Her mother was Fannie Brandon, a teacher and choir singer, and her father was Dr. H. Roger Williams, a physician and pharmacist.

She began her teaching career as director of music at North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham (1926–32) and subsequently taught at Dunbar High School in Mobile (1932–1936), at Fessenden Academy in Florida (1936–1937), and at Lincoln Academy in Kings Mountain, North Carolina (1938–39).

[3] In 1939, Williams became the first supervisor of music in the Mobile public school system, a job she held until her death in 1973.

"[1] Its haunting refrain underlines one of the major continuing divides in American culture: O' de wurl' ain't flat, An' de wurl' ain't roun', H'it's one long strip Hangin' up an' down— Jes' Souf an' Norf; Jes' Norf an' Souf.

—from Ariel Williams Holloway, "Northboun'" "Northboun'" won an important prize in Opportunity (where it was first published in 1926) and has been collected in several anthologies, including Golden Slippers (1941), edited by Harlem Renaissance poets Countee Cullen and Arna Bontemps,[2] and Lorraine E. Roses and Ruth E. Randolph's Harlem's Glory: Black Women Writing, 1900-1950 (Harvard University Press, 1996).