It’s the rare musician who doesn’t, at some point, compose a tell-all memoir that recounts the rise to glory, descent into addiction, journey through paparazzi hell and, finally, the triumph of the comeback tour—all spiced with enough political observations to score gigs on cable shows. Dar Williams, a singer-songwriter in the folk-introspective vein, has taken a road less traveled. She has written a book about grass-roots urban renewal. Her focus is not herself but ordinary schmoes who sweat, toil, dream and sometimes scheme to make their communities better places. “What I Found in a Thousand Towns” may not offer up the usual star-performer tales of scandal and excess, but it does remind us that walking on the wild side—which these days means taking a stroll outside one’s techno-bubble—is a trip worth taking. Ms. Williams isn’t an urban expert by training. She attended Wesleyan College (Middletown, Conn.), which she describes as an “artsy” and “progressive” enclave where she “stage-managed a Balinese-dance love story” and performed in “Marat/Sade,” which required her and her fellow students to explore “the dynamics of power and insanity by dutifully losing our minds.” Outbreaks of profundity were apparently common: “You put your beautiful painting of a tree on the wall? We’re going to staple toast to the wall to challenge your hierarchical definition of art and self-expression.” Take that, Michelangelo. Despite such diversions, Ms. Williams found time to polish her musical chops, which eventually took her to towns and cities that are rejuvenating themselves “one coffee shop, dog run and open-mike night at a time.” All share what she calls positive proximity, described as a “state of being where living side by side with other people is experienced as beneficial.” Put another way, positive proximity results when people work together for what they believe is the common good—our era’s version of the old barn raising, though the new barns might be a community center or garden, a soup kitchen or river walk. Ms. Williams starts out in Beacon, N.Y., “a haven for every kind of freethinker, artistic or otherwise.” The late Pete Seeger lived nearby, and the positive vibe (and low rents) attracted city slickers and everyday artisans, coffee grinders, bar owners and shopkeepers, one of whom sold Ms. Williams the “perfect dress” to wear when she opened for a Simon & Garfunkel tribute show. If not exactly Eden, a close suburb thereof. She finds a similar spirit in Lowell, Mass., Wilmington, Del., and Moab, Utah, a former uranium mining town whose positive proximity to two national parks (along with some excellent PR work) turned the town into a Mecca for outdoor enthusiasts after the uranium biz tanked. In Carrboro, N.C., a vibrant arts scene inspires, unifies and produces income, while the Finger Lakes district of New York is home to a tribe of entrepreneurs who are “pushing the edges of the envelope of the food economy, experimenting with kimchee, ice wine, ice cider, and cucumber popsicles.” Those of us who prefer our cucumbers drowned in gin can nonetheless appreciate the creativity and the desire to make a buck in new and unusual ways. Yet there’s trouble in paradise, Ms. Williams feels, mostly in the form of gentrification. Developers and various one-percenters, who like the ambiance and real-estate bargains, buy up properties with their pocket change, which drives out lower-income residents and endangers the locality’s “soul.” In many places, Ms. Williams writes, “food servers can’t afford a place to live.” In essence, San Francisco on a micro scale. A certain type of reader (who perhaps has had a bad kimchee experience) might say that Ms. Williams is herself a person of “privilege” who is giving a book-length shout-out to kindred spirits. They might wonder if her enthusiasm for those bustling coffee shops would be the same if the in-house radios were tuned to Rush Limbaugh rather than Terry Gross. The good news is that “What I Found in a Thousand Towns” goes light on the politics. While Ms. Williams can’t resist a swipe at Wal-Mart and the Tea Party, there’s no mention of Donald Trump, perhaps an act of heroic self-denial. She also understands the privilege rap: “The expense of growing organic food and just the sheer snobbery that can go with it will easily deepen any chasm of negative proximity in a town, bringing up economic, philosophical and even generational differences as flags for division and distrust.” Still, the power of community can transcend these differences, she says, if residents will let “our curiosity and interests, and a little trust, lead us outside our doors and onto the village green.” While many singer-songwriters follow the “two chords and a blizzard of words” formula, Ms. Williams largely avoids literary flatulence, though readers are required to weather an occasional blast of jargon: “A good bar,” she explains, “can be the best place to tie up the loose ends of small, social subsets that, in turn, allow people to draw from diverse social resources and discover material ones as well.” But there’s no doubting Ms. Williams’s sincerity, or the idea that people who work together for positive ends have a better chance of dying with a smile on their faces than those suffering from terminal addiction to their devices. In addition, she appears to practice what she preaches. At book’s end she writes about using her upcoming birthday as an occasion for a fundraiser for the local Episcopal church, whose tepid furnace will put no one in mind of hellfire. One assumes that the kimchee will be sublime. Mr. Shiflett posts his original music and writing at Daveshiflett.com
