Dar Williams

folk · singer-songwriter

Dar Williams is an American folk singer-songwriter, born Dorothy Snowden Williams on April 19, 1967 in Mount Kisco, New York, raised in Chappaqua and based in the Hudson Valley. She began playing guitar at nine and writing songs at eleven, studied theater and religion at Wesleyan University, and moved to Boston in 1990, where she worked as a stage manager for the Opera Company of Boston while taking voice lessons and playing the New England folk circuit. After the early self-issued recordings I Have No History (1990) and All My Heroes Are Dead (1991), her breakthrough came with The Honesty Room (1993), released on her own Burning Field Music label and reissued through Waterbug Records. A long run on Razor & Tie followed: Mortal City (1996), End of the Summer (1997), The Green World (2000), The Beauty of the Rain (2003), My Better Self (2005), Promised Land (2008) and In the Time of Gods (2012), then the independently released Emerald (2015) and I'll Meet You Here (2021). Her thirteenth album, Hummingbird Highway, came out September 12, 2025 on Righteous Babe Records, produced mainly by Ken Rich in Brooklyn with two tracks by Dave Chalfant in western Massachusetts and contributions from Daisy Mayhem, Bryn Roberts and Beth Nielsen Chapman. She has toured with Mary Chapin Carpenter, Joan Baez, Ani DiFranco and Shawn Colvin, and from 1998 to 2000 sang in the folk-covers trio Cry Cry Cry with Richard Shindell and Lucy Kaplansky, who reunited in 2017 and released Live @ the Freight in 2020. Williams also writes prose: the children's novels Amalee (2004) and Lights, Camera, Amalee (2006), the community-and-urbanism study What I Found in a Thousand Towns (2017) and How to Write a Song That Matters (2022). Since 2013 she has run songwriting retreats for adults and teenagers, and she does organizing work in her own town.

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