History of BluesABilly Genre

King of BluesABilly, Bill Harper, was born in Eugene, Oregon in 1951. His family, consisting of the Harpers and the Potters, both were very musically talented and performers.

His great, great grandfather Harper enjoyed singing and performing. His grandmother was a part time professional self taught piano musician. She initially used a “Player Piano” to get started learning how to play piano.

Bill's grandfather Potter was a violin player, or more commonly known as a “Fiddle Player”. His grandmother Potter played the piano. His uncles and aunts played stringed instruments including steel guitar, flat top guitar and mandolin. For many years the Potters lived in a large 8 bedroom house with a huge living room. The family hosted dances there every Saturday night for years. Grandfather Potter was in a serious automobile accident which ended his music career and the Saturday night dances.

Bill, as a young boy observed his uncles and aunts playing music and became hooked. He began guitar lessons at age 8. He performed in front of an audience for the first time in 2^nd grade at Howard Elementry school in Eugene, pantomiming his favorite song, “Davy Cockett – King of the wild frontier” using a guitar as a prop

Mr. Harper began his professional music career in 1973 performing as a single occasionally using a sideman drummer as an accompanist. His first long term drummer, Jim Malmberg, had been one of the original “Kingsmen”. The Kingsmen were one of the groups to originally record, release and successfully market the song “Louie Louie”. Unfortunately Jim was drafted just a couple of weeks before the song was recorded with a different drummer. While on station in Hawaii Jim was the drummer for widely known Hawaii performer “Don Ho”. While Jim was playing with Bill the band name “Powder River” was first used as Mr. Harper's band.

In 1980 Mr. Harper's Powder River band consisted of himself, Jef Boyd and Carla Umbehocker. The trio recorded and released a single in the Northwestern Washington State music market which quickly climbed the local charts and was the number one selling single in the market for 6 weeks straight. There were several offers from major labels for Mr. Harper to enter into a recording contract but at the time Mr. Harper had established an Insurance Agency and did not want to abandon that pursuit.

In 1995 Mr. Harper entered the burgeoning information technology industry as a data developer working on contract at Microsoft. For the next several years Mr. Harper's only focus was on software development. In the year 2001 Mr. Harper was struck with a heart attack. He was quite ill for about 3 years but did fully recover and returned to the computer industry. But this time he picked his music back up. He had played for 20 plus years and wanted to change gears with his music.

“BluesABilly” was born in 2004 with the release of the “Raw Cheese” CD. Mr. Harper reviewed all of the music presentation techniques and skills he had developed over the 20+ years he performed. Picking the performance and musical items that the audiences all over the northwest had responded most to he began combining them all to make a new genre of music. This became “BluesABilly” and has been a huge crowd-pleaser ever since.

The release of the King's “BluesABilly Bustin' Out” CD world wide has sold thousands and soundly established the genre.