Phil William's obituary from the Seattle Times, Feb. 27, 2017
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Phil Williams, co-founder of the Folklife festival and the pioneering folk label Voyager Recordings, has died at the age of 80.

By Brendan Kiley Seattle Times staff reporter

Phil Williams, a co-founder Seattle's Folklife festival and pillar of the region's folk-music scene, died last week of complications from blood cancer. He was 80.

Mr. Williams was a business attorney, a philosophy major at Reed College and a mandolin and guitar player. His widow and former collaborator Vivian Williams "plays fiddle," as she put it, but they both served as conduits who brought folk music — from Asia to Africa to Snohomish County — to Seattle for decades. She served on the Folklife board for years and they started a record label,Voyager, to document and preserve music other folk-record companies were overlooking.

Voyager started as kind of an accident, when the two of them went to fiddle contests in Montana and Idaho. "There were all these amazing jam sessions," Williams said. "Phil was just running around, carrying his tape recorder and recording everything."

When the couple got back to Seattle and listened to the tapes, they realized they had a sonic treasure trove: sounds that weren't being recorded anywhere else. "All the traditional-music record labels had gone to Appalachia," Williams said. "But the Texas guys had a knack for making incredibly intricate improvisations based on very simple melodies; the Northwest fiddlers were dance-oriented and tended to play quite simply and unornamented." But, she added, the Northwest tradition — largely influenced by people from Kentucky and Tennessee who'd settled in the Darrington area, as well as northern European immigrants — played with a heartfeltness the two of them hadn't found anywhere else.

"Darrington was an end-of-the-road kind of place back then," she said. "But we got acquainted with those folks, learned their music, ate their soup beans, played their benefits for the local Boy Scouts." Voyager Records "started as a hobby that grew out of hand" and the couple recorded some of those little-known Darrington musicians on the 1969 album "Comin' Round the Mountain."

The Folklife festival got started in 1972 and used to share offices with Bumbershoot (which has since been sold to international music corporation AEG). But when Bumbershoot started charging money and put up fences to keep out interlopers, Mr. Williams dug in his heels to stop the festival he'd co-founded from going the same direction. "Phil was an inspiration who fought to keep it free," said Scott Nagel, who worked as executive director of the festival for 18 years. "He truly believed that music is for everybody. It shouldn't be elitist."
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