Remembering “The Gentle Giant” DON WILLIAMS (May 27, 1939 – Sep 8, 2017), American country singer, songwriter, and 2010 inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
NOTE: The video here is Don performing his 1980 hit I BELIEVE IN YOU. I’ve framed and improved the color of the clip.
With his laid-back, straightforward vocals and large, imposing build, Don Williams came to be known as “the Gentle Giant.” That nickname was bestowed on him in the early ’70s, when he began a string of countrypolitan hits that ran into the early ’90s. Williams’ ballads were immensely popular; and in the course of his career, he had a total of 17 number one hits.
British fans of country music have tended to favour the unassuming, less flamboyant male exponents of the genre such as Jim Reeves, George Hamilton IV and Don Williams. At the peak of his popularity in the late 1970s and 80s, Williams headed the bill at the annual Wembley international festival of country music, toured Britain and mainland Europe, and sold LPs by the hundreds of thousands. He once described his music as “intensely simple”, but while his love songs were charming and often sentimental and his warm baritone voice was compared to that of Reeves, he also found admirers among the rock music fraternity: both Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend recorded versions of his songs.
As fashions in country music changed, Williams toured less and spent more time with his family at his ranch near Nashville. But he was held in high esteem by many younger musicians. On his final albums, So It Goes (2012) and Reflections (2014), issued by Sugar Hill, he was accompanied by artists including the singer Vince Gill and the fiddler and singer Alison Krauss. A tribute album, Gentle Giants: The Songs of Don Williams, featuring versions of his songs by Garth Brooks, Keith Urban and Lady Antebellum, was released earlier this year.
Williams was awarded many honours from the country music community. He received the 1978 male artist of the year award dressed in the outfit of faded blue jeans, denim jacket and worn-out hat designed for him when he appeared with Burt Reynolds in the 1975 film W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings. He was also inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2010, but was too ill with bronchitis to attend in person.
On September 8, 2017, Williams died in Mobile, Alabama, of emphysema.
I BELIEVE IN YOU
Released as the first single and title track from Don Williams’ I Believe in You album, this became the singer’s 11th #1 on the Country chart. “I Believe in You” was also Don Williams’ only Top 40 entry on the Hot 100, where it peaked at #24. It was also a hit in several other territories, particularly in New Zealand, where it reached #4 on the pop singles chart.
This simple song about the power of love comes from the pen of the first British songwriter to enter the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, Roger Cook, who wrote it with Sam Hogin, whose other credits include Lonestar’s “No News” and Joe Diffie’s “The Quittin’ Kind.”
Roger Cook penned the first draft. He recalled to The Tennessean how he one day realized “a lot of the lyrical images were dumb.” He was especially unhappy with a line that said, “the rising costs of getting high.”
So Cook got together with Sam Hogin and the pair sat around until 2 o’clock one night, fine-tuning the lyric – they changed “the rising costs of getting high” to “the rising cost of gettin’ by.” Once he was happy with the lyric, Cook recorded a demo.
Two or three days after Cook did the demo, Don Williams’ producer Garth Fundis asked Cook if had anything suitable for the singer’s next album, and Cook suggested this song.
When Williams recorded “I Believe in You,” he didn’t change anything from Cook’s demo. They even brought in the songwriter’s demo guitarist, an Irishman named Phil Donnelly, to play on the session, as they didn’t want to change the guitar lick.
Artists who have covered the song include Bette Midler in 1995, Patti Page in 2001 and Joey + Rory in 2014.
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