A Canadian music pioneer passes - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

Sometimes I worry that, as an old guy, I’m reminiscing too much about the past in my column. At the same time, I think it’s important for readers to know the history that made us what we are today. This is one of those times.

 

Country musician Tommy Hunter died at age 89 last week at a retirement home in London, Ontario. His long career spanned important changes in Canada. He started out with the weekly country and western music show Country Hoedown with host Gordie Tapp. (The show also included future star Gordon Lightfoot as one of the square dancers before he became internationally famous as a singer/composer.)

 

That show ran for nine years on CBC. I remember watching now and then. As Hunter later mentioned, there was only one TV channel back then, so you either watched that or you turned off the TV. Few did in those days.

 

There were two country music shows on CBC back then: Country Hoedown and Don Messer’s Jubilee. Locally, CKNX’s Doc Cruickshank also had two country shows. He also hosted the Saturday Night Barn Dance on the radio, travelled to a different location each Saturday night and starred the musicians and singers from his TV shows.

 

As Hunter became more and more popular, his fame led to him having a lunchtime radio show. Finally, in 1965, when he was only 28, he got his own television show: The Tommy Hunter Show. Originally broadcast in black and white, it stayed on air (in colour) until 1992.

 

Also on his show for almost 25 years was fiddler Al Cherney, originally on CKNX who became known as “Flying Fingers” and was inducted into the Country Hall of Fame, in 1989, the same year he died of lung cancer.

 

During the years that The Tommy Hunter Show was broadcast over CBC, Canada changed so much. Canada’s Centennial was held in 1967, only two years after his show went on the air. We got our own maple leaf flag in 1965, the same year that Hunter’s show began. In 1967, Montreal held its famous Expo ’67, which boosted Canadian loyalty. We began to be proud of our country, not think of ourselves as second class compared to, first, Great Britain, and later, the United States.

 

We were used to having so much of our TV imported from the U.S., paticularly as we got privately-owned networks, but The Tommy Hunter Show was seen not only on CBC but was exported to the Nashville Network.

 

 

I remember how from having no recording studios in Canada we got one locally. CKNX star Ernie King opened a music shop on Wingham’s main street and later included a recording studio in the facility. (He was a creative man and also bought Silver Lake near Kinloss and had an amphibious car that could drive on the highway or take to water using propellers to power it.)

 

Though I remember all this, I wasn’t a fan of country music. I remember playing my newly-bought transistor radio while I did my homework after school and listening to a new DJ on CKNX who actually played rock music. Later, I listened to a London station where the host was one of the first DJs in North America to play The Beatles.

 

I also watched a half-hour TV show on CBC that came from a different city each night. The show from Winnipeg featured The Guess Who. The show from Vancouver included David Foster, who eventually moved to the U.S. where he won 16 Grammy Awards from 45 nominations across the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.

 

It’s hard to remember that all these changes have come along since Tommy Hunter first went on television. All kinds of Canadians have emerged as stars, like Diana Krall, Terri Clark, Nelly Furtado, Anne Murray, Bryan Adams, Sarah McLachlan, Avril Lavigne, Justin Bieber, Celine Dion, Shania Twain and the greatest of them all, Drake, whose mansion sits across the road from the former home of the late Gordon Lightfoot.

 

But before any of these, Tommy Hunter was showing the way. He made Toronto a place to be for later legends like Anne Murray. He helped make people stars by having them appear on his show over 22 years.

 

So much has changed - among the most serious locally being the end of Doc Cruikshank’s local bands - but in general Canada is not the place it was in 1965 when Hunter got his own show. Younger Canadians couldn’t imagine the world back then after the contributions of the many stars who have populated the air waves with Canadian music. Tommy Hunter played a pioneering role in today’s Canada.