When you listen to "Ghost of the Knoxville Girl," the 2009 release by Doug and Telisha Williams, it's plain to see why they belong to the hard-to-define genre of Americana music.

From track to track, the duo can take you from the twang of Grand Ole Opry in the era of Patsy Cline, to the laid-back groove of a modern day coffee house and back.

There's even a dose of bluesy rock-and-roll.

But the couple's voices — Telisha's all at once twangy and lilting, and Doug's folksy with a touch of Southern rock — hold it all together, as the deeply personal songs detail true stories of their small hometown and its cast of characters.

The Williamses will bring their varied repertoire to Dahlonega this Friday. The Times recently spoke with the couple about moving to Nashville, their latest CD and coming back to North Georgia.

Question: Do you still live in (Martinsville) Va.?

Doug: Yeah, we live in Virginia, but ... we actually don't live anywhere.

Telisha: We are moving to Nashville, but we're on the road quite a bit, so we're not going to get a place in Nashville until late summer, early fall. Our house here in Virginia has been rented full time, so we're just kind of staying on the road a bit.

Q: Why did you decide to move to Nashville?

Doug: We're spending more and more time there, and all the people we work with are there, and so it's just kind of a lot going on with our kind of music and our friends. So it just made a lot more sense for us to live there.

It's a really good place to tour out of as well. You can get to all the major highways from there. You can get out west pretty quickly from there, and you can get down into Texas without much trouble.

Q: Tell me about "Ghost of the Knoxville Girl."

Doug: That's the newest one. It came out in 2009, and most of 2010 it was the record we were playing. We were very happy with it. Lloyd Maines played pedal steel on it, which was really cool. It did very well on the Americana Music Association Charts.

We were in the top 20 for a while, and we were in the top 40 for about 15 weeks, which is pretty cool. We were up there with Tom Petty and Bob Dylan, which was kind of cool to be in that kind of company for a while.

Q: Are you working on a new album right now?

Doug: We are. We've got some new stuff that we're really excited about. We're really excited about the new songs. There's a couple that we haven't played out much yet.

We'll probably play some of them this weekend just to kind of try them out on people, and let them kind of grow and evolve a little bit before you put them on a record.

Q: Do you guys have anything else that you want our readers to know about you before your concert?

Telisha: This will be our third time back in Dahlonega. We really like playing there.

We've had a couple of shows there that have been really, almost, magical. Just because of the audience and the town and that environment. It's in such a great building.

Doug: We think it's haunted, so that's always a plus.

Telisha: He thinks the building is haunted. In a good way. A good haunting.
Doug: We're always up for a good haunting.

Telisha: So, we always look forward to playing The Crimson Moon. It's really fun.