Jim Payne is from Notre Dame Bay, Newfoundland and has been a professional performing artist and writer for 19 years. Long known as a leading performer and collector of Newfoundland traditional music, he is also one of the province's most prolific songwriters, working in several genres.

Jim has directed, composed and performed music for some of the most popular theatre productions of the past two decades,as well as creating soundtracks for plays, documentaries and videos. He has performed extensively on radio and television in Canada and abroad, and has toured throughout Canada, the US, Europe, Japan and Australia.

Jim has a string of recording credits to his name, including solo recordings, contributions to anthologies of Newfoundland music, and support and production work on recordings by other Newfoundland artists. Jim also owns and operates his own recording label, SingSong Inc., which has released seven titles since 1990. He is also a producer of concerts and special events featuring traditional and contemporary music, song, story and dance that reflect the Newfoundland experience.

Jim plays guitar, accordion, mandolin, tin whistle and violin, and is a singer, storyteller, actor, writer, stepdancer, and teacher of traditional Newfoundland set and square dances.

He has toured with six of Rising Tide Theatre's Annual Revues, and has appeared in many other RTT productions including Newfoundlanders Away, Hold Fast, and Shakespeare's Hamlet, for which he created a musical score and played the gravedigger. In the past two years, he has toured all over Newfoundland and Labrador, the west coast of Canada, Northern Ireland, and the eastern seaboard of the US. He has just released a new album of shanties and work songs from Atlantic Canada, and is one half of the popular musical comedy duo, Sods'n Rhymes.