Drawn to the legacies of Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Abbey Lincoln among other vocal forebears, honey-voiced Patrice Williamson established herself as a jazz singer who cultivated a modest audience across the Boston region throughout the 1990s. Although she, like numerous peers in jazz, favors reinterpretations of pop and Broadway standards from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, she has at times turned her attention to jazz renderings of soul and urban contemporary material such as Stevie Wonder’s “Another Star” and Anita Baker’s “Good Enough.” Despite her strongest recognition remaining in New England, Williamson originally hails from elsewhere, having grown up in Memphis, Tennessee, where her late father Webster F. Williamson (1929–1997) nurtured her broad musical curiosity. A devoted gospel performer and respected figure within his Baptist congregation, the elder Williamson urged his daughter toward gospel alongside jazz and pre-rock popular song. During her pre-teen years she took up piano, violin, and flute, yet singing gradually emerged as her central pursuit. Upon entering the University of Tennessee, she initially declared communications as her major, but during her sophomore year she abandoned plans for broadcasting and switched to music, a shift her parents ultimately endorsed. For a time she envisioned a path as a classical instrumentalist until the conductor of the UT Studio Jazz Orchestra, struck by her scat work, urged her toward jazz vocals. Pianist Donald Brown, also at UT, reinforced that direction, prompting her 1992 relocation to Boston and enrollment at the New England Conservatory, where she trained with jazz singer Dominique Eade. By the middle of the decade she was performing regularly on the local jazz circuit, and toward its close she began documenting her work on record. Her self-produced debut, My Shining Hour, appeared in 1998 on River Lily Records, the imprint she named for her mother Lillie Rivers Williamson and to which she dedicated the project in memory of her father. In 2002 she recorded and co-produced the follow-up Free to Dream, again issuing it through River Lily.
