Legacy stories run in rich veins through Bobby Dean Blackburn’s life. His great grandfather Elias Earls traveled the Underground Railroad from Kentucky to its terminus in Owen Sound where he married a local girl. Bobby Dean has recently served as artistic director for the town’s Emancipation Festival, established in 1862. His ancestors likely attended the same picnic celebration in their own time and sang some of the same songs.

Like the pioneers in his family, Bobby Dean’s musical sojourn has traveled a long road that’s taken him across the GTA, Ontario and Canada. It started at York Memorial High School where his band The Gems won a talent contest and played the first ever school dance. His reward was a threat of expulsion from the principal for “deteriorating the morals” of students by playing rock and roll.

He quit school at 16. He’s essentially been on the road ever since.
Bobby Dean and the Gems fought the Battle of the Bands with Toronto’s other top groups The Consuls and the Wildwoods. He recorded a version of You Are My Sunshine at age 13 at Fred Roden’s Record Corral on Yonge St. There was an offer from Nashville, which his father flatly turned down.
The Gems headlined dances before Bobby Dean truly made his name at the Zanzibar a Go Go, playing 4 hours every afternoon.

There were no after-hours clubs back then, so the Zanzibar became the home-away-from-home for every name jazz, blues and R&B player passing through town.

Music critic Jack Batten described it in 1973 as “the only room in Toronto, maybe in the whole world, where jazz musicians can wander in at any hour of the afternoon and jam away the daylight hours to an appreciative audience of their peers and their fans.” Bobby Dean was the ringmaster.

A short list of those who jammed at his Zanzibar Finishing School includes Paul Butterfield, Rick James, Buddy Miles, Jimmy McGriff, Taj Mahal, Richard “Groove” Holmes, David-Clayton Thomas, Roland Prince, Dougie Richardson, Don (D.T.) Thompson, Eugene Smith and Steve Kennedy. The Blackburn homes in Brampton and Malton, where the family lived for the better part of 40 years, were filled with musicians coming to pay their respects and play.

Blackburn took a three-year hiatus when his doctor diagnosed “smoker’s cough.” He resumed playing after B.B. King told him “you should never quit
playing because you never know when you might make it.” He moved to the
Bruce Peninsula about a decade ago and has revived his career – and not coincidentally the local bar scene – up there.

Blackburn’s CV includes a gospel TV show that tapped his childhood roots singing lead in Baptist church choirs, 3 years playing solo in Yellowknife and a gig on an Alaskan cruise ship.

He was the first black coach in the Mississauga Hockey League. He went back to Westwood Secondary School at 57 to complete his high school diploma and was chosen as valedictorian by hi fellow adult students.
His four sons have grown up imbued with their father’s music and his passion for it. Their Maple Blues-winning Juno-nominated “band of brothers” proudly carries the Blackburn name.

Bobby Dean counts a recent appearance with Blackburn at Summer Folk as one of his career highlights. Many of the group’s songs carry lyrical references to the family history.

In one, son Duane sings “My father played the blues/ always the real deal/ down on Yonge St.” Bobby Dean Blackburn is the real deal to a lot more people than just his sons. Music has been his life for six decades. It still is. Every gig in every bar in every town across Canada has taken him another step towards his arrival today on the Mississauga Music Walk of Fame.

For 36 years, Canada had a Friday night TV date with a lanky troubadour who lived in Mississauga. His name was Tommy Hunter and his game was country music.

He didn’t have hit records. He didn’t dance. He hardly ever wore sequins. He didn’t yodel. All he did was invite a nation onto his front stoop and his back parlour, assemble some friends to sing some familiar songs, get everybody to relax and then entertain them like crazy.

He was that most Canadian of celebrities, a star without apparent ego. He really didn’t need one because he put us all at ease right away, from the cream of the superstar country crop in Nashville to an impossibly young Eileen Edwards — later to become Shania somebody-or-other — making her national TV debut.

The collective blood pressure of the nation started dropping mid-evening as 10 per cent of the country tuned in to see what small pleasures Canada’s “Country Gentleman” had for us this week.

Despite an endless parade of producers who wanted to modernize him, gussy him up and turn him into a showcase for the latest musical trend, Hunter knew his audience well and knew that they wanted the real goods he was delivering – honest music delivered in an honest way.

