On a clear fall day in 1958, twenty-one-year-old Lightfoot headed south, making the trip to Toronto he had done so many times before. This time was different: he was moving there for good. His parents supported his decision. Gord Sr. had even bought him a car as a leaving-home gift. As he drove down Highway 400 in his secondhand Pontiac, Lightfoot had a flurry of thoughts racing through his head. He remembered the Kiwanis Festival wins at Massey Hall when he was a kid and how he’d driven to Toronto as a teenager to pitch publisher Harold Moon his “Hula Hoop Song.” Getting his music career going wouldn’t be easy, but he realized that his best shot was to keep working with the Two Timers, the Everly Brothers–style duo with his high school buddy Terry Whelan.
Lightfoot found accommodation at Mrs. Smith’s rooming house in Toronto’s east end, sharing with Brendan McKinnon, the Orillia friend with whom he’d once sung Elvis songs. But he needed a job. His father, who knew the manager at the Royal Bank of Canada in Orillia, helped him land one as a junior clerk at the bank’s Yonge and Eglinton branch. Young Lightfoot’s salary was $48 a week—enough to cover his room and board and keep his Pontiac filled with gas.
Toronto in the late 1950s was still a buttoned-down town. Rock ’n’ roll had arrived in Toronto the Good to loosen hips and, according to the guardians of morality, corrupt local youths, but the city was still a pretty staid place. The wildest action could be found down on Yonge Street. There, visiting rockers, jazz players and country singers were busy plying their trade in clubs along the neon-lit district known as the Strip. Bo Diddley, Oscar Peterson and Conway Twitty all played there. And Pete Seeger and the Weavers had come to town, performing “Goodnight, Irene” at Massey Hall for college kids, but folk music had not yet exploded.
Lightfoot had little time to absorb all this. By day, he was pushing paper; by night, he was busy trying to find work for the Two Timers. Whelan was still living in Orillia, and gigs weren’t frequent. But Lightfoot did manage to get them booked at places like Bloor Street’s Collegiate Club, a teenage nightspot that had once showcased 1950s vocal stars the Four Lads, the Diamonds and the Crew-Cuts. Dressed in dark suits and slicked-back hair, the Two Timers were a polished act, with Lightfoot on a four-string tenor guitar and Whelan strumming a baritone ukulele. Their repertoire consisted of crowd-pleasing covers of pop tunes and country ballads, with the occasional calypso and Irish folk song thrown in. Lightfoot’s smooth voice carried them musically, while Whelan did the talking. Together they drew on all the experience they’d gained playing for tourists around Orillia. To get his high school diploma, some of Lightfoot’s evenings were also spent making up for his failed algebra course. “I went to night school at the same time I was working at the bank,” he recalls. “I was certainly an industrious little bugger.”
Lightfoot also found time for songwriting. Marg McEachern, his dance partner from Pefferlaw, was now running a music school in Toronto. Her business partner was Art Snider, a veteran pianist with connections in the music world. McEachern made the introduction, telling Snider of her friend’s talent. She also insisted that Lightfoot use their studio space to work on his songwriting. One night, while passing by one of the rehearsal rooms, Snider noticed Lightfoot sitting at a piano with pen in hand, putting down some notation. “Can you write lead sheets?” Snider asked. “I think so,” replied Lightfoot. “Come over to my studio on Eglinton,” Snider told him. “I’ve got a tape full of songs that need transcribing.” Lightfoot’s Westlake training was coming in handy.
Soon, Lightfoot was copying scores for CBC musical productions that Snider had arranged. The work was painstaking. “It all had to be written with great care,” says Lightfoot. “Ink on onionskin transparencies—that was the process. There were no photocopiers. You’d take the sheets to this guy who’d transfer them onto white sheets of paper using ammonia. I’d be there once a week. The smell of the ammonia was overpowering.” Soon, he was copying individual parts for the likes of Rick Wilkins, Lucio Agostini and Bert Niosi, working musicians who were members of CBC orchestras at the network’s Sumach Street studios.
