Updated February 20, 2025 at 14:10 PM ET
Rusty Williams isn't a famous singer. But maybe he could have been.
In the early '70s and '80s, Williams and his friend Frank Morris recorded original music together. But when Williams presented their recordings to labels in Nashville, he was told to make them "more country."
"I am not country. Don't want to be country. If one song's got a guitar lick at the end, that's as country as we ever got," Williams said. Uncompromising, he shelved the recordings and eventually forgot about them.
Although Rusty never became the famous singer in the family, his granddaughter Hayley Williams did. She is the lead singer of Paramore, a Grammy Award-winning rock band that has toured around the world.
She says she owes much of her musical abilities to her grandfather. He taught her drums and introduced her to artists like Elvis Presley and The Temptations. He would also occasionally sit at the piano and sing some of his songs for her, which are some of her earliest memories of hearing music.
"This is where I came from," Hayley said "This is also the person that believed that I could do it before anyone else believed I could do it."
Now 78, Rusty Williams' own dreams are coming true with help from his granddaughter. He released his debut album, Grand Man, on Feb. 14 about 50 years after it was recorded.
Grand Man embodies the timelessness of love songs. Some of the music on the album captures Rusty's love for his wife of 60 years, Sharon. "Angel Eyes" is one of his and Hayley's favorites. In it, he sings, "Oh angel eyes, You've been here all of my life, And now that I've found you, I'll never let you go, Angel eyes I love you so."
His songs often begin as poems. Then the poems become melodies. With groovy instrumentals from Morris and friends, Rusty transforms into a soulful crooner. "I wanted to sing," said Rusty. "And that's what I did."
It wasn't until 2024 that Hayley realized her grandfather almost had an album of his own. Rusty's collaborator Morris had dug up the old recordings and sent them to the family.
Hayley's Paramore bandmate, Zac Farro, happens to run the label Congrats Records. When she played the music for him, "he was like, 'This is incredible. Like, we need to do something with this.' " Soon the recordings were digitized and made into vinyl.
Now available for the world to hear, Hayley says Grand Man transports her right back to intimate moments of her family's past.
"I hear stories all the time. But when you get to actually experience a piece of that history and it gets brought into the present with you, it's like better than a photo album," Hayley said. "It's like you're sitting there with all of it right there in the moment."
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