Bill Harley

Recognized as “the Mark Twain of contemporary children’s music,” Bill Harley earns the label through songs and stories that reach the core of ordinary experience and resonate across wide audiences. Although his recordings draw on an array of styles ranging from reggae to doo wop to country & western, it is his knack for distilling a plainspoken, sincere line in both lyrics and narrative that lingers longest. Each of his children’s albums has earned at least one national distinction.

Raised in the Midwest and Connecticut, Harley draws heavily on his grade-school and junior-high escapades for material, yet he was never considered a troublemaker. “I never spent much time in the principal’s office, despite what people think. I behaved well enough that grownups left me alone, so I held the adult world at arm’s length. I still do.”

He earned honors in religion upon graduating from Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, but community activism proved the stronger draw; he took part in programs assisting children and parents affected by violence and contributed to numerous other local-service initiatives.

Harley began performing for young listeners in 1980, concentrating first on New England venues. With his wife and manager, Debbie Block, he established Round River Records. The label’s debut, 1985’s Monsters in the Bathroom, gathered folk songs and tales including “Black Socks” and “What’s the Matter with You?” Its reception prompted the 1986 follow-up Fifty Ways to Fool Your Mother, after which Harley began appearing at storytelling and folk festivals across the country.

Round River’s 1987 album Cool in School spotlighted one of Harley’s signature pieces, “Zanzibar,” whose tale of a boy delaying a fifth-grade report echoes Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant”—but better. The record received a Parents’ Choice Award and established Harley among the leading ten figures in children’s entertainment.

Known for partnerships with fellow artists, Harley has broadened his catalog through such ventures. A 1988 collaboration with Peter Alsop yielded the reassuring 1989 collection In the Hospital. In 1991 he recorded the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. songfest at his home, resulting in I’m Gonna Let It Shine, an album featuring more than twenty folksingers that documented civil-rights-era material from the 1960s and was named Entertainment Weekly’s Best Recording of the Year.

Another joint project produced the 1996 elementary-school musical Lunchroom Tales: A Natural History of the Cafetorium, which included numbers such as “Morning Announcements,” a comic portrayal of classroom public-address routines. Building on that success, Harley issued the 1997 set There’s a Pea on My Plate, whose characteristically empathetic songs addressed topics including soccer defeats and vegetable aversion.

Maintaining a steady output, Harley accelerated his pace in the early twenty-first century. From 1999 to 2010 he released thirteen albums, among them the 2002 collaboration Sandburg Out Loud with Carol Birch, Angela Lloyd, and David Holt, and the 2008 live recording Yes to Running! Beginning in 1999 he also accumulated multiple Grammy Award nominations.

His first NARAS recognition arrived for 1998’s Weezie and the Moon Pies, which contended for Best Spoken Word Album for Children at the 1999 Grammys; subsequent nominations in that category followed in 2000 for The Battle of the Mad Scientists and Other Tales of Survival and in 2010 for The Best Candy in the Whole World. He won the award in 2007 for Blah Blah Blah: Stories About Clams, Swamp Monsters, Pirates & Dogs and again in 2009 for the aforementioned Yes to Running! Additional nods came for Best Musical Album for Children—first in 2008 for I Wanna Play and again in 2012 for High Dive and Other Things That Could Have Happened….

Alongside his recordings, Harley has issued children’s books at regular intervals. The earliest, the Peter Alsop collaboration In the Hospital, appeared in 1989 to accompany the album of the same name. As his profile grew, so did the number of titles; his first full-length children’s novel, The Amazing Flight of Darius Frobisher, was published in 2006, and his authorship reached a high point in 2013 with the debut of the Charlie Bumpers series.