Artists: Biography Holly Williams  

Holly Williams was born March 12, 1981, the daughter of country star Hank Williams Jr. and his third wife Becky. Her parents separated when she was about a year old. Her mother played classical music at home, and she saw her father only

intermittently, during visits to his home in Paris, Tenn., when he wasn't on the road. When she was 8 years old, she scribbled words into a notebook she called Holly’s Song Folder, inventing storylines far beyond her years.

"These weren't childhood songs," she remembers. "They were songs about issues, like death, people having affairs -- things I knew nothing about. This one song, 'Who Am I,' was about a 20-year-old girl going through a broken marriage -- and I was writing that at 8 years old! I wasn't even really listening to music at that time, but even then I found it easy to put myself in someone else's shoes and write about what they're going through."

After a typical childhood, Williams returned to songwriting at age 17, when she picked up a guitar and taught herself to play. Though she hadn’t experienced much heartbreak at that point, her music was often dark. She became fascinated by the music of Hank Williams, her grandfather, and deeply researched his life and career. (Because Hank Sr. died when Hank Jr. was only 3 years old, she says her grandfather’s legacy was rarely discussed in detail because her father had few of his own memories of Hank Sr.)

When Williams finished high school, she focused on music, wrote and performed her music in Nashville clubs and spent three months in Los Angeles checking out the scene there. She found a benefactor in Tim McGraw’s manager, Scott Siman, who encouraged her to record demos and write songs. She also landed a slot on Ron Sexsmith’s European tour and traveled alone from city to city with nothing but a backpack, her guitar and homemade CDs to sell. She found European audiences enthusiastic about her grandfather’s music, as well as her own. Indeed, her spare and sometimes melancholy songs call to mind her grandfather’s no-frills approach, rather than the rowdy good-timing music of her father.

In 2003, she played shows with John Mellencamp and toured with Billy Bob Thornton. A year later, she signed with a Nashville label, Universal South. Relying on her original compositions, The Ones We Never Knew was released in late 2004.