In recent years there has been a plentitude of unorthodox performers who have made their mark in pop music, but non more versatile nor as colourful as Mason Williams. Expert guitarist, folk singer, comedy writer, poet, author, publisher, arranger and composer of well over a hundred songs including “Cinderella, Rockafella”. He is also very much a best-selling record star in his own right as his chart success “Classical Gas” proves.
Williams was born on August 24th, 1938, in Abeline, Texas. While studying mathematics at Oklahoma City University he learned to play guitar and formed a successful folk trio. After serving in the U.S. Navy he began singing in folk clubs during which time he was introduced to the Smothers Brothers. They used Mason and his material on an album they were then recording and he has written consistently for them ever since. Many of his songs, in fact, have been recorded by artists such as The Kingston Trio, Claudine Longet, Glenn Yarborough and Johnny Desmond.
He has written and published seven books. The biggest (literally!) is called “The Bus Book” and is a life-sized photograph of a Greyhound bus which folds up into a small package. This has been exhibited at The Pasadena Art Museum, in Life magazine and on the Joey Bishop TV Show. It now hangs permanently in the New York Museum of Modern Art.
Mason Williams is obviously a person who thinks big—his records, his songs and his whole talent prove it— but probably the most spectacular, not to mention eccentric, feat he has ever accomplished occured while at his desert retreat recently. He ‘painted’ a sunflower by hiring a plane to skywrite a stem and leaves below the rising sun. The result was a ‘temporary’ thing of beauty.
Beautiful, too, is the music contained in this album. But unlike the ‘sunflower’, this is fortunately of a more permanent nature.
