Bill Staines

New Hampshire-based singer/songwriter Bill Staines has long drawn on the American landscape as a central focus in his work. Rivers, mountains, and the expansive terrain of the American West recur throughout his compositions. His knack for crafting originals that echo longstanding folk traditions has positioned him as a reliable supplier of fresh material for other performers. Artists including Nanci Griffith, Jerry Jeff Walker, Grandpa Jones, Fairport Convention, Priscilla Herdman, Gordon Bok, and Mason Williams have recorded his pieces such as "The Roseville Fair," "River," "Wild, Wild Heart," "Yellowstone Winds," and "A Place in the Choir (All God's Critters)."

Although his country-folk material often evokes the people, ways of life, and surroundings found in Wyoming, Colorado, and Alaska, Staines grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, a modest city northwest of Boston. The folk scene flourishing in Boston and Cambridge during the early 1960s left a strong mark on him as a teenager. With junior high school friend Dick Curtis and younger brother John, who would later join the Pousette-Dart Band, he started the folk group the Green Mountain Boys. While the Curtis brothers leaned toward old-time string music and bluegrass, Staines stayed devoted to romantic folk ballads. He went on to establish and manage a student folk music coffeehouse called The Barn at Lexington High School. That role readied him to host a weekly open mic hootenanny at the Harvard Square folk venue Club 47. National notice as a songwriter arrived after Randy Burns & the Skydog Band cut his earliest original, "That's the Way It's Going to Go in Time," in 1966; the same year saw the release of his first album, Bag of Rainbows.

Staines first drew wider attention through his yodeling, capturing the National Yodeling Championship at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Kerrville, Texas, in 1975. The following year brought the album Miles, which featured the ballad "Sweet Wyoming Home." A self-taught fingerstyle acoustic guitarist, he absorbed influences from regular Club 47 performer Jackie Washington and from Tom Paxton. He plays a right-handed Martin D-18 that he flips and uses left-handed. Time spent as an amateur pilot has supplied further creative direction. Several aviation-related tracks appear on the 1995 album Looking for the Wind, among them "Bill Hosie," which concerns an airplane builder, and "Song for Tingmissartaq," composed for Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. In 1993 he completed The Alaska Suite, a fifteen-piece instrumental work for strings and brass drawn from repeated flights to Alaska.

The song "A Place in the Choir (All God's Critters)" has established itself as a staple of children's music. During the 1980s Staines occasionally appeared with the informal folk collective the Passim All-Stars, whose members also included Mason Daring, Jeanie Stahl, Billy Novick, and Guy Van Duser. On the Red House Records label he issued the 1993 children's collection The Happy Wanderer, containing "The Hound Dog Song" and "I Can Feel the Sweet Winds Blowing (Bless My Soul)" alongside renditions of "Home on the Range," "The Gypsy Rover," and "Kookaburra." He remained with Red House through the rest of the decade and into the new century, issuing Going to the West (1993), the already noted Looking for the Wind (1995), One More River (1998), October’s Hill (2000), Journey Home (2004), and Old Dogs (2007). His compositions appear in the songbooks If I Were a Word Then I'd Be a Song (Folk-Legacy, 1980), All God's Critters Got a Place in the Choir (Puffin, 1989), River (Viking, 1993), and Music to Me (Hal Leonard, 1994). Bill Staines died on December 5, 2021, from prostate cancer at the age of 74.