The Gentle Man Who Played His Guitar Upside Down

An old folk singer came into my life for a day a decade ago, and I’m better for it.

I guess I first heard Bill Staines sing on our independent radio station, 88.5 WXPN, probably around the time I was sixteen. In control of the steering wheel of my 1990 Ford Crown Victoria (an ex-Delaware State Police cruiser; kids are crazy, fyi) and in control of the radio, I became exposed to a wide variety of musicians who somehow moved me. Bill Staines, with his calm, warm, rich baritone voice, singing gentle ballads of rivers, trees, mountains, skies was the perfect antidote for my acerbic teen angst. Piloting this massive land-barge down winding Pennsylvania roads, listening to “Piney River Girl” or “Bridges” somehow just…fit. Sometimes, Howlin’ Wolf was more appropriate (like for brashly announcing my pre-dawn arrival in the Lower Merion High School parking lot).

A couple decades later, that angsty high schooler went to work at a locked, inpatient psychiatric hospital. Why? Go ask the moon; maybe she knows. While I was there, I embarked on a lot of crazy missions to “do good.” Banning smoking at the hospital was one of them and, in spite of massive resistance from “the old guard”, it happened. I cast, rehearsed, and produced a full-scale production of “Our Town” with the staff as a way to bring us together and make something beautiful in a place where beauty was in sometimes short supply. I got a grant to fund a mural program to turn the cinderblock walls of…