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STEPHANIE BECK WILLIAMSBIO 2007
Not Your Normal Country Girl is the debut album by Stephanie Beck Williams, but millions have already heard her voice.
As an ad-jingle singer, Stephanie has a nationwide audience in spots for McDonald’s (“Have You Had Your Break Today”), Toyota (“Life Is a Highway”) and other products. As a backup vocalist, she has recorded with Dolly Parton, Isaac Hayes, Darryl Worley and other celebrities. The award-winning independent film Folly Island features four of her performances on its soundtrack. And this year, more than 1.2 million votes made her the winner of CMT’s first on-line talent search Music City Madness. Her song and video “D-R-U-N-K” are being heavily promoted by the cable channel.
The playful “D-R-U-N-K” is a standout track on Not Your Normal Country Girl. The collection showcases a refreshingly distinctive singer-songwriter whose style incorporates a variety of influences that Stephanie sums up as simply “Southern.” The native Mississippian salutes her state’s famed Elvis Presley and Bobbie Gentry on her debut album. But the CD’s most impressive songs are Stephanie’s own. “Destiny” is a swooning love ballad. “Even in Mississippi” has a bluesy hue and a meaningful lyric. “Her Idea of Fun” and “PhD in M-E-N” are party-girl rockers.
Husband Dan Williams is the writer behind the lovely, wistful “The One That Got Away” and the rhythmic “Time to Do Some Changin.’” The sultry, dreamy “Fall at Your Feet” comes from the repertoire of the acclaimed Australian pop band Crowded House. Adding a special Deep South vibe to the collection are Stephanie’s self-penned “interludes,” musical fragments and spoken-word instances that enliven the spaces between the songs.
“I really wanted to have that Mississippi flavor in it,” comments Stephanie Beck Williams. “I did the record to remind me of my artistic journey and of who I am. Even though I knew it would be very ‘different,’ I wanted it to be me. Whether it is somewhat rock or somewhat country or somewhat pop, everything about me seems Southern.”
That merging of styles has been with her since childhood. Stephanie Beck Williams was born in Texas, but was adopted as an infant and raised in Cajun-flavored Biloxi, Mississippi. Her parents had a large country record collection, but from her earliest years, Stephanie studied other styles as well.
“The first time I sang in public, it was gospel,” Stephanie recalls. “I did a church solo at age three of ‘Jesus Loves the Little Children.’ I started collecting records when I was really young, 5 or 6. I’d take my allowance and buy 45s with it. The first record I bought was ‘Jive Talkin’’ by The Bee Gees. My dad bought me my first two albums, The Jackson 5’s Greatest Hits and Paper Roses by Marie Osmond. So right from the get-go I was into that pop-meets-country flavor.”
The piano-playing teen sang standards in the Biloxi High School traveling entertainment troupe. At the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, she was a member of The Southern Dolls.
“It was an all-girl trio. We all wore red dresses and traveled around representing the university. We did everything from The Judds to The Pointer Sisters to The Andrews Sisters.”
The Southern Dolls visited Nashville on tour. It was the most cosmopolitan city Stephanie had ever seen. She was inspired by the diversity of its musical culture. With her marketing degree in hand, she moved to Music City on January 1, 1992.
“I knew what I wanted to do. I just didn’t know how you did it. I didn’t know how to say, ‘I sing, and I want to write, and I might be a little bit different. So how do I find somebody who will work with me? Or how do I do it on my own? What do I do?’ I did sense that when I was around real musicians and writers for the first time, I felt like I was in my group.”
To teach herself show business, Stephanie took jobs at MCA Records, Glen Campbell Music Publishing and the Studio 19 recording studio. She began writing songs. By the end of that first year, she was in a studio singing a jingle for a bank in Cookeville, Tennessee. In 1993, she signed with Milsap Galbraith Music as a staff songwriter.
In 1997, the publishing company issued a four-song CD sampler of her tunes. One of them, “Elvis Movie,” became her first single and video. As a result, Stephanie was invited to perform during Elvis Week festivities in Memphis for the next several years and was featured on CNN Headline News and on TNN’s Live From the Wildhorse Saloon series. This led to a recording offer from a Memphis label in 1998, but the company went out of business. The following year, the exact same scenario occurred in Nashville. Right after that, she fell in love.
Dan Williams is a successful Nashville songwriter whose award-winning tunes include the 1983 Ronnie Milsap smash “Don’t You Know How Much I Love You.” He also owns a thriving jingles business and has penned such national favorites as “Red Lobster for the Seafood Lover in You” and “Mama’s Got the Magic of Clorox II.” Stephanie had sung for him years ago. Now their paths crossed again. They began dating in 2000.
In October 2000, Stephanie founded her Wilhelmina Dan Talent Agency. It is now one of Nashville’s largest and most successful such firms.
“We represent talent exclusively. We place them in music videos, film, TV commercials, as CMT hosts, on shop-at-home channels. We have people for runway modeling, print ads. We do some celebrity booking and some commercial campaigns.”
She gleefully reports that the company practically “runs itself,” without her even being there. Which is a good thing, because her relationship with Dan Williams heated up to the point of marriage on May 19, 2001. While returning from their Parisian honeymoon on September 11, 2001, the couple was unforgettably detained in Newfoundland when their flight was grounded. Son Cole Beck Williams was born November 14, 2002.
“I just stopped writing,” says Stephanie. “It was almost like a long sabbatical,” while she raised her baby.
She began working again when she was tapped to sing jingles for the Tennessee State Lottery campaign, memorably one in which she imitated the voice of Marilyn Monroe. The 2001 Folly Island soundtrack work came about when the director asked her to compose a song on the spot in a Nashville restaurant, and she did. The result was “Her Idea of Fun.”
For the 2005-06 TV season, Stephanie created a Nashville series called Wilhelmina Dan New Faces which aired on the local WB affiliate. CMT selected her recording of “Time to Do Some Changin’” for the soundtrack of its 2007 documentary about Ronald Reagan in its True Grit series.
Meanwhile, “Dan’s company had gone into video production. They had some Jack Daniels TV ads and a few different things here and there. His guys came to him and said, ‘We don’t have a music video.’ So I became their artist for a music video. ‘D-R-U-N-K’ was sitting in a closet at the office until a friend of mine called and said, ‘CMT has a music-video contest, and you have a music video.’ So I entered it, not really knowing what I was entering.
“Ironically, the week that we finished the album, I got a phone call saying that I was CMT’s Pick of the Week. The following week, they announced the finalists, and I was one of those. That was a Big Moment for me, because I felt like, ‘I just finished a record that has taken me 10 years to put together, and here’s some validation.’ Well, I wound up winning. So the time is meant to be that I put my record out now.
“I think God has his timing for things. I don’t know if I could have made this record any sooner than this. Because I’m ‘Not Your Normal Country Girl.’”
Stephanie Beck Williams will celebrate the release of Not Your Normal Country Girl with an appearance on Studio 330 Sessions, CMT’s online performance series. The show coincides with the CD’s release in July.
