Asked how he feels about growing old, Bill Hamill invokes one of his many sayings: “Whom the gods love grow young, they don’t grow old.” Then, playfully, he adds: “As a man becomes older, he becomes more delectable.”
These upbeat responses typify this 76-year-old street singer of songs primarily from the 1920s to the 1940s. In three-hour stretches, he belts them out to the wonderment of passersby in Harvard Square. His unabashedly in-your-ear voice, often in high falsetto, carries across the sidewalk to the surroundings.
Six feet tall, 200 pounds, arrayed in red flannel pants, winter boots, green cap down over his forehead, broad face, and two pencil-thin mustachio lines, Bill loves to entertain the passing world. He knows 160 songs by heart and only rarely forgets any of their lyrics.
Students he considers his main target. Of them he says, “I’m bringing a sort of a mirror of what they are doing. They are actually falling in love and I’m bringing love songs. You see them holding hands as they walk by and I’m singing love songs.”
Bill has been performing in the Square for only the last seven years, but singing since he was a boy growing up in nearby Chelsea. When World War II came along, he joined the Navy and was sent to Bethesda, Maryland. After a medical discharge, he went to art school, traveled widely, and then came to Cambridge.
There he met a millionairess who taught him part of his guiding philosophy. “She gave me insight into the fact that what is money compared to love,” he recalls appreciatively. “I wanted love, I wanted art, I didn’t want money,” he adds.
Besides being a romantic, he also shows himself a patriot. The first song he rendered on a cold winter afternoon last week was “America the Beautiful.” Later he drew “The Star Spangled Banner” from his repertoire and performed it with the same earnestness. When singing, he sheds all inhibition and lets go with abandon, often transfixing those who hear his voice.
Where does he get the chutzpah to set up his equipment on a public sidewalk and sing out so boldly? At the beginning, he confesses having felt “a little bit” embarrassed but, by now, “I’m completely relaxed.” No one harasses him: his Cambridge Arts Council badge, purchased for 40 dollars each year, makes him legit.
Some people like him a lot. A middle-aged woman who did not give her age evaluates Bill enthusiastically, “I think he’s great, I’m a vocalist myself.” Jason., 20-something, offers a less committed evaluation: “He’s something different.”
But Bill does not depend on his reviews. He loves the songs behind the sheet music covers lined up against the wall: old favorites such as “My Foolish Heart” with Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward; “At the Balalaika” featuring Nelson Eddy and Ilona Massey; “Babes In Arms,” with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland; and “Folks Who Live on the Hill,” by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein.
Among the composers Bill likes best, Jerome Kern tops the field. But he puts in a fervent plug for obscure composers who wrote great songs. No one remembers the writer of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” or another WWII song “There’ll be Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs of Dover” but they remain outstanding pieces.
After a lifetime of what he calls “running around,” Bill is glad to be settled in his chosen community. “Now I realize there’s no place like home,” he says. “I can be happy and revel right around here without going to the so-called enchanting places that people rave about.”
But he believes in good exercise. This he gets by riding his bike around the Boston area. “I’ve been cycling every day for the past 67 years,” he claims, not without some hyperbole.
He also exercises by pushing his song kit along. This cart comprises his microphone, sound system, and props. In addition to the sheet music covers, these latter include a toy cat and other animals. Assembled in one package on wheels, this material provides him with resistance exercise when he goes back and forth to his apartment some blocks from his performance sites.
As indicated earlier, this flamboyant gentleman trusts to his sayings. He can produce a quote or an original aphorism as commentary on almost any phenomenon. “I’ve studied quotations and proverbs, and the wisdom of the old sages in a concise way,” he explains. However, he adds: “I haven’t studied too much beyond that.”
Sayings about love loom large in his repertoire but they often veer sharply away from the romantic. “There’s a saying, leave women and they follow you, follow them and they leave you.” Interpreting this statement, he applies it to himself: “I’m a real Don Juan, I can do without women.” But then he laughs.
Richard Griffin