http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/..040923/REPOSITO
RY/409230330/1001/NEWS01

Like father, like daughter
Jett Williams finds her heritage and her voice


By VICTORIA SHOULDIS
For the Monitor


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
September 23. 2004 8:02AM


W
ith a twangy voice that is one part good humor and one part resilience, Jett
Williams will be the first to tell you that her life story would make one do
ozy
of a country song: a father who died days before her birth; a grandmother wh
o
set out to adopt her and then passed on just weeks after completing the
paperwork; a child abandoned to become a ward of the state; a 10-year court
battle to reclaim her birthright as the child of a musical icon.

But Jett Williams - born Cathy Yvonne Jett in January 1953 - doesn't much dw
ell
on those things. She focuses instead on performing, a lifelong passion that 
she
shares with that father she never got to meet: Hank Williams.

"Everybody who knew me through my life - the social workers, everybody - wil
l

tell you that I was always the little girl singing and picking at the guitar
,"
said Williams, who opens this season's Walker Lecture Series Wednesday with 
her
show, Living the Legend with Class, at Concord's City Auditorium. "It was
something that was always a part of me."

When she was a teenager, being raised in the supportive family that adopted 
her
when she was 3, her adoptive father told her of a rumor he'd once heard abou
t
her parentage. Jett Williams ended up devoting much of her young adulthood t
o
pursuing her true identity. And in the course of her struggle, she discovere
d
that not only was Hank Williams her father, but that he had looked forward t
o
her arrival and had taken steps to claim her as his own just before he died.


"There was something truly spiritual about finally getting to the truth and
learning about my dad,"said Williams from her tour bus last week. "I think n
ow
that our souls passed each other as he was leaving and I was coming. I reall
y
believe that."
Williams won a decade-long legal fight for her own identity in 1987, when th
e
Alabama Supreme Court officially declared that she was the legal heir to Han
k
Williams. During the battle she happened to meet attorney Keith Adkinson, wh
o
became intrigued by her case and set out to discover the truth. In the proce
ss
Adkinson and Williams found not only legal victory but love. They married an
d
today they live in Tennessee, where Adkinson serves as Williams's manager.

"That was another fine bit of destiny!" Williams said. "Without the search,
Keith and I would never have met - it was all meant to happen as it did."

As she learned the facts of her own early life, Williams was alternately
cheered and distraught. She learned that Hank Williams had been a talented a
nd
troubled troubador, living a life of broken relationships and battles with
drugs and alcohol. She learned that Hank Williams, then just 29, had been aw
are
of her pending birth - Jett Williams was about to be born to a woman other t
han
Hank Williams's wife - and had, in fact, taken legal steps that would allow 
him
to raise her. Then on New Year's Eve in 1952, Hank Williams died mysteriousl
y
in the back of a limousine on his way to a performance in Canton, Ohio.

Jett Williams was born a few days later to a mother who showed little intere
st
in raising her. Hank Williams's own mother felt more maternal toward Jett an
d
she took her in, bonding with her and encouraging the toddler in her natural
impulses at song. Two years later, the grandmother passed away, and the
2-year-old found herself a ward of the state, rejected by the rest of
Williams's surviving family.

Throughout her life, singing has been a constant in Jett Williams's life. "I
was also performing somehow - I sang in the choir, and in high school I had 
a
band," Williams said. "It was what felt right."

As an adult, though, Williams set aside her passion for performing in order 
to
devote herself to claiming her heritage. It took longer than she ever dreame
d.

"I knew I had to settle myself and who I was," Williams said. "That had to c
ome
first."

Williams did find out who she was and the court, finally, backed her claim,
thanks in no small part to the custody paperwork unearthed by her husband-to
-be
that Hank Williams have been preparing before his death. Jett Williams is an
advocate for open adoption, and she vigorously supports the rights of adopte
es
to know who they are. She recounted her fight for her birthright in her book
,
Ain't Nothin As Sweet As My Baby.

After her legal case was finally settled, Williams felt free to again pursue
her love of song, this time finding new meaning and nuance in the soulful so
ngs
her father once sang. She sang before a large audience for the first time in
1989, performing at an Alabama festival honoring her father with the survivi
ng
member's of Hank Williams's band The Drifting Cowboys.

Williams has recorded her own music and likes to offer audiences a mix of ol
der
classics, but the magic comes when she sings the lyrical, often mournful son
gs
that her father Hank wrote and sang. When she performs she includes many Han
k
Williams' classics: "Your Cheatin' Heart,""Hey Good Lookin" and "If You Got 
the
Money." But she finds the most meaning in her own rendition of the classic "
I'm
So Lonesome (I Could Cry)."

"In the course of performing I've met people who tell me the music means so
much to them and I've met people who actually knew my father and they share
their memories with me," Williams said. "And when I sing 'I'm So Lonesome' i
t
brings it all out for me - the connection to my father, the fact that I didn
't
get to sit on his knee. It's like I'm singing that song to a falling star in
the sky."





-------------------------
A good friend will come and bail you out of jail . . . but, a true friend wi
ll
be sitting next to you saying, "Damn . . . that was fun!"
-----Unknown

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