Folk singer Bill Staines died Sunday after a battle with an aggressive form of prostate cancer, according to his website. Staines was 74.

Staines enjoyed a decades-long career as a singer and songwriter. Traversing North America countless times in his car to play shows, Staines was said to have driven more than 65,000 miles every year to perform for his loyal audiences across the continent.

"Whenever I think of Bill Staines, I think of a traveler," says Mike Pengra, host and program director of Radio Heartland from The Current. "Bill played over 200 dates a year and traveled from coast to coast playing concerts, and always included Minnesota in his travels. In fact, I remember passing a car on a Twin Cities highway, and the driver looked exactly like Bill Staines, gray hair, hat, beard… and I thought to myself, 'Of course it’s Bill Staines; he’s always driving to the next gig.'”

Minneapolis was indeed one of Staines's frequent stops. Marv Menzel, owner of the Homestead Pickin' Parlor in Richfield, Minn., knew Staines personally. "He was extremely talented and highly regarded," Menzel says, "and his songs like 'Place in the Choir' and 'River' had just become standards in the folk and country scenes."

Staines's songs captured a uniquely American spirit, reflecting the people and landscapes, sometimes nostalgically, sometimes more immediately. "I've been trying to bring something of value to people through my songwriting," Staines told Radio Heartland's Dale Connelly in 2010. "And so I guess, as you get older, you tend to write more about things that are great things: living and dying, and home and family and work and all these things that everybody can relate to."

Born and raised in suburban Boston, Staines gained his first exposure to folk music during the folk revival of the mid-20th century. "I grew up in the Boston music scene," Staines told River City Folk host Tom May in 1994. "It was a wonderful golden time to grow up. There was just a whole bunch of folk music around and a lot of coffeehouses around. So I remember when I was in high school, I would throw my books in the locker at three o'clock, and I'd go home and I'd catch a subway into Harvard Square and listen to people like the Kweskin Jug Band, Tom Rush, Tim Hardin, a lot of bluegrass.

"It was just a wonderful time, and just a lot of inspirational people around," Staines continued. "You could go and start out and play at some of the coffeehouses, and it was the place to be. So even if you were an unknown, the place was full on a Wednesday night."

Staines went on to record 26 albums, many of them on the Red House Records label, with which Staines enjoyed a long and productive relationship. Staines drew inspiration from the road, whether the people, scenery or even wildlife he encountered along the way.

One of Staines's most well-known songs, "The Roseville Fair," was written during a visit to Minnesota when Staines was staying at his friend and fellow folksinger Jerry Rau's apartment. "I was looking for a title for it," Staines told Tom May in the 1994 interview, "a title name for a fair, and thinking something with mom and apple pie, and I thought, well, 'Roseville.' Little did I know how many Rosevilles there are, and little did I know how many Roseville Fairs there are. But I just started playing the song and it just kind of took off."

Staines's songs bore his hallmarks of warm baritone vocals, gentle humor and a picking style that was his own, developed by dint of Staines playing guitar left-handed but with a right-hand-strung guitar held upside down. Staines performed on American Public Media's A Prairie Home Companion, NPR's Mountain Stage, and on the soundtrack to the HBO series Deadwood. Beyond his own albums, Staines's songs have been covered by many artists, among them Peter, Paul, and Mary; The Highwaymen; Jerry Jeff Walker; Nanci Griffith; and Glen Yarborough.

Over the course of his career, Staines received numerous accolades. His albums The Happy Wanderer and One More River won gold and silver Parents' Choice Awards, respectively. In 2007, the Boston Coffeehouse Association awarded Staines the Jerry Christen Award for  his contributions to New England folk music. In 2015, New England magazine recognized Staines as "One of the 80 gifts New England has given to America," placing him on a list alongside other cultural luminaries as Stephen King and Katherine Hepburn. In addition, Staines was an accomplished yodeler, and he had even taught yodeling workshops at the Homestead Pickin' Parlor in Richfield.

When it came to songwriting, Staines admitted it didn't necessarily come easily to him. "There are two types of writers," Staines told Connelly in 2010. "There are people who live to write, and then there are people who live to live, and then write about it. I'm sort of the second class, you know? I don't get up every day and say I need to write a song because I'm a songwriter. It's never been an easy thing. I think the melodies are actually fairly easy to write. They, in fact, they kind of fall out of me. But really having something to say — and saying it well — is the tough part."

Menzel says that Staines was recently in the Twin Cities to attend the musical tribute to Minnesota folk singer Jerry Rau, who passed away on October 15. "We did not know at the time how sick [Staines] was," Menzel says. "I don't think he knew he was that sick, but he had been struggling with cancer for many years. We didn't get a chance to say goodbye, but we did get to spend some time together.

"He was a good person, a gentle person, and he will be genuinely missed," Menzel continues. "It’s everybody's loss; I knew him personally, but everybody was torn up when he passed on."