Doug & Telisha Williams live right in the middle of the places others only write about. When they write and sing songs about dying small towns, they know what they’re talking about. The unemployment rate where they live is 20.2 %. When you hear them sing songs about a couple of hard luck kids who made some bad decisions and wound up in jail, you’ve got to remember that Doug & Telisha are still good friends with those kid’s family. Their home sits right in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and you can hear, smell, and taste that influence in all of the songs on their new record, Ghost of the Knoxville Girl.
It’s been more than three years, several hundred shows, and a couple hundred thousand miles since Doug & Telisha released their last record, Rope Around My Heart. They’ve played shows from Florida to Oregon, and from Michigan to Texas. Along the way, they’ve had the opportunity to meet and play shows with some pretty legendary folks. Lucinda Williams, Darrell Scott, Charlie Louvin, and Joe Ely, just to name a few. They’ve also played in some of the most prestigious rooms in the country- Anderson Fair, The Birchmere, the Carolina Theater, Godfrey Daniels.- and some pretty cool outside shows as well, from Madison Square Park in New York City, to Floydfest, just up the road from where they live. Wherever Doug & Telisha go, they always make quick friends with their audience, inviting them right into the intricacies and contradictions of life in the South today.
Somehow they always find their way back home. A place where old time religion, superstition, run down bars, gravel parking lots and boarded up factories all mingle together. A place where in just one set, Doug & Telisha can still send audience members to their feet in applause, to their knees in prayer, and back to the bar to buy another beer.
