The Tour: A Life Between the Lines

For more than 35 years, Bill Staines has traveled the highways and byways of North America, playing his music in colleges, coffeehouses, concert halls and folk song societies. He is one of America's quintessential troubadours, logging almost 70,000 miles a year on the open road. The Tour is not only a collection of characters, consequences and experiences, it is - perhaps more importantly - an offering up of some of the wisdom gained from "a life between the lines."

The Tour is a book that will take you on two journeys, one past and one present. Each fall, Bill Staines leaves his home in New England and sets out on a five week tour of North America, playing his music for fans and friends, and covering almost 15,000 miles of open highway. On the twentieth anniversary of the tour, he began writing this narrative.

Read these pages and you will journey with Bill and get to know some of the people and places that make his story worth telling.

The Tour is also a chronicle of a 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 has come to be considered one of the most respected singer-songwriters on the folk music scene today. It is all here, and it is all written from the heart.