It’s not relative

If you listened to “The Ones We Never Knew,” knowing only that this debut album comes from a member of an important musical family, you might think Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell or even Coldplay’s Chris Martin was the relevant relative. The songs reveal a writer who alternately is staunchly opinionated, deeply introspective, disarmingly honest and openly emotional.

Little on this impressive first effort would suggest that the singer’s grandfather was of one of country music’s true titans, or that her father is one of its biggest mavericks.

That suits this descendant of Hank Williams just fine.

“When I first played in Nashville, I never told people who I was, because I wanted to know if they liked me for my music first,” Hank Williams Jr.’s daughter Holly says between bites of an oatmeal frittata at a health-food restaurant near a friend’s house in L.A., where she was staying on a recent visit.

“Even at my shows now not many people know who I am unless I tell them -- which I don’t -- or unless they’ve read up on the website [www.hollywilliams.com],” she says. “That’s my favorite part, because when they go to my website or read a bio and find out, they’ll be like, ‘Cool, I was a fan before I knew.’ And that’s what I always wanted.”

It’s not that this confident and assertive 23-year-old isn’t proud of her heritage -- though it wasn’t until she was 17 that she realized her granddaddy was more than “this old country singer.” But Williams is more interested in making a name for herself than in exploiting the one she was born with.

Like her daddy, though, she’s not afraid to invoke the family connection in her music.

“Sometimes,” a song from her album, references Hank Sr.’s drug- and alcohol-related death at age 29 in the back seat of a Cadillac:

I wish I were an angel in ’52

In a blue Cadillac on the eve of the new year

And there I would have saved him

The man who sang the blues

“I don’t really contemplate his death,” she says, soft waves of blond hair falling past her shoulders over a pistachio green dress that matches her eyes. “It’s so hard to feel like he’s my grandfather because there’s not that many people [still alive] who knew him. My father didn’t know him -- he died when he was 3 -- it’s so far away from me....

“But when I first started listening to a lot of music -- I’ll never forget -- I heard Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen and Dylan each mention him in a song, and then I heard Neil Young’s ‘From Hank to Hendrix.’ I just started wigging out because I had just thought he was this old country singer who was in the Hall of Fame.

“When it’s someone in your family, you just think, like, ‘Oh, whatever,’ ” she says, a hint of Valley Girl speak intruding on her low-key Nashville-bred twang. “After that, I started listening a ton” to the man who wrote “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” “You Win Again,” “Hey Good Lookin’ ” and other country classics.

A difficult path

It’s not easy being the relative of a legendary musician. Just ask Hank Williams Jr. He struggled in his father’s imposing shadow early in his career, when his mother, Audrey, shepherded him into singing his father’s songs. It was years before he cast off that shadow.

Few others have achieved anywhere near the success of their famous relatives: Marty Haggard (Merle’s son), Buddy Allan (Buck Owens’ son), Stella Parton (Dolly’s sister), John Carter Cash (Johnny’s son), Carlene Carter (June Carter’s daughter), the Lynns (Loretta’s twin daughters, Patsy and Peggy), even Hank Williams III (Hank Jr.’s son and Holly’s half-brother).

“I think it’s a hindrance,” says R.J. Curtis, operations manager at Los Angeles country radio station KZLA-FM (93.9). “It raises people’s interest, but unfortunately for the offspring, it creates some unrealistic expectations on so many levels. It’s almost a lose-lose situation.”

Officials at Williams’ label, Universal South Records, don’t see it that way, but they acknowledge they don’t have an easy job promoting an artist whose music doesn’t fall into neat categories.

“All along we knew this was the sort of project that radio wouldn’t embrace in a big way,” says Susan Levy, Universal South’s vice president of artist development. “We believe Holly is her own best salesperson, so instead of putting money into pushing a single at radio, we’ve chosen to put it into touring.”

So far, she’s been in front of singer-songwriter-attuned fans, opening shows for Mavericks singer Raul Malo, heartland rocker John Mellencamp and Australian folk-country singer Kasey Chambers. This year she’ll resume opening for Chambers, including a six-week trek through Australia.

Williams displays her father’s renowned feistiness in “Everybody’s Waiting for a Change,” which includes the stinging rebuke: “Everybody’s waiting for me to fall / You criticize my walk as I watch you crawl.”

That outsider sensibility fits right in with the rebellious history of her celebrated family.

“I went to a private school where everyone goes to college,” she says. “No one did not go to college, but I didn’t. I started playing gigs in clubs in Nashville.”

There isn’t much heel on the cowboy boots she’s got on, but it doesn’t take much to lift her 5-foot-11 frame into the 6-foot-plus range of her beefy daddy and her lanky granddaddy. But she doesn’t have the sharply chiseled facial features that Hank III, who is 10 years older, shares with his namesakes.

“I remember meeting with a high-school counselor and he said, ‘What do you want to do?’ and I said, ‘I want to be a songwriter.’ They were like, ‘Yeah, but that doesn’t count -- what are you really going to do?’ They would completely ignore it, and that [ticked] me off. I used to fight with them about it, and they were like, ‘You’re going to end up at McDonald’s,’ and I said, ‘I don’t care, as long as I’m writing songs.’ ”

Unlike many musicians who felt the calling early on, Williams at first thought she’d be an interior designer, or maybe a visual artist.

She wrote a few songs when she was 8 and 9 -- with unexpectedly dark themes that hinted at a family gene trying to assert itself -- but then didn’t listen to much music through her early teens.

One day, however, she picked up a guitar again and felt as though she’d tapped into a deep well.

“Something changed when I was 17,” she says. “When I started playing, I wanted to know where this writing was coming from and who else was a songwriter. I remember saying, ‘Who’s Bob Dylan? Who’s Joni Mitchell? Who are all these people I’d read about?’ I’d go on Amazon.com and read and go to all these shows. Then I kind of became immersed.”

She’s a big admirer of Beat generation writers, particularly Jack Kerouac, whose on-the-road credo dovetails with her own. She’s also a fan of musical iconoclasts such as Elliott Smith, Neil Finn and Tom Waits.

Those influences play out in a preternatural maturity of musical vision and execution -- she also co-produced her album -- evident in her best songs.

Hints of her lineage can be heard in “Sometimes” when, after each verse, she infuses the word “sometimes” with things she wishes she could have, do or be -- a signal of her awareness that not all impulses need to be acted on.

There’s almost a Jekyll-Hyde schism between the upbeat manner Williams exhibits in person and the failed romantic at the heart of most of her songs. Although she sometimes sings about her black-and-blue heart, or about trying in vain to save a loved one bent on self-destruction, she warns against taking everything autobiographically.

“I write in the first person because I like it better than writing about he, she and they,” she says. “Not everything I write about has happened to me. I like to see things through other people’s eyes. It’s more interesting that way.”