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Doug Reansbury has spent close to fifty years with a guitar in his hands somewhere in Ontario. Born in 1957, he came up through the coffee houses and folk clubs of the late 1970s and built a working life out of songwriting, session work, festival stages, children's theatre, radio, a recording studio and the tour boats that run out of Kingston harbour. At the centre of that life sits a self-titled album from 1988, ten of his own songs cut at Grant Avenue Studio in Hamilton with a band of first-call Canadian players.

The earliest trace of him in print is an advertisement from March 1979 for a Friday night at the Lancaster House Tavern in Kitchener. The following year his name turned up on Scott Merritt's Desperate Cosmetics, where he played acoustic guitar and sang backing vocals. Daniel Lanois engineered that record at Grant Avenue Studio, and the room would matter to Reansbury again eight years later.

The early 1980s found him working several corners of Ontario's independent scene at once. On April 20, 1984 he played Toronto's Music Gallery as part of Judith Fitzgerald's Country and Western Swing Revue, sharing the night with Fitzgerald and Geoff Somers. Both sides of the concert survive on tape in the Music Gallery fonds at York University. In 1985 he turned up at the Blue Skies Music Festival on a roster that included Scott Merritt, David Woodhead, Ian Tamblyn and Colin Linden.

Doug Reansbury, his first album, was released in 1988 by Kingston's Silver Birch Music Productions as DR0404. He wrote all ten songs and handled voice, acoustic guitar and electric guitar. Bob Doidge produced and engineered the sessions at Grant Avenue, and Reansbury assembled a formidable group of Canadian musicians around him: Al Cross on drums and percussion, David Woodhead on fretless bass and keyboards, and Bill Dillon on electric six and twelve string. Doidge added flugelhorn, bass and voice, Jane Gordon and Vivian Moens sang, and Dr. Charles Bowden played piano on “Dance & Sing.”

Each of them arrived with a history. Dillon had come up around Grant Avenue with Daniel Lanois, who put him on Robbie Robertson's 1987 solo album, and his guitar would later turn up on records by Joni Mitchell, Sarah McLachlan and Peter Gabriel. Woodhead came out of the Perth County Conspiracy circle, played bass on Stan Rogers' first album and was working with Scott Merritt through those same years. Cross had been Jane Siberry's drummer through her mid-1980s run, playing on No Borders Here, The Speckless Sky and The Walking. In 1988, the same year he recorded with Reansbury, Cross was part of the original Big Sugar trio with Gordie Johnson and Terry Wilkins. Loreena McKennitt's Parallel Dreams followed in 1989, with The Visit in 1991. The record completed a circle that had started with the Scott Merritt sessions in 1980, in the same Hamilton studio with the same kind of care.

What makes the album worth hearing thirty-eight years later is how directly it comes out of Reansbury's own life. He annotated the lyric insert by hand, in pen, explaining where the songs came from. “All Your Blues Away” started in his head during a staff meeting at a job he was working in London, Ontario, after a night at a coffee house called A Change of Pace. “Friend of Mine” was written while he watched the leaves turn in Kingston's Victoria Park. “Talk to Me” grew out of thinking about how badly people manage to say what they mean.

Other songs reach further out. “Shamus 303” takes on confinement and the way institutions treat the people inside them, and Bill Dillon and Bob Doidge cook up a sneaky detective sound behind it. “People With the Sadness (in their eyes)” came from what Reansbury saw in Moosonee and on Moose Factory Island, and the song carries James Bay, the Hudson's Bay store and the weight of northern isolation. “Dance & Sing” follows it as a deliberate continuation, drawn from the same time up north. “Tonight I Sat and Thought” looks at war and weapons and the state of the world, with Doidge's flugelhorn answering the guitar. In his handwritten introduction Reansbury called the LP a first project, which makes it the earliest full statement of what he had to say as a songwriter.

He stayed visible on the Ontario circuit after it came out. In September 1992 CKLC 1380 and the Kingston Whig-Standard launched a hunt for local contemporary music, listened to more than two hundred submissions and picked ten recordings for a compilation CD called Foundation of Rock. Reansbury's “Live In Love” was one of them.

By 1993 he had a second career going that few songwriters can claim. He was performing with puppeteers Tim Soper and Annie Milne in the Kingston-based Purple Dragon Puppet Troupe, playing live guitar, singing and making sound effects behind masks, props and large-scale puppets. A newspaper account from that year described him plainly as a full-time musician and noted the troupe had already been at it for about five years. Their repertoire included Oscar's Magic Garden, loosely inspired by Oscar Wilde, and the shows carried his music into schools, festivals and children's theatres across the region.

He returned to Blue Skies in 1995 with Kirk Elliott and Laura Thomas, on a weekend where the Purple Dragon troupe also appeared. The next year the Ottawa Folk Festival gave him a singer-songwriter showcase, and festival records list two showcases featuring Reansbury and Orealis.

In 2000 he appeared before the CRTC at hearings for a proposed Kingston radio station, introduced as one of the city's respected singer-songwriters and a partner in a local recording studio. He told the Commission what radio support had done for him in practical terms: airplay, recognition, royalties and better-paying work. By then he was recording other bands and helping younger players, including arranging studio time for the winner of a local high-school Battle of the Bands. He agreed to sit on the proposed Kingston Talent Development Board and argued for a system that would give developing musicians studio time, live exposure and a shot at local airplay. The transcript gives a rare look at Reansbury the producer and mentor.

The songwriting kept going alongside all of it. In 2001 Canadian Musician reported that Reansbury and fellow Kingston performer Roger James had taken an honourable mention in a songwriting competition for “The Great Square Dance of Life.” In 2003 he played acoustic and high-string guitar on the album Farmhouse. Later he worked closely with Gananoque singer-songwriter Cliff Edwards, playing guitar on Undercurrent, co-producing the album with Edwards and Duncan Holt, and sharing the music credit on “The Music's Too Loud.”

His guitar playing drew particular attention. HomeGrown Live Music Festival called it a complete guitar style in 2016, running bass lines underneath the melody, a player thinking the way a piano player does with two hands going at once. That approach is what has kept him working, because it fills a room without a band behind it and it suits his own songs and other writers' songs equally well.

Kingston and the 1000 Islands claimed him early. He began playing aboard the 1000 Islands cruises around 1991 and has been part of the boats ever since. Kingston 1000 Islands Cruises still lists him among its entertainers, with a repertoire of guitar-based soft rock and favourites from the 1960s and 1970s. By 2018 he was a fixture at the Stonewater Pub and aboard the Island Star.

That same year he joined You've Got a Friend, a tribute to the music of Carole King and James Taylor, and his ear for Taylor's guitar writing turned out to be made for it. Keyboardist Ken Hall singled out those interpretations for praise, and the show became a recurring part of his performing life.

More than forty-five years after that first newspaper advertisement in Kitchener, Reansbury is still working. He played The Helm Dockside Patio in July 2026, with another You've Got a Friend performance booked for October. His career is a long unbroken strand of Ontario music history built out of records, coffee houses, festivals, studios, radio, puppet shows, riverboats and decades of playing for whoever came in the door.

-Robert Williston