How Lucinda Williams' Father Influenced her Work

The celebrated poet and teacher Miller Williams created a unusual and impactful creative atmosphere for his children growing up

May 27, 2025

When I looked into the origins of the songwriter Lucinda Williams, I uncovered a remarkable childhood. One that laid the groundwork for her to develop into an artist capable of creating deeply compelling music. I discovered how Lucinda’s father Miller cultivated an engaged artistic community to surround his family, provided access to educational opportunities for Lucinda, and provided a clear vision of artistic integrity for his children’s education.

Artistic Community
Lucinda’s father Miller Williams was a writer and a professor. His connection to a community of novelists, translators, and poets created a rich environment for his daughter to grow up in. When Lucinda was just five years old, Miller decided to visit his mentor Flannery O’Connor in Georgia. Lucinda chased peacocks all around the yard while Flannery and Miller spoke, presumably about writing. Lucinda has cited Flannery’s debut novel Wise Blood as one of her biggest influences, a “southern gothic” style of writing she found particularly resonant. When Lucinda was 17 years old, her father was a professor at the University of Arkansas, and hosted readings and workshops. These were often held in the family living room, and Lucinda attended in spite of only being in high school. This group of writers included Charles Bukowski, James Dickey, and John Clellon Holmes. Miller was a teacher and mentor to Frank Stanford, a prolific and troubled young poet who struck up with a friendship with Lucinda right as she was coming of age in her early 20s. According to Lucinda’s memoir Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, she and Frank would talk about “why it was important to be a poet or a singer, even if your audience was never going to be big, which certainly seemed to be the case for me at the time.”
Unusual Educational Opportunities
After the aforementioned readings and workshops at the University of Arkansas, Miller hosted parties in the family home. In an interview with radio station RRR, Lucinda recalled that “we'd have writers over and sit around and have drinks. My dad would often read a new poem that he'd just written, and I would sing some songs. That was a fairly regular thing. I got feedback, which is of the utmost importance when you're learning I had this immediate intelligent audience.”
In the 1960s Lucinda's father traveled to Vermont each summer to teach at a writers conference called Bread Loaf, which even included participation by poet Robert Frost. Lucinda at the time was a teenager, and tagged along to watched as young writers shared their work, and received feedback from their peers. As a young adult, Lucinda joined her Father Miller at a workshop that he was teaching at Cummins unit prison in Lincoln County, Arkansas. Miller taught poetry to the female inmates and Lucinda performed music.
Miller’s Vision of Artistic Integrity in Education
Excerpt from Finding Lucinda the podcast, where I read the letter Miller wrote to Lucinda’s teacher about a bad poem, which he refused to allow his daughter Lucinda to learn.
“Dear Mrs. Saxton, because it’s very important to me that my children know the difference between good poetry and bad, and be exposed to as much good and as little bad as possible, and because the poem Cindy was to have memorized for today is such a terribly bad poem in almost every way a poem can be bad, I have forbidden Cindy to learn it…”

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Lucinda’s father primarily influenced his daughter Lucinda in the way of literature. She had many more influences in the musical realm, including her mother who was a gifted piano player and lover of music. That is a story for another post / episode though.

I’ll add that while her childhood was remarkable, it certainly didn’t make what Lucinda Williams has gone onto accomplish inevitable. There was a tremendous amount of growth in her craft throughout her 20s, 30s, and beyond that was a result of hard work and commitment to creating music. Lucinda applied the lessons she learned from her father and community doggedly and consistently over decades. But understanding her unusual childhood does show how her father laid a foundation to understand the way of words, upon which Lucinda would build her body of work . None of us choose how we grow up, but we can apply these practices of reinforcing artistic community, pursuing learning opportunities, and a cultivating a vision of artistic integrity to make that possibility more likely.

To finish out here an excerpt from Finding Lucinda the podcast, where Miller reads his poem The Caterpillar. The subject of the poem is a memory of Miller and Lucinda together in their yard at insects, yielding a profound insight.

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If you like what you are reading here, listen to our podcast Finding Lucinda for an extended explanation of these idea. Listen on your preferred platform including Spotify, Apple, and YouTube by clicking here

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The Caterpillar and the letter appear courtesy of Rebecca Jordan Williams

references:

Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin

Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You by Lucinda Williams

Living on the Surface, New and Selected Poems by Miller Williams

The Ways We Touch, Poems by Miller Williams

Making a Poem: Some Thoughts about Poetry and the People Who Write It

https://oxfordamerican.org/web-only/the-kinship-is-real

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/miller-williams

https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/southern-tenant-farmers-union-35/

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26671158