Bill AckerbauerMusic & Miscellaneous Travels Bill Ackerbauer wrote his first song in the fourth grade and hasn't stopped since. He grew up singing in school and church choirs and picked up the harmonica - the first of many instruments he plays - while an undergraduate at Union College in the 1990s. After college, he picked up the guitar and then the mandolin, banjo, fiddle, ukulele and other instruments. Heavily influenced by American and Irish traditional and roots music, he performed as a solo 'folk singer' before briefly playing with the Bluegrass/Gospel group Durey Creek in the mid-2000s. Around 2006, Bill joined Roland Vinyard to form The Bentwood Rockers, an old-timey string band duo that released a studio album, Raised in a Lion's Den, in 2013 and later issued an album of live recordings, All Night Long.
Bill's debut solo EP, Discovery, was issued in February 2017. Bill, who is the father of three boys and loves to perform for children and families, and he released a full-length album of original and traditional music for kids in 2020. (Chicken Milk!) Since 2015, Bill has been playing acoustic Americana with Bill Healy and Bob Zink as The Doghouse Carpenters, and he's been playing acoustic rock, blues, soul and more with Frank DeVer Pullen as The Insolent Willies. (Their albums are available on iTunes, Spotify, and in person at shows in CD form.) When Bill isn't writing songs, playing gigs or recording, he teaches guitar, fiddle, uke and mandolin lessons both privately and at the Paul Nigra Center for Creative Arts. He also has a full-time day job in the public sector, and he volunteers with a number of community organizations, including the Johnstown School Museum, and he is the founder and coordinator of the upcoming Johnstown Midsummer Concert Series, which has been running since 2018. Bill also is a veteran newspaper journalist, college writing instructor and former UAlbany lecturer in journalism who has several Associated Press and NYNPA writing awards to his credit, and in 2011 he was honored with a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. And Bill also dabbles in visual art, mainly painting in watercolor and acrylic. He has exhibited pieces at the Paul Nigra Center for Creative Arts and Saratoga Arts, and examples of his work can be found at https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/bill-ackerbauer |