Read one way, the book is an intellectual history: Starting at a young age, Williams had frequent brushes with many great writers, musicians, and activists of the day. Williams’s memoir, like the sum of her songs, offers enough richness and breadth to afford multiple focal points.

Both of her grandfathers were Methodist ministers - one in Louisiana and the other in Arkansas - and she writes fondly of her paternal grandparents’ efforts to forge racial equity, despite the tyranny of Jim Crow, within their church. While Williams speaks, in her new memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, to the influence that living in places like Mexico City and Santiago, Chile, had on her intellectual sensibilities, she maintains that she’s still Southern to the core. She was born in 1953 in Lake Charles, La., to Lucille Fern Day and the late, lauded poet Miller Williams, whose search for an ever-elusive professorship meant that the family moved almost yearly. The chameleonic ease of Williams’s discography is an indirect outcome of her itinerant childhood. Because her music blends the ambience of blues with the candid narratives of country and the cool fervor of rock, it can accommodate any mood, any landscape. It took recovering from my preteen antagonism to fully admit the sheer prowess and sonic versatility of those songs, as well as those that appear on Williams’s 13 other albums, for that matter.

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