Ray Williams grew up in Birmingham and was an outstanding three-sport star at West End High School. He played end on the football team, was a top scorer on the basketball court and a third basemen on the baseball team during his high school days.

Williams joined the Marines in 1943 before he had even completed his high school education. He spent most of the next three years overseas in the Pacific.

After returning home, he attended Auburn University where he was a three-sport letterman. Before getting his degree at Auburn, Talley signed a professional baseball contract and spent the next decade as a minor league baseball player.

Over ten years later, Williams got his amateur eligibility restored and played basketball at Livingston University for one year in 1949.

Williams got his first coaching job in Statesboro, Georgia after graduating from Livingston. Williams joined his high school coach, Ernest Teel, in Statesboro.

He was a an assistant football and girls basketball coach in Georgia for the next decade. In 1968 he got his first shot as a head football coach at Statesboro with his two finishing with a 15-4-1 record.

Coach Williams returned to Alabama and the Birmingham area when he accepted the head coaching job at Mountain Brook in 1969 for one season. Talley became the head football coach at his alma mater, West End High School, following a couple of years as an assistant at Jones Valley (1970-71).

Between 1973-80, his Lions went 80-14-1 and made the playoffs after each season. Williams, who suffered throat cancer in the early 1980s, spent his last few years at West End coaching with a voice box.

Coach Williams football record is 132-53-1 while his teams went 7-9 in the state playoffs and won six area titles. He died of a heart attack February 8, 1995 at the age of 70.