FOLK LEGEND BILL STAINES COMING TO CAPE

Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, Tim Hardin and Taj Mahal were among the performers who emerged from the Boston-Cambridge folk music scene in the '50s and '60s, names that even non-aficionados know through the popularity of their music.

But to aficionados, the name Bill Staines belongs right in the middle of that list.

Staines' "Roseville Fair" is well known, partly because "A Prairie Home Companion" host Garrison Keillor loves it and has invited Staines to entertain frequently, and his "All God's Critters (Got a Place in the Choir)" is a Girl Scout staple. But he remains a folk legend unburdened by the yoke of broad celebrity.

Staines will perform at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Rose Theatre in a benefit for KRCU 90.9 FM Radio. Tickets are available through KRCU.

As a Boston-area teen-ager in the early 1960s, Staines tossed his books in his locker after school and headed to the coffeehouses. "There were two groups of students in high school," he recalled in a phone interview from near his Dover, N.H., home. "One was listening to the Beach Boys and going to proms. The other was listening to the Weavers and Peter, Paul & Mary. Folk music was sort of the pop music at the time."

After high school, he worked at Sears while singing part-time in coffeehouses. He emceed the hootenanny for a while at the legendary Club 47 in Cambridge, and after 1969 became a full-time songwriter and performer.

In 1980 and 1981 he was selected the favorite performer in The Boston Globe's annual Reader's Poll. Nanci Griffith, Mason Williams, Geln Yarborough, Jerry Jeff Walker and Grandpa Jones are among the performers who have recorded his songs.

In the past quarter century, he has written 250 songs and has averaged 200 singing dates per year, performing anywhere from living rooms to large folk festivals.

"Homey" is an adjective often used to describe Staines' singing and his performing presence. He is lauded for his ability to paint musical portraits and to disarm audiences with his ease.

But he's also very individualistic. Besides playing guitar lefthanded and upside down -- he plays the high strings with his thumb -- he is a past winner of the National Yodeling Championship.

Staines is at a loss to explain why he has never quite achieved the fame some of his brethren have. He's been around the business long enough to know that lightning still could strike.

Folk singers had been performing "From a Distance" for 10 years before Bette Midler turned it into a hit.

Indeed, much of today's folk music sounds like acoustic pop to Staines. "When your roots go back to Crosby, Stills & Nash or James Taylor and you play acoustic guitar, you tend to write in more of an acoustic pop vein," he said.

"If you've been around awhile, your roots go back to the Weavers and before that. Much of the true roots are not as evident these days."

Real folk music is universal, Staines says. "It has a sense of the human spirit -- not in a religious way. But certainly songs about home, living and dying. These are things people can relate to."

Staines has played in all sorts of places over his career, and says the venue he likes best is "a place where people listen.

"I try and take the space and transform it as much as possible into somebody's living room."