Messages on the 'Friends of Bill Hinkley and Judy Larson' Facebook page are reporting that Bill died this morning.

Garrison Keillor wrote an obit that is posted on the Prairie Home Companion web site:

Bill had an insatiable appetite for music and his great happiness was to sit among kindred spirits and play by the hour, jazz, Irish, jug band music, old rock 'n' roll, country music, almost anything that allowed for improvisation. He was a father of the acoustic music community in Minnesota and everybody knew him and Judy. He was an inspiration to so many people and a source of frustration to some of us who wanted him to have a bigger career. But Bill, like Thoreau or some old Ojibway medicine man, chose to live his life on his own terms, off the clock and outside the grid. He had little interest in the music business as such, marketing, networking, and so forth. He enjoyed playing the radio show, I think, but he would just as soon sit around in his backyard for six hours with friends and play their way through a river of tunes, one after another. He was generous always to anyone who wanted to learn from him: his eyes lit up if you asked him questions. He was most animated when talking about his young and promising fiddle students. I don't remember Bill ever reminiscing about his life, but when he heard a kid play fiddle tunes whom he, Bill, had taught, he was utterly joyful. That was more important to him than the radio show. When I visited Bill a week before he died, he was picking out on mandolin a tune he wanted to be played at his funeral, "Niel Gow's Lamentation for James Moray of Abercairney" and he recalled for me a song we sang on a canoe trip thirty-five years before, "Golden eggs, golden eggs,/Happy golden eggs./O improve them as they fry,/These happy golden eggs." He was restless at the end, hanging on as best he could, and was comforted by the presence of friends playing music.