Working in the bank by day and copying music scores by night didn’t leave Lightfoot much time for socializing. And there was no new girlfriend yet in his life. On one rare night off, Lightfoot ventured downtown to the Yonge Street strip, where he hoped a little romance might be found. Yonge Street could be a dangerous place for a small-town boy, as young Gord discovered that night at a Las Vegas–style nightclub called the Brown Derby. He’d gone to hear the house band, Joe King & the Zaniacs, and was knocking back beers to get his confidence up, hoping to maybe meet a woman, when it all went terribly wrong.
I looked at somebody’s girl when I shouldn’t have. I looked at her and she returned my gaze. Turned out her boyfriend was a thug, even had a switchblade. He and three or four of his friends played cat and mouse with me for the next half hour, chasing me through the Brown Derby and its other room down below. They almost caught me in O’Keefe Lane, the alleyway behind, but I managed to escape in a taxicab. Scared the hell out of me. I wouldn’t go downtown to a bar for six months after that.
Through his CBC connections, Art Snider learned of an opening at Country Hoedown, the TV network’s corny but wildly popular country music series. The show needed another cast member for its square-dance group, the Singin’ Swingin’ Eight, and Snider urged Lightfoot to audition. Lightfoot knew he could handle the singing side of the job but had serious doubts about the swinging, square-dancing part. The audition proved him right: the producers liked his voice but felt his footwork was hopeless. One producer called him “a clumsy son of a bitch.” Still, they were so impressed they figured some intensive dance training would sort him out. Lightfoot was hired. Rehearsals began immediately, with the show set to debut in a primetime slot that October. Lightfoot had to tell his parents and the bank that he was quitting. Gord Sr., inherently cautious, worried that his son was being hasty: “You’re leaving your job to do what?”
Lightfoot was convinced that Country Hoedown, the square dancing notwithstanding, was a good move. The job paid twice as much as the bank did, and for less work: two days of rehearsals at the Sumach studios, then a third on Friday at Studio 4 on Yonge at Marlborough,* where the show went live at 8 P.M. The show’s set was a makeshift barn, complete with wagon wheels and bales of straw, and its host, Gordie Tapp, played a hayseed character in bib overalls and blackened teeth. Members of the Singin’ Swingin’ Eight wore yoked cowboy shirts or gingham crinoline dresses and usually performed five numbers each week, including such hokey fare as “Heel and Toe Polka” and “Boomps-a-Daisy.” The new kid in the cast was soon nicknamed “Gord Leadfoot” because of his tendency to allemande left instead of do-si-do right.
Still, Lightfoot loved the show’s colorful characters, especially Gordie Tapp, who was pure cornball, and the redheaded Hames Sisters—Jean, Marjorie and Norma—who were “cute, bubbly and a lot of fun.” Regular guests on the show included the Red & Les Trio, who were signed to Snider’s Chateau label. Red and Les Pouliot hailed from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Red’s real name was Laurice Pouliot, a former carny worker and freight train hopper who’d done a stint in prison. No one knew exactly what crime he’d committed. He changed his name to Red Shea to distance himself from his checkered past and became a mean guitar picker. Les could also play and was an aspiring songwriter (the trio was rounded out by bassist Bill Gibbs). In Toronto, Red and Les became known as the gas-guzzling Pouliot boys, siphoning petrol to run their beat-up convertible around town.
Country Hoedown’s house band, fiddler King Ganam and his Sons of the West, included a tall, broad-shouldered guitarist named Tommy Hunter. One Friday, Lightfoot and Hunter arrived at the Yonge Street studio early. In the dressing room, Hunter took out his guitar and started playing the Carter Family’s “Wildwood Flower,” with its distinctive “Carter scratch” style of picking the melody on the bass strings while simultaneously strumming on the treble strings. Lightfoot was transfixed. “Play that again,” he said. Hunter obliged, and was impressed that the newcomer showed so much interest. “If you listen to some of Gord’s early recordings,” says Hunter today, “there’s a bit of Carter scratch in there.” Lightfoot was learning tons, absorbing ideas at every turn.
