Dar Williams: folk singer-songwriter from Mount Kisco

She grew up in Chappaqua with two older sisters, Meredith and Julie. Her nickname came from a sister's mispronunciation of "Dorothy"; in a 2008 interview with WUKY radio she said her parents had wanted to name her Darcy, after the character in Pride and Prejudice, and called her "Dar-Dar", which she shortened to "Dar" in school. She has described her parents as "liberal and loving" people who encouraged a career in songwriting early on.

Williams started playing guitar at nine and wrote her first song two years later, though she was then more drawn to drama, majoring in theater and religion at Wesleyan University. She moved to Boston in 1990, worked for a year as stage manager of the Opera Company of Boston, and on the side wrote songs, recorded demo tapes and took voice lessons. That year she recorded her first album, I Have No History, produced by Jeannie Deva and engineered by Rob Lehmann at Oak Grove Studios in Malden, Massachusetts.

In 1991 she recorded a second album, All My Heroes Are Dead, mostly at Wellspring Sound in Newton, Massachusetts, including "Mark Rothko Song", whose original recording appeared on her next album, The Honesty Room. She moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1993. Early in her career she opened for Joan Baez, who recorded some of her songs and dueted with her on Ring Them Bells.

Her first full album, The Honesty Room, was recorded under her own label, Burning Field Music, with guest artists Nerissa and Katryna Nields, Max Cohen and Gideon Freudmann, and was briefly distributed by Chicago-based Waterbug Records. A licensing-and-distribution deal with Razor and Tie led to a 1995 reissue with two re-recorded bonus tracks. Mortal City followed in 1996, again licensed and distributed with Razor and Tie, with guest appearances by the Nields sisters and Freudmann as well as John Prine, Cliff Eberhardt and Lucy Kaplansky.

End of The Summer came in 1997. In 1998 she formed the group Cry Cry Cry with Richard Shindell and Lucy Kaplansky, releasing an eponymous album of covers and touring from 1998 to 2000; the group reunited in June 2017 at the Clearwater Festival in New York. Six further studio albums followed on Razor & Tie: The Green World (2000), The Beauty of the Rain (2003), My Better Self (2005), Promised Land (2008), Many Great Companions (2010) and In the Time of Gods (2012), plus two live albums, Out There Live (2001) and Live at Bearsville Theater (2007).

Williams founded the Snowden Environmental Trust and has taken part in many benefit concerts, including a show at Alcatraz with Baez and the Indigo Girls to benefit the prisoner-rights group Bread and Roses. In 1994 she wrote and published a directory of natural food stores and restaurants, The Tofu Tollbooth, and co-authored a second edition with Elizabeth Zipern in 1998.