Artists:Bet Williams

Bet Williams is a fearless vocalist and performer. Her four-octave-range voice has mesmerized audiences across America and Europe astounding them with what Sing Out!magazine calls "the sheer beauty of her instrument and the passion with which she sings.” Armed with raw emotion, an acoustic guitar and a startling honesty, Williams' music blends earthy folk, rock, pop and roots rhythms with smart lyrics and infectious hooks. With a gift for storytelling and spontaneous humor, her stage performances go from searching confessional to Chaplinesque pantomime at times bordering on performance art.

As an army brat, Williams was born in Virginia and raised in Germany and throughout the United States. She grew up with a heady brew of music, theater, travel and academia. Her mother was a piano teacher and organist while her father was a military judge advocate and university professor who directed musicals on the side. As a child Bet was frequently enlisted for roles in her father's staged musicals playing everything from the balloon girl in Gypsy to the young Kurt in The Sound of Music.

After high school Williams studied classical music, voice and theater at college before settling on an English Literature major. She grabbed a poetry degree at Penn State, and began performing in a series of wildly original bands such as Ticapoo Brain, The Shaggy Dogs and Righteous Ethel. After various band incarnations fell apart, Williams went off to live and work on an organic farm and began to re-invent herself and her music. What emerged was a more mature and introspective songwriter and performer who was still capable of tapping into the surreal theatrics of her early performance experiences.

In the early '90s she hit the road with her first album and a burning desire to communicate her new material. With a disdain for conventional music industry shenanigans, Williams shunned "the business" and focused on performing and writing while developing her passionately committed cult following. Along with John Hodian, Bet founded Epiphany Records as a vehicle to release recordings in a variety of musical genre. It wasn't until 2004 that she found a record label she felt comfortable with and is now releasing the self-titled Bet on Sliced Bread Records.

Williams lives in New York City with her composer husband and toddler son. "It's great to live in a city like New York because it puts you in close touch with people from everywhere," she laughs. "You're constantly reminded that there are a lot of us on the planet so we'd better learn how to get along!"