Since Williams' death, The Jargon Society has continued publication through the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.

[5] Once described as "a busy gadfly who happened somehow to pitch on a slope in western North Carolina," Williams was a living link between the experimental poets of Modernism's "second wave" and the unknown vernacular artists of Appalachia.

I mean, you know the early book, Blues and Roots, which was done in the course of walking a big piece of the Appalachian Trail, I listened to mountain people for over a thousand miles and I really heard some amazing stuff.

That's the thing I love about found material, you wake it up, you "make" it into something.The literary critic Hugh Kenner described Williams as the "truffle hound of American poetry."

Williams divided his time between Corn Close at Dentdale in England and Scaly Mountain, North Carolina.