$15.00
Bill Staines has been a mainstay at the Me&Thee since it opened its doors nearly 36 years ago. A New England native, Bill has been singing his songs at coffeehouses, festivals, folk song societies, and concert halls since the 1960s and, for a time, emceed the Sunday hootenanny at the legendary Club 47 in Cambridge. A spokesperson for Folk Legacy Records says of Bill and his music: “Any new song that can live comfortably beside the well-worn songs of folk tradition has a good chance of surviving the test of time. Such, we believe, are the songs of Bill Staines.” Think about that statement for a moment. That’s quite a legacy.
Over 20 albums’ worth of music later, Bill continues to play more than 200 concert dates per year and is one of the most popular folk singers on the circuit. He has chronicled his life on the road in a book, The Tour: A Life Between the Lines. Each fall, Bill leaves his home in New England and sets out on a five-week tour of North America. He covers about 15,000 miles of open highway and gets to relay many of his adventures while he performs for his fans. This book is also a chronicle of his life, from the time that Bill spent growing up in the Boston-Cambridge folk music scene in the early 1960’s to the present, when he is one of the most respected singer-songwriters on the folk music scene. The story’s all here, and it is all written from the heart.
Bill’s repertoire includes contemporary love songs as well as beautifully arranged traditional folk tunes. A former yodeling champion, Bill can sometimes be cajoled into demonstrating how he won that championship at the Kerrville Folk Festival in 1975. Speaking of Kerrville, Nanci Griffiths credits Bill Staines with getting her to perform her music outside of Texas. She says of him: “Bill Staines has been my hero since 1977. He carries on where Woody left off — carrying on the tradition of stories and characters you wish you knew.” Bill is Americana in the truest sense of the word. He sings as earnestly about adventures in the Yukon as he does about his roots in New England or about the prairie people of the Midwest.
Bill is the epitome of the traveling folk troubadour. We guarantee you that you’ll be singing and humming Bill’s song all the way home after this show!
Photograph by Larry Marcus
His gentle lilting voice, spacious melodies and common-chord lyrics give his songs a homespun grace that often belies his mastery of the folk form. He is such a pure pleasure too, people forget to notice how damn good at the job of singer-songwritering he really is. New England Folk Almanac