Geoff Bartley

Geoff Bartley (1948 – ?) is a folk-blues guitar player singer-songwriter and recording artist. His last two CDs, 2009’s “Put the Big Stone Down” and 2011’s “Mercy for the Dispossessed”, were promoted by Kari Estrin Management in Nashville and went to No. 1 on folk radio.

In the 1980s, Geoff won four guitars at the National Fingerpicking Champion-ships in Winfield, Kansas. Some of his songs and co-writes have been recorded by other artists in New England, Canada, Ireland, and Nashville, and some are included in the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings of the Fast Folk Musical Magazine collection in Washington, D.C. A new CD called “Particles of Light” will become available in late summer 2014. Since 1994 Geoff has played guitar and sung harmony for folk treasure Tom Paxton. Geoff was also instrumental in bringing the HD-40LSH Tom Paxton Signature Model Martin guitar into production in 2004. In 2007, Geoff’s song A Letter from Prison about Nelson Mandela was recorded by the progressive bluegrass band, The Infamous Stringdusters, on their CD “Fork in the Road” on Sugar Hill. Subsequently, that recording was used in the independent 2008 Lionsgate film “The Lucky Ones”. Before his main stage appearance at the 2009 Boston Folk Festival, the Boston Area Coffeehouse Association awarded Geoff its Jerry Christen Memorial Lifetime Achievement Award. The folk press has called him a world-class guitarist, a brilliant songwriter and the prophet and spiritual godfather of the Boston folk scene.