Imagine a little girl with gorgeous red hair, the baby in a family of eight children. It’s Sunday morning in a rural Virginia church. She sits quietly because her place is between her mama and daddy. She takes her daddy’s hand and traces the calluses and lines of the hard-working farmer and mill worker.

“That was my time with my dad,” recalls Jeanette Williams. She wrote a song about those times called “Father’s Hand,” featured on her all-gospel project titled Get in the Boat (Bell Buckle 0014). In the lyrics, she draws the analogy between her father’s strong hand holding her tiny hand “tenderly” and our Heavenly Father’s hand holding ours.

Jeanette Williams sings and plays bass in her band—with husband, Johnny, on guitar and vocals; Marsha Bowman on banjo, mandolin, and vocals; and Stephen Fraleigh on fiddle, mandolin, and vocals—and says they prefer to sing songs with meaning. Jeanette says that bluegrass audiences are filled with “real people who want to hear about real things.”

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