Bill Staines
Massachusetts native Bill Staines was an old-school troubadour in every way, a hard-working folk singer-songwriter-storyteller who regularly crisscrossed the US performing in coffeehouses, clubs and other venues for over five decades. Eschewing airplanes for ground travel, he’d grab his Martin D-18 acoustic – which he played upside down because he was a southpaw – and hop in his Jeep, covering some 65,000 miles per year on average to playing about 200 shows.
Ballads, Singalongs, Country, Yodeling
Born on February 6, 1947, in Medford and raised in Lexington, Staines proudly referred to himself as a folksinger, but his shows covered a wide swath of the genre, from ballads, singalongs and country to a bit of yodeling. Yes, yodeling, as he explained in a 2018 interview with MetroWest Daily. “There was a country singer Johnny White who had a band called the Country Rhythm Boys,” he said. “I would see them play at a place called the Maples in Billerica. Johnny did a bunch of yodeling. Yodeling is all about learning the syllables and when to crack your voice and what notes to hit, and my voice sort of cracked naturally. I could control it, and eventually I could do it pretty fast.” Staines could yodel so well that he won the 1975 National Yodeling Championship in Kerrville, Texas.
Rock ‘n’ roll beginnings, Switch to folk
Yet Staines started out as a rocker. When he was 11, his friend Dick Curtis got a guitar, so Staines got a guitar (a Sears Silvertone three-quarter size model). The two pals put contact pickups on their acoustics and started a band with Curtis’ younger brother John (later a member of the Pousette-Dart Band). Around that time, the Curtis brothers’ mom – for reasons unknown – suggested that they listen to the album The Weavers at Carnegie Hall and, almost overnight, they made the switch from rock to folk as The Green Mountain Boys.
But Staines, a fan of folkies like Gordon Lightfoot and Eric Andersen who had already begun writing his own songs, eventually set out on his own. His first solo paying gig was at The King’s Rook (later Stonehenge Club) in Ipswich in April of 1965. He was 18. A self-taught guitarist, he was watching a lot of other performers at the time and picked up on the fingerpicking style of local folk-scene regular Jackie Washington. Before long Staines was playing at Club 47, the Unicorn and a number of the small clubs that lined Charles Street and had landed an ongoing gig as the emcee at Club 47’s Sunday Hootenanny.
Albums, Awards, Memoir
He got into touring, started recording albums (beginning with Bag of Rainbows in 1966), wrote a number of children’s songs (his albums The Happy Wanderer and One More River won the Parents’ Choice Award) and made appearances on A Prairie Home Companion and Mountain Stage. Best known among his more than 300 original tunes are “Bridges,” “A Place in the Choir” and “River.” In 2003, Xlibris published Staines’ memoir, The Tour: A Life Between the Lines.
Death, Legacy
After making his home in Rollinsford, New Hampshire, for a number of years, Bill Staines passed away on December 5, 2021, at age 74 of prostate cancer. “He was just so warm and very friendly and I was in awe of him,” said Kate McNally, host of New Hampshire Public Radio’s Folk Show. “I had a hard time not being totally star-struck [whenever he came to the studio].”
“Even though he wasn’t born in New Hampshire, New Hampshire claims him,” she continued. “He’s a New Hampshire gem, as much as maple syrup and the Old Man of the Mountain. He’s right up there with things we’ll always value here.”
(by Ed Symkus)
