A native of Southern California, “Perfessor” Bill Edwards discovered ragtime when he was six years old, and hasn’t been able to leave it alone since. Learning initially from records by Paul Lingle, Frankie Carle and Lou Busch, he later discovered it was available in print form also, and started accumulating ragtime scores in his teens.

Bill started his professional career in California in the late 1970s, residing in Durango, CO, through the first half of the 1980s, where he took up residence at the Strater Hotel’s Diamond Belle Saloon. He has lived in Virginia since 1986. For many years Bill was a featured entertainer at the Fish Market in Alexandria. Since 1996, Bill has been applying his passion for the music on his website, www.perfessorbill.com, and has been an active researcher of selected composers and specific ragtime sub-genres.

One of Bill’s more fulfilling projects of the past three years has been acquiring rights to and restoring to CD some of the very records that originally inspired him. He also enjoys attending ragtime festivals and competitions, particularly the World Championship of Old-Time Piano in Illinois, where he holds the 1991 title and has consistently finished in the top five since his initial appearance there in 1987. He has 30 different CD titles available for your enjoyment. Most are themed to a genre such as classic ragtime, popular ragtime, topical rags, stride and stomps, old-time songs and blues, and even old-time Christmas.

Bill wowed audiences in his debut appearance at RagFest ’07 and again in 2008, and he’s back yet again to surprise unsuspecting audience members with his audacious pianistics. His fervent wish, he always says, is to bring multiple elements of his unique ragtime stylings into the lives of those who are ragtime-deprived and syncopation-undernourished.