Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

The home of music journalist Nicholas Jennings, author of Lightfoot, the definitive new Gordon Lightfoot biography from Penguin Random House.

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Obituaries, Books

This Beat Goes On: Canadian Pop Music in the 1970s

A two-hour documentary that aired on television in 2009 and was released on DVD  that same year. This Beat Goes On tells the story of Canadian music in the 1970s, a ground-breaking era of great sounds, from glam and progressive rock to punk and reggae.  Mixing archival footage with candid interviews, the documentary features proven hitmakers as well as a wealth of new folksingers, blues artists and mullet-rockers. Solo artists and progressive rockers still rule, but it’s also a time of shaved heads and skinny ties, as punk and new wave artists push their way into the spotlight. By the end of the decade, the Can-rock revolution has arrived. This Beat Goes On presents ...
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Shakin' All Over: Canadian Pop Music in the 1960s

 A two-hour documentary that initially aired on Canadian TV in January, 2006 and was released on DVD on December 11, 2007. The documentary captures the sounds of the 1960s in Canada, from the folk music of Ian and Sylvia, and the rhythm 'n blues of Ronnie Hawkins, to the many other legendary stars like Joni Mitchell, The Guess Who, Neil Young, Anne Murray, The Band, cult heroes like David Wiffen, The Collectors and Mashmakhan, and some of Canada's brightest younger stars including Blue Rodeo, Barenaked Ladies and Sarah Harmer. Full of candid interviews with more than 60 iconic figures.         Here is a list of all the songs featured, taken from concert footage and T...
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Gordon Lightfoot's music education

Gordon Lightfoot, who passed away May 1, would have turned 85 today. His legacy includes songs that will live on for decades to come. Success didn’t come easy for him. In the beginning, Lightfoot worked hard at learning everything there was to know about music. Long before his first hit records, Lightfoot tried choir singing, barbershopping, pop crooning, jazz drumming and square dancing. While in a folk duo called the Two Tones, he even jumped on the Belafonte craze and belted out a calypso. When he was 19 and studying jazz composition and orchestration at the Westlake College of Music in Hollywood, Lightfoot and three fellow students moonlighted as the Four Winds, recor...
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