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Multiple Juno award-winner Bill Usher could be one of the most accomplished but, not-so-famous people in the world of Canadian music and arts! Starting in the 1970s, this self-taught drummer has played and recorded with several festival’s worth of well-known artists, from Bruce Cockburn and Ronnie Hawkins to Valdy, Willie P. Bennett and Stan Rogers. He’s produced 60 albums, most notably the first four ground-breaking albums for Sharon, Lois & Bram, but also for Stringband, the Nexus Percussion Ensemble, Big Bird & Oscar the Grouch and many others – and received numerous Gold and Platinum records for his efforts. (And yes, that was Bill who made those Five Little Monkeys jump on the bed!)

During the ’90s, Bill emerged as a songwriter, releasing two albums with his band The Space Heaters. Two notable gigs involved playing Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD festival in Toronto and Festival Rhyme du Monde in Montreal. By the early 2000s while working as the Ontario Arts Councils’ Performing Arts Touring Officer he created a whole album’s worth of songs with the release of Slowdancing in the Ballroom of Life, a deep dive into the challenges and rewards of surviving into middle age – a thoughtful and groove-filled look at, mostly, the good things about getting older. From gospel-tinged hints of redemption to the sort of love songs that can only be written after you’ve been in love for a very long time, Slowdancing had a lot to say and said it very well indeed. “These songs have already sung their way into my life,” wrote Dugg Simpson, longtime artistic director of the Vancouver Folk Music Festival. “They’re about things that I have lived and about things that I am living, in a musical language that I can understand.” Bill Usher and thespaceheaters Pursuing a long held dream to leave the city behind, Bill and his wife moved west in 2002 and settled in Golden, BC. “Pete Seeger’s elder advice to me backstage at the Mariposa Folk Festival in 1975, was my ‘north star’ growing older,” says Usher. “Pete told me, ‘You don’t find community. You make community.’ So simple, yet so powerful.”

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