By Gregg Shapiro

Contributing writer

It might seem hard to believe, but Cris Williamson, the groundbreaking women’s music legend, has never performed at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago. That is until May 17, when she headlines the annual Alt Q Festival. From “The Changer and The Changed” to her most recent album “Fringe,” Williamson has been an unstoppable force in the women’s music scene for more than 30 years. I spoke with Cris shortly before she made her Old Town School of Folk Music debut.

Gregg Shapiro: In the CD liner notes for your latest album “Fringe” (Wolf Moon), you described the songs on the disc as a “journey to the West.” Did making this album feel more like a journey than you previous releases?

Cris Williamson: Yes. Well, certainly it felt like a journey home. Like a journey full of closeness to the earth, close to things that I will always love. Lodestar type events. I don’t live in the wild, wild West anymore. I live in Seattle, but when I think about where I’m most at home, it’s probably Wyoming. It was a way to come home and get there and be there and live in that complete atmosphere. There are things that endure and that’s the love of the land out there and animals and how that sparse place is actually so full of empty. So full, period.

GS: There are Western albums in your catalog, including “Prairie Fire” and “Country Blessed,” that precede “Fringe.” Would you say that this is a genre in which you feel most at home?

CW: Road dog that I am (laughs), I try to make myself at home everywhere I go. If truth be told, that’s where my heart resides. Of course, I bring that heart everywhere I go. But it’s about the value of place and all writers know that. And there’s got to be some place for everybody that moves them so much that they can wax nostalgic about it. The great thing about nostalgia—kind of gets a bad rap, when really the word itself means…

GS: …homesickness, right?

CW: Yeah! Turning towards home. If it’s true that all sickness is homesickness, then writing about home the way that I do—that word is there, it’s always in my work. I grew up in a kind of nomadic tradition, my dad being in the Forest Service and mom a nurse and we kids just going wherever Dad was transferred by the government. It’s kind of like being a military kid, except we got to live in paradise—that’s the beautiful part—and he didn’t have to shoot anybody.

GS: Speaking of shooting people, would it be safe to say that Wyoming’s gotten a bad rap in recent years between the murder of Matthew Shepard and the lovely personality of Dick Cheney?

CW: The fact is that those two things can and do happen everywhere. But people turned their attention towards a state that rarely gets any attention at all. It’s huge and it has very few people, which means that it’s mostly horizon and a place that seems so empty when you fly over it. I can remember as a kid, people saying, “There’s nothing here!” And you’d be standing in the middle of everything. Nothing is something and it’s more than an existential concept—it’s a reality.

GS: So we’ll just let the Cheney presence roll off.

CW: Oh, what do we do with somebody like that? What in the world? You can vilify him, you can hate him. And yet, here’s the way that fortune works—he has a lesbian daughter. She probably could join the Log Cabin Republicans. But he’s her dad. All of us have families or we didn’t and we chose our own, as is often the case, I think. We don’t see her—we don’t really know anything about her. We know about her dad and her mom, who are pretty fierce. It can’t be easy being Cheney’s daughter and being a lesbian and then having that baby (laughs). This is just a really interesting thing. We probably don’t have to take care of that then. I think fate is at work here in really interesting ways.  

GS: The new album is titled “Fringe,” and that made me think of the different definitions of the word, one of which is “something regarded as peripheral, marginal, secondary, or extreme in relation to something else.” Do you consider yourself to be on the fringe?

CW:  I sure do. Before I came out, I was fringy anyway. You’re going through high school in a little Western town and you think what you think. I did what everybody did and went to college and then with Vietnam, being a musician, you’re put to work right away on the lines. I did a lot of anti-war demonstrations and got politicized in that way. But still, rock and roll, fringy, fringy, fringy. I love the power of the fringe, In Western lingo, there’s a purpose to fringe when it’s on a jacket or the way that I have it over my eyes (on the album cover), and the purpose of it is that when it rained, the water would drip off down those fringes and keep you and your coat dry. It had an actual function and form.

GS: More than just being decorative.

CW: Yeah, but also then in the West they decorated them with beads and feathers. From the native people who knew about this—they didn’t think of themselves as fringy until the white people came along and they were marginalized because of the way they think about land, the way they worship, the way they are. Their respect for things was a different way of being in the world. If you have a different way of being in the world, which I think gay people do, in a way…some of us go to church, some of us think there’s a higher power. Some of us suffer—most everybody does, if you’re awake. In many ways we’re just like everybody else. There’s that satisfaction of trying to be a part of the human family. And then there’s the great satisfaction of being the power of the margin. When you write in the margins of books, those are your own thoughts. You’re in accordance or you’re in disagreement with the body of the work that’s going on. I’ve always been a person who wrote in the margins.

GS: With this being an election year, I was wondering if you’ve been asked to or if you’ve played any campaign fundraisers for a candidate?

CW: No, I’ve just been waiting for somebody to call me. But I’m so fringy, they don’t know about me (laughs).

GS: You are coming to Chicago in May to perform as part of the Alt Q Festival at the Old Town School of Folk Music. You’ve performed at your share of music festivals over the course of your career—what do you like best about music festivals?

CW: The best part about festivals is that you get to meet and hang with other players who you’ve heard about but don’t know, because we’re all playing a Friday and Saturday night somewhere in the world (laughs), and not often in proximity. I can hear what they do and they can hear what I do. Most of us are really shy people. People forget that—as bold as we are, we are also that shy. It’s always good if the (festival) producer remembers to introduce us. Dar Williams and I were like that. I saw her at the Kate Wolf Festival and she was sitting and practicing guitar and I thought, “I can’t go over and bother her. I’m too shy.” Then I saw her at the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, and she said, “I was so shy. I saw you sitting over there and I thought I should go over there.” And nobody bothers to facilitate.

GS: There should be a Wal-Mart greeter type person in charge of introductions.

CW: Exactly! Some elder. “Have you two met?” Somebody kind. “Here, have a beverage!”

Cris Williamson performs at the Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln, at 7 p.m. May 17 as part of the annual Alt Q Festival.