Will Oldham
American singer-songwriter and actor
Joseph Will Oldham (born January 15, 1970) is an American singer-songwriter and actor. From 1993 to 1997, he performed and recorded in collaboration with dozens of other musicians under variations of Palace (Palace, Palace Brothers, Palace Songs, and Palace Music). After briefly publishing music under his own name, in 1998 he adopted Bonnie "Prince" Billy as the name for most of his work.
Early life and education
Oldham was born on January 15, 1970, in Louisville, Kentucky. His mother, Joanne Lei Will Tafel Oldham, was a teacher and artist. His father, Joseph Collins Oldham, was an attorney and photographer. Oldham graduated from the J. Graham Brown School in 1988. He sporadically attended Brown University in Rhode Island while pursuing a career as an actor, and living between Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Bloomington, Indiana. He began making music during this time, initially as a project for his professor Jeff Todd Titon, an ethnomusicologist at Brown University.
Career
Oldham first performed and recorded under various permutations of the Palace name, including Palace Brothers, Palace Songs, Palace Music, and simply Palace.
“Will Oldham” enters the record as american singer-songwriter and actor. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Will, Oldham and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Will Oldham” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Will, Oldham and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q709464. VIAF identifies the subject as 100843097. The Library of Congress control number is no00021957. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1970, 1993, 1997 and 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “Will Oldham” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.