didn’t let the horrible diagnosis bring her down and kept herself busy with music over the years. ‘Sings Some Ol’ Songs’ is her last studio album to date: a poignant collection of standards from the Great American Songbook. It’s no surprise, as it’s music whose influence has clearly soaked into her original work (‘Polish Those Shoes’ from ‘Loose’, just to name one example), and she never made a secret of having grown up with it: “I liked all those musicals when I was a kid – she told Bomb Magazine in 1995 – like ‘Mary Poppins’ and ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’. ‘The Sound of Music’, I liked that a lot. My best friend had a recording of ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down’ and we used to dance to that. Mostly musicals, the flute in Peter and the Wolf…“.

The project was many years in the making. It was discussed as early as 1998, when Williams, in an interview with Hearsay, confirmed the album was “no rumour. If Atlantic doesn’t want to put it out, we will put it out on our home label here”. That might explain the long time in limbo, as her next release on Atlantic, in 2000, was indeed an album of original material (‘Water To Drink’). ‘Sings Some Ol’ Songs’ eventually surfaced in 2002 on Nashville’s Dualtone Records.

The song selection is really the cream of the crop. We have heard these tunes countless times, delivered by some of the greatest singers, yet an album like this doesn’t feel unnecessary. On the other hand, Williams’ unique, high-pitched voice gives these classics a whole new depth, both when the instrumentation is sparse and when New Orleans-style brass shows up here and there. For what it’s worth, my favorites are ‘My Funny Valentine’, a heartwrenching ‘Over The Rainbow’, and ‘Moon River’, but honestly, you can’t go wrong with any of them.

More than once, Victoria expressed her wish to record a new album, but it has yet to materialize. Nevertheless, she continues to perform live sporadically, always with the biggest smile on her face – the same smile she puts on ours when we hear her singing or see the pictures of her lovely dogs, which she always manages to feature on her records (on the back cover, in this case). “To sing out songs is goood for the soul”, she writes in the liner notes, with an extra o to emphasize the message. And how can we even argue with that? When I think of inspirational artists, Victoria Williams is definitely one of the names at the top of my list.

CHANCES OF VINYLIZATION: Low. Her most popular album, ‘Loose’, was released on a major label and didn’t even get a 30th anniversary reissue. It seems a bit far-fetched that a not very in-demand collection of old standards would get the treatment, even though it came out on a different label. As of writing this, it’s not even available for streaming. However, Dualtone seems to love the vinyl format, and they reissued records from some of their most popular artists, like The Lumineers, so perhaps there is a slim chance.

🟥 Unvinyl is a series of articles about great music not available on vinyl (at the time of writing). A full index can be found here.