Lightfoot and Whelan were now performing under a new name, the Two Tones. Impresario Billy O’Connor got them a few nightclub bookings and a variety and ice-show benefit for the Kiwanis Club. O’Connor boasted to the Toronto Star with astonishing hyperbole that the Two Tones had a “better sound than the Kingston Trio,” America’s popular folk group. The combination of O’Connor’s promotional enthusiasm and Snider’s industry acumen got Lightfoot and Whelan gigs on CBC shows like Talent Caravan. When the Two Tones appeared on the network’s While We’re Young, the duo performed Belafonte’s Caribbean song “Don’t Ever Love Me,” and, with host Tommy Ambrose, tackled the Mexican-flavored “Three Caballeros.” But as the Toronto Star wrote in a dismissive review, “The guitar-strumming lads kept away from anything even suggesting rock and roll, despite their superficial resemblance to the Everly Brothers.”
Lightfoot wasn’t about to allow a few snide jabs to derail him. He continued to plug away at his songwriting. Keeping up his Country Hoedown duties, and still believing the Two Tones could be a success, he also started moonlighting as a drummer with the Up Tempo ‘61 revue at the King Edward Hotel. And he kept even busier performing with Jack Zaza’s band at its Friday night residency at the Orchard Park Tavern in the city’s east end, drumming and singing as he’d done with Orillia’s Charlie Andrews Orchestra.
Snider admired Lightfoot’s ambition and took the Two Tones into the studio to make their first recording. The single “Lessons in Love,” a breezy number written by Sy Soloway and Shirley Wolfe, came out on the Quality label. Its flip side was “Sweet Polly,” a cheery tune penned by Les Pouliot. In an effort to boost radio play, the pair also recorded station breaks and safety checks that began with a chirpy “Hi, we’re the Two Tones: Gordie Lightfoot and Terry Whelan.” It didn’t work: the single stiffed.
The sad truth was that the Two Tones were musically out of step with the times. A folk music boom was resounding across North America, sparked by the phenomenal success of the Kingston Trio’s earnest murder ballad “Tom Dooley.” Audiences craved traditional story songs with a ring of truth more than well-polished pop tunes. New coffeehouses were featuring budding troubadours. And folk festivals, the biggest being in Newport, Rhode Island, were springing up everywhere—even in Lightfoot’s hometown. There, Ruth Jones, her husband, Dr. Crawford Jones, her brother, David Major, and broadcaster Pete McGarvey launched Canada’s first folk music festival and called it Mariposa, after Stephen Leacock’s fictional name for Orillia. Lightfoot applied for the Two Tones to appear but was turned down, despite his duo’s local connection. Their music was judged too polished. Instead, the inaugural Mariposa, held in August 1961, featured the more “authentic” folk sounds of Alan Mills, Bonnie Dobson, Ian Tyson and Sylvia Fricker and the Weavers-inspired Travellers. Lightfoot was understandably hurt by the rejection.
By now, Lightfoot was living in a condemned building on Yorkville’s Avenue Road with four other Orillia lads. He continued composing his own songs, carefully writing out the words and musical notation on parchment paper and quietly registering them with the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. In his bedroom in that rundown house, he wrote “Remember Me (I’m the One),” a forlorn country ballad full of regret and remorse about forsaking the woman he loves. The lyrics went, “I’m the one who ran away and left you all alone / I’m the one who broke your heart and scorned the love I’d known.” Although the story was a figment of his imagination, “Remember Me” was a harbinger of songs Lightfoot would write about failed romance.
Lightfoot played “Remember Me” for Snider, who felt the song had great potential. Snider convinced his protégé to drive with him to Nashville to record it. Even better, he arranged for Chet Atkins, one of the biggest names in country music, to assemble top Nashville cats like guitarist Grady Martin and pianists Floyd Cramer and Hargus “Pig” Robbins to play on the sessions at RCA Studios. Atkins himself dropped in for the recording. “Knowing Chet was there got me fired up,” says Lightfoot. “I even tried to sing it in more of a baritone.” It wouldn’t be the last time Lightfoot would record in Nashville.
