As part of its 40th birthday celebration, the me&thee coffeehouse brings together four old favorites who performed at the coffeehouse in the early years. Bill Staines, Bob Franke, Mason Daring and Jeanie Stahl will all be together again on our stage. Bill and Bob have traveled the world spreading their special brand of music for decades now. Mason and Jeanie had a fine career as a duo — their “Marblehead Morning” is a much loved classic in this area. Mason has done a lot of film score work, primarily with director John Sayles, while Jeanie has carved out a solo career as well. This promises to be a special night as we revisit our early days. Founder Anthony Silva will emcee.

For over thirty five years, Bill Staines has traveled back and forth across North America, singing his songs and delighting audiences at festivals, folksong societies, colleges, concerts, clubs and coffeehouses. A New England native, Bill became involved with the Boston-Cambridge folk scene in the early 1960’s and, for a time, emceed the Sunday hootenanny at the renowned Club 47 in Cambridge. Bill quickly became a popular performer in the Boston area. In 1971, after one of his performances, a reviewer for the Boston Phoenix stated that Bill was “simply Boston’s best performer.” A decade later, both in 1980 and 1981, the annual Reader’s Poll of the Boston Globe selected him as a favorite performer. Singing mostly his own songs, he has become one of the most popular singers on the folk music circuit today and averages around 200 concert dates a year. Bill weaves a magical blend of wit and gentle humor into his performances, and as one reviewer wrote, “he has a sense of timing to match the best stand-up comic.” His music is a slice of Americana, reflecting with the same ease, his feelings about the prairie people of the Midwest or the adventurers of the Yukon Interspersed between original songs.

Bob Franke began his career as a singer-songwriter in 1965 while a student at the University of Michigan. He was one of the first people to perform at the now famous Ark Coffeehouse in Ann Arbor. Upon graduation, he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has since made New England his home. Bob’s songs are considered classics, fueled by his deep faith and the real-life lessons taught him by his 30-odd years of playing everywhere from concert halls to street corners. Bob has appeared in concert at coffeehouses, colleges, festivals, bars, streets, homes and churches in 33 states, four Canadian provinces and England. His concerts have appeared in lists of the top five musical events of the year chosen by critics in the Boston and San Francisco Bay areas. In 1990, he was nominated as an Outstanding Folk Act by the Boston Music Awards.

Film composer Mason Daring has explored many paths on the way to his current career — entertainment lawyer, folk singer, cabbie and truck driver, commercial director, and rock star among them. But his professional life has always returned to the world of music. After a stint on the coffee-house circuit, Daring decided it was time to move ahead. He enrolled at Suffolk Law School, but soon thereafter met folk-singer Jeanie Stahl. Her extraordinary vocal talent persuaded him to renew his performance career — while maintaining his status as a full time law student and paying the bills driving a Checker Cab — and the duo quickly became a staple on the Northeast singer/songwriter circuit, playing as far afield as Chicago and New York. Their signature song, “Marblehead Morning,” became a hit on regional radio, they released a pair of albums on Philo, and they became such a fixture at Cambridge’s famed Passim’s Folk Club.

But it was Daring’s law work that led, ultimately, to his first film score. He served as legal counsel to first-time filmmaker John Sayles during the production of The Return of the Secaucus Seven. Sayles had heard Daring’s recordings, and at the end of editing came to Mason with an offer to write the music score for the film — for a total budget of $700 dollars. The film was a critical success, and Daring embarked full time into a wide-spanning composing career. While he has managed to leave the practice of law well behind him, he maintains his membership in the Massachusetts bar to this day. Mason also established a record label, Daring Records (a sub-label of Rounder Records), as an outlet to release his film scores and early recordings with Jeanie Stahl.

Marblehead based songstress Jeanie Stahl was on the crest of a promising solo career, in 1983, when a tragic wind surfing accident prevented her from performing for two years. The release of her debut solo album, I’m Just Fooling Myself, came about at that time. In addition to performing frequently at New England folk music clubs and coffeehouses, Jeanie and Mason periodically joined together with Bill Staines, Guy Van Duser and Billy Novick in the folk super-group, The Passim All-Stars. With the increased demand for Daring’s time as a producer and soundtrack composer, Stahl began to perform as a soloist in the early-1980s. Although she’s turned the songs of such songwriters as Gordon Lightfoot, Robin Batteau and Randy Newman into heartfelt experiences, Stahl remains as effective singing jazz standards from the 1930s and 1940s.