Free
FROM singing in a church choir, to backing Stevie Wonder and then on to her own career, Deniece Williams certainly travelled a long way in just a few short years. Not bad, especially for someone who had no drive to be a millionselling artist solo artist.
“I wasn’t ambitious at all,” she explains today, “I really didn’t want to be a singer. I didn’t want to tour because, by that time, I already had two children. But I did want to be a songwriter, that was what I was going for. I wanted to go into the studios and be a jingle singer! But instead I got a recording contract.”
That deal was all down to “Free”, a track co-written by Williams and three other members of Stevie Wonder’s sensational backing group, Wonderlove, during rehearsals in 1975. Their leader wasn’t in the room when the song was written, but his free-flowing creative spirit certainly acted as a guide.
“We were working with a genius,” says Williams. “Being around him, I began to learn that poetry plus music equals song. I’d been writing a lot of poetry, but I hadn’t been thinking in terms of it being songs until I got around him and got around some of the other musicians in the band. And that’s when I really started songwriting.”
