SIDNEY — As far as Bruce Moon remembers, the last time he was in The Historic Sidney Theatre was to watch “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

On Wednesday — a good 55 years later — Moon was the main attraction.

Moon performed in his hometown for the first time on Wednesday for the Tri-County Board of Recovery and Mental Health Service’s kickoff concert for its Art of Recovery exhibition.

“It has been a hoot,” Moon said. “There were people there (Wednesday) I had not seen for 60 years, and a lot of old friends. It was really fun.”

Moon, 73, is a singer-songwriter and painter and has long been involved in the arts. He has performed all his life. Since retiring in 2017 from a 40-year career working and teaching art therapy, writing music and performing has been his full-time focus.

“It’s been nothing but fun,” Moon said of focusing on music. “Blessed is the man who can’t tell the difference between his application and vocation, and I have been blessed in that way.”

He performed several songs on Wednesday from latest album “Hometown Stories and Songs (Live),” which was released on July 16, in front of a large crowd. Moon also performed Thursday at Treasure Island in Troy during another Tri-County Board event.

He said performing for a hometown crowd was one of his most nerve-wracking experiences.

“The second set that I did is from this latest album, and it’s all hometown stories and songs,” Moon said. “It was really fun to play that for people who understood where I was coming from. But nerve-wracking. You want to do well for your hometown.”

He worked for over 20 years as an art therapist at a psychiatric hospital in the Columbus area and then followed with a 20-year career at Mount Maury University in Milwaukee teaching about the field.

“It’s always been together,” Moon said of his music and work as an art therapist. “… From very early on, I started to write poetry in response to clients and the poetry led to making music about clients.”

He graduated from Sidney in 1969 and after graduating from Wright State four years later, he began working at Harding Hospital in Worthington; he stayed the hospital until 1996.

“It was, in a lot of ways, a Cadillac of psychiatric hospitals,” Moon said. “It was private hospital. And when I first started there, we had average length stay of about nine months, and we really had time to form deep, meaningful relationships with clients and to help them work through the whatever very difficult issues they were struggling with.

“By the time I left there in 1996, the average length stay was three days. And so that’s that is a huge change in in mental health services in America, and what happened, of course, is a lot of those folks who would have been in the hospital are now what we call the homeless and are living on the streets. And I think it’s a tragedy.”

He began writing textbooks about the profession in his last few years working in the field. After being invited to do several guest lectures at universities, he decided to transition to academia. He said he has 12 books used regularly in graduate programs around the country and said he thinks his real contribution to the field is storytelling.

“I was always bored by research paradigm … and all that kind of the mathematical part of doing academic research,” Moon said. “And so my work was always about how to tell the stories of clients in a way that would honor them, but also then educate students about how to do the work.

“And that’s probably what I feel best about. And I kind of carried that on through the whole through the whole experience.”

Much of Moon’s art has been based on experiences with clients. But before making his most recent album, he said he lacked inspiration.

Moon talked with friend who is a touring musician, and his friend told him, “Anytime I get stuck, I just go back home and drive around my hometown, and something always comes up.”

Moon didn’t return physically after that advice, but did mentally.

“I started think of the old wall by the Miami River that everybody vandalizes,” Moon said. “That was the first one I wrote from that album. And from that story, other stories started to pop back up.”

Moon told stories about growing up in Sidney, including about his friend Cliff Adams, who Moon said had his own hot rod jalopy that never ran. He also reminisced about driving around town from the old Frisch’s location on Wapakoneta Avenue, down to Big Four Bridge and back.

“When I told that story, there were lots of people who got a kick out of that,” Moon said.

Moon has a lot of family and relatives still in the area and returns often, but said he’s seen more of Sidney on his recent stay.

“I think the thing that’s been interesting is the combination of seeing stores boarded up and seeing all the renovation of the stuff with the Murphy Building and Poplar Street, and even on Ohio Avenue, seeing some of the new things come in. So it’s been fun to see it sort of be revitalized a little bit.”

More information about Moon and links to find Moon’s music on popular services like Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music on his website https://bclunar.wixsite.com/mysite.

Reach Sidney Daily News editor Bryant Billing at 937-538-4822, or follow @BryantBillingSDN on Facebook or @TopBillingSport on X (Twitter).