Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

He was one of the early architects of Jamaican music – a guitarist, bass player, songwriter, arranger and producer whose contributions to hundreds of recordings helped to shape reggae and popularize it around the world. He played with Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Johnny Nash and Toots and the Maytals, and worked for such famous studio owners as Duke Reid, Bunny Lee and Lee (Scratch) Perry, and the Trojan, Treasure Isle and Upsetter record labels. Yet the name Ronnie (Bop) Williams is barely known outside of reggae circles. Part of the reason for the near anonymity was Mr. Williams’s own modesty. A soft-spoken man, he came from extremely humble roots in rural Jamaica, teaching himself to play on ...

To walk through the middle of Toronto's Kensington Market on a Saturday in the early ’80s was to enter what locals called the “wobble zone.” There on a stretch of Kensington Avenue, between St. Andrew and Baldwin, the booming bass sounds coming from two sets of opposing speakers could throw passersby a little off balance. The duelling sound systems, like something out of The Harder They Come, belonged to a pair of Jamaican expat musicians who ran competing reggae record shops, each facing the other. Stranger Cole came first, in 1978, launching his Roots Records store – the first Caribbean business in the Market – at 58 Kensington. Four years later, Rannie “Bop” Williams opened Record Corner ...

Toronto reggae-soul star Jay Douglas, originally from Montego Bay, got his start with the Cougars, playing at the West Indies Federation Club at Brunswick and College then at Club Jamaica on Yonge Street before crossing over to Le Coq D'Or. The Cougars can be heard on the great Jamaica to Toronto compilation from the Light in the Attic label. Here, Jay and his band return to Yonge and take over the Friar's Music Museum space for a half-hour concert and an animated history lesson of the Toronto music scene. Tip o' the hat to Mark Garner, Museum co-curator Jan Haust and the ever youthful legend Jay Douglas. Watch Jay at the Friar's Music Museum here 

There was a time in the 1950s when Torontonians regularly shuffled off to Buffalo for excitement. That was in the days when puritanical laws in Toronto the Good kept entertainment under tight wraps and alcohol and rock 'n' roll flowed more freely on the American side. But during the Roaring '20s, many Buffalonians were frequently travelling to Crystal Beach, Ontario by ferry boat to visit its giant amusement park and world famous dance hall, featuring the biggest bands of the Swing Era. Opened in 1925, the Crystal Beach Ballroom held the largest dance floor in North America, with room for 3000 dancers on its gleaming wooden dance floor. Among the biggest names to perform there were Coun...

Some songs live forever. Infused with musical elixir, they transcend time and space and even their original language. The Gipsy Kings, for instance, do Sinatra's signature tune "My Way" their way. And the raunchy Latino standard "La Bamba" has been sanctified by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, no less. For all we know, Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode," now hurtling somewhere out in space aboard the Voyager II, will become a hit on Neptune when it reaches the planet sometime in the next millennium. So how to explain the longevity of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," which made Brooklyn's The Tokens a one-hit wonder in the '60s? Despite its trite lyrics ("In the jungle, the mighty jungle," etc.) the song...

African-Canadian performers have long faced prejudice and deeply ingrained racial stereotypes within the entertainment world. These six women, singers who sometimes also worked as stage actresses and TV performers, overcame those challenges to become stars in Canada and around the world. The trails they blazed created pathways for other Canadian black female entertainers to follow. Portia White Canada’s first black concert singer to gain international fame, Portia White came from a family steeped in African-Canadian history: her mother was a descendant of Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia, while her father was the son of former slaves from Virginia. Born on June 24, 1911 in Truro, Nova Scotia, ...

Everything has to start somewhere. For True North Records and Bruce Cockburn, the beginning can be traced to April 7, 1970. On that spring day in Toronto, a remarkably mild and sunny one, by all accounts, True North was auspiciously born with the release of Cockburn’s first solo album. The reviews for the record were universally ecstatic. One newspaper said it deserved “nothing but praise,” while another called the album “quite simply the best thing to happen in Canadian music since Joni Mitchell.” It was the start of a long and fruitful partnership between label and artist. Over the next 50 years, True North would issue another 33 albums by the acclaimed singer-songwriter (along with hundre...

When Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan performs, people get high. They break into tears, fall into trances and feel like they’re flying. They may even see God. It’s something the Pakistani singer’s proud of—actually it’s his mission in life. Yet Khan, who performs Sunday with his seven-member “Party” at Roy Thomson Hall, has nothing to do with drug-induced states of ecstasy. As the world’s leading performer of qawwali, the devotional music of Sufi Muslims, his approach is purely spiritual. It’s a tradition that dates back to the 12th and 13th centuries. Sufi poems, praising Allah and his prophets to music, are sung in Urdu, Punjabi or the original Persian language. And a qawwali ...

The Troubadour is one of the most storied venues in popular music. Beginning in 1961, owner Doug Weston ran the club, located in West Hollywood on Santa Monica Boulevard, as a showcase for folk and country artists. Later, it featured rock musicians as well. The Troubadour is where Elton John made his triumphant U.S. debut, where the Byrds, who met at a Monday open mic, first performed their classic take on Dylan’s “Tambourine Man,” where Buffalo Springfield made their live debut, where the Eagles’ Don Henley and Glenn Frey met in the front bar and where Led Zeppelin famously played with Fairport Convention in a three-hour jam session. But more than anything, the Troubadour became synonymous ...

Charismatic reggae star Michael Rose’s Toronto connections run deep. Rose, Black Uhuru singer-songwriter in the group’s glory days of the early 1980s, wrote one of Uhuru’s best-loved songs, “Youth of Eglington (sic),” about a shooting incident that occurred in 1981 during one of his frequent Toronto visits. And the performer’s brother, Horace, owns Rap’s Place, a popular restaurant in the Jamaican neighbourhood around Oakwood and Eglinton. So it’s fitting that Rose, now a respected solo performer, should help launch Toronto’s newest reggae club, I-Beam (1 Robina Ave., east of Oakwood, off St. Clair) with a headline performance there Saturday. His appearance comes at a time when Black Uhuru i...