Lost Song Collection From Late Country Great Don Williams Discovered: Listen to His ‘Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight’ Cover

Don Williams , nicknamed the Gentle Giant for his soft-spoken manner and warm baritone, is one of the most revered country singers from the ‘70s and ‘80s. Now, nearly a decade after his 2017 death, Concord’s catalog division, Craft Recordings, is releasing Epilogue: The Cellar Tapes, a May 29 collection of recently discovered recordings by Williams captured between 1979 and 1984 but never released.

So named because the reel-to-reel recordings were literally discovered in the basement of his family’s Tennessee home, the original tapes were turned over to Garth Fundis , Williams’ longtime co-producer, who completed the songs by bringing past colleagues and some of Williams’ bandmates into the studio. He reconstructed certain musical tracks that had started to deteriorate and brought in such key Williams collaborators as bassist Joe Allen and drummer Kenny Malone to fill in and enhance.

Remarkably, Williams’ original vocals are intact on the set. The songs weren’t shelved because Williams wasn’t happy with the result; they just didn’t match the tone of the albums he was working on at the time, Fundis says. “Don liked...