Mike Daley's Yorkville book

The publication of Mike Daley’s book Yorkville: How a 1960s Coffee House Scene Rewrote Popular Music is a welcome deep dive into what was arguably Toronto’s most influential cultural district. It comes nearly 30 years after Penguin published my book on Yorkville, Before the Gold Rush: Flashbacks to the Dawn of the Canadian Sound. 

Back then, I couldn’t believe there hadn’t already numerous books published on Yorkville, the way there had been on Greenwich Village, Haight-Ashbury and other scenes. After all, Yorkville had easily produced as many artists, both bands and singer-songwriters, that had made an impact at home and abroad. 

Given it was the mid-1990s—the Palaeolithic period, long before Google, social media and online databases—my research was a lot like conducting a gruelling archeological dig, without much of any previous work to draw on. Even finding the major figures in the scene was challenging. And by that point over 30 years had passed from Yorkville’s heyday and memories of survivors were unreliable. So corroborating facts and dates from interviews involved painstaking searches of newspaper microfilms at the Reference Library. 

In the end, Before the Gold Rush drew from over 100 interviews with musicians, club owners, waitresses and painted as rich a portrait as was possible then of the neighbourhood I called the birthplace of Canadian song. I’m grateful it was well received and is still often pointed to as a seminal work in Canadian music history.

Now Mike has been able to take the story of Yorkville to the next level, finding new facts and interview subjects that eluded me back then. Of course, he’s had the benefit of my book and everything else that has been published and come to light online since.

But, to be clear, I don’t begrudge Mike those advantages—that’s the way historical documentation works: it deepens with each new investigation. In fact, I applaud Mike for researching and writing his book and for giving the Yorkville story the importance it deserves. It’s a fascinating read, with plenty of cool revelations that were thrilling to discover, and I urge music fans everywhere to pick it up.