Lightfoot returned to Toronto armed with a dozen recorded songs that Snider planned to release on his new Chateau label. But first, Snider agreed to produce a live recording of the Two Tones. The Village Corner was the first club in the Yorkville coffeehouse district to feature live music regularly, promising “folksinging for the discriminating folknik.” On the night of January 20, 1962, in the midst of a huge ice storm, Lightfoot and Whelan made their way to the club. While the crowd smoked and drank coffee in the cramped quarters down below, the duo waited upstairs for Snider and engineer Dave Newberry to arrive with the recording gear. The session finally got underway after midnight. Backed by stand-up bassist Howie Morris, the Two Tones performed a mix of traditional folk and country songs, calypso tunes and pop fare courtesy of Les Pouliot. There were also a couple of surprises: a spiritual popularized by Nina Simone, “Children, Go Where I Send Thee,” and, more significantly, a brand-new Lightfoot composition, “This Is My Song.” It was all captured on tape.
The album proved to be a good move. Two Tones at the Village Corner kept the Two Tones busy for much of 1962. Mariposa even booked the duo for its second festival in Orillia, slotting Lightfoot and Whelan (mistakenly billed as the “Tu Tones”) into the Sunday afternoon schedule. No sooner were the Two Tones experiencing a little success than Whelan’s fast-talking father started pushing for the pair to formalize their partnership. Lightfoot’s dad disagreed. In his quiet, measured tone, Gord Sr. told his son, “You need to do this yourself.” Lightfoot was caught in the middle.
I just wasn’t happy. I was writing songs and Terry wasn’t. But Terry’s father, Tom, who worked in refrigeration and often acted like our manager, was really pressuring us to sign a partnership agreement that was going to split everything fifty-fifty. “It’s a mutual pooling of talent,” he said, “no matter what.”
Meanwhile, Snider released “Remember Me,” and the single was climbing the charts. Country Hoedown’s producers asked Lightfoot to sing it on the show. It was the first time he’d ever performed on Hoedown without the rest of the Singin’ Swingin’ Eight. Everyone praised his smooth, confident performance. Lightfoot knew it was time to end it with Whelan.
I went back to Orillia and was so upset by the prospect that I fell face down in my aunt’s living room and had a nervous breakdown. I didn’t want to break up with Terry, but I just knew that I had to. It was just like getting a divorce.
While agonizing over ending the duo, Lightfoot moved into a new rooming house on Admiral Road. It was right around the corner from the Dupont Street laundromat where homeless busking musician and future Lovin’ Spoonful member Zal Yanovsky was sleeping in a clothes dryer. One of Lightfoot’s new housemates was a young blond woman whose room was down the hallway from his. Brita Olaisson had arrived from Sweden with the intention of learning English while working for the Toronto office of M.P. Hofstetter, a Swedish typewriter and office supply company. Lightfoot was instantly smitten and invited her out to George’s Spaghetti House for some pasta and jazz. Later, in his room, she listened to him sing his songs and began advising him about his career that very night. Brita was brainy and beautiful, with a clear level-headedness that impressed her new boyfriend. With Brita egging him on, Lightfoot delivered the difficult news to Whelan that he was through with the Two Tones.
Lightfoot and Brita saw each other frequently over the next several months. They’d get together in the evenings for dinner and talk about how work had gone for her at the office and for him at the studio. Brita listened intently to Gordon’s latest news about upcoming shows and recordings (Snider was releasing two more singles from the Nashville sessions on his Chateau label). And she was able to practice her English as she offered advice or opinions. Brita was full of encouragement and had a confidence that Lightfoot admired. He knew she was only in Toronto for a short time, but he couldn’t help himself—he was falling in love with her.
With Snider’s help, Lightfoot began getting solo gigs. First, he appeared on CFTO-TV’s Hi Time, a variety show hosted by Canadian teen idol Bobby Curtola. Then, alongside fellow Chateau recording artist Pat Hervey, Lightfoot performed at the Hull Arena for what was advertised as a “Mammoth Dance Party.” Snider’s own trio opened, and Hervey and Lightfoot received top billing, highlighted by their respective hits: her “Mr. Heartache” and his “Remember Me.” Before the year was out, he appeared at a New Year’s Eve dance at Club 888 in Toronto’s Masonic Temple, backed by Dave Newberry and His Orchestra. Lightfoot seemed noticeably uncomfortable performing solo. Whelan had always spoken to audiences and handled song introductions; now, Lightfoot had to do that all by himself as well as carry the songs. By the end of the year, he was wondering whether he could make it on his own. To make matters worse, Brita had returned to Sweden.
* The former Pierce-Arrow automobile showroom, now a Staples business supply store.