“I don’t want any hot-shot material,” he once told an interviewer. “When a new writer comes along and says he wants to write comedy, I tell him he’s got learn how to write, “Hello folks,how are you tonight?”
When his audience tuned in, they “wanted to feel like they were putting on an old slipper,” Tommy says. Our feet have never been in such comfortable hands.

They called it The Tommy Hunter Show but they could just as easily have called it what they named a later CBC show — Heartland — because that’s where he touched this country. The show was a kind of regional religion in parts of Canada that otherwise had little in common.

That’s why, when Tommy went out to play the legion halls and churches and community theatres across this land, the public flocked to see him.
Over its lengthy existence, The Tommy Hunter Show had a consistency of character — the host’s character — genial and exuberant and gentle on our minds.

He has a special place in our local history because he wrote our theme song, “Mississauga” when the municipality was incorporated as a city 40 years ago. He even had the foresight to use the future mayor on backing vocals.

The song was his idea and he guided the whole process, getting the studio for free; collecting Mississaugans from all walks of life; putting them on a bus downtown; and making them an integral part of the recording party.
If Tommy Hunter’s one-time background vocalist is known as the “people’s mayor,” then surely Tommy himself should be known as the “people’s troubadour.”

The chorus of his civic theme song urged the listener to “Come on out to Mississauga, it’s the greatest place we know.”

It’s advice the rest of the country should heed — simply because it’s coming from arguably the greatest example of a home-grown, natural story-telling entertainer Canada will ever have the pleasure to know.

Welcome to the Mississauga Walk of Fame, Tommy.

After watching a student talent showcase at Mount Carmel Secondary School in the spring of 1993 featuring three school bands, English teacher David Rogers had an idea.

What if the three standout guys who were in the band called To Each His Own hooked up with the standout guitarist in the band Dragonflower? He planted the idea with them and, sure enough, over the summer Ben Kowalewicz (Ko-wall-a-witz) Aaron Solowoniuk (Sol-won-ee-yuk) and Jon Gallant got together with Ian D’Sa to see what would happen.

What happened was an instantaneous musical bond. The energy and mutual admiration were immediate. One of the first songs they played was a Neil Young’ cover. It was supposed to be practice, but Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World turned out to be prophecy.

Even though it was a mixed marriage — two of them were from Meadowvale and two were from Streetsville — the guys made it work. There was no punk-pop scene in Mississauga at the time, so they all but created one themselves, turning Friday nights at the Masonic Lodge in Streetsville into a pilgrimage for every angst-ridden teen in town with a sense of musical adventure. And they gained a reputation — which they’ve never lost — for delivering the real goods onstage.

Whether it was upstaging the headliners at Jingle Bell Rock 4 at Mt. Carmel or playing for a few friends and family at a billiards joint in Lakeview, the guys in Pezz — which became Billy Talent to the rest of the world — were totally committed to the energetic execution of their musical vision on stage.

They wanted desperately to get better and better — and they did. That they played with the same energy and commitment and edge in front of 100 kids in the basement of the Masonic Lodge in the late 1990s as they did in front of 100,000 people at the Rock Am Ring concert in Germany last year, is a mark of their high personal standards of excellence.

Their songs have evolved rhythmically, lyrically, melodically and harmonically over the years, but the nuclear musical fission at their core remains intact.

After a decade of hard-slogging, they became “overnight” successes. While they can now measure their success in terms of millions in sales, and international tours, and media coverage, and awards (seven Junos and nine MuchMusic video awards and counting), they prefer to measure it in terms of their own musical evolution. Which is ongoing.

In introducing their Mississauga forerunners, Triumph at an induction ceremony last year, Ian said “as artists they showed the world time and time again how to give bigger-than-life performances. And they showed the value of really connecting with their fans.”

He might just as well have been speaking of Billy Talent. Despite their huge successes, the band members are very much still the same Toronto Maple Leaf-loving, neighbourhood pub types that they were when they started out. They’re a “friends and family” band for the punk set. From their first gig in Ian’s parents’ basement in Meadowvale to their appearance yesterday before thousands at Riot Fest in Downsview Park, Billy Talent has rocked the talk.

And — now that they’ll have their very own stone — they’ll be able to rock the walk on the Mississauga Music Walk of Fame.

Congratulations Aaron, Ben, Jon and Ian!

Trust and the music business are too often mutually exclusive things. Many bitter artists would say that the concept of “ trust in the music business” is an oxymoron — like truth in advertising. Yet a man we honour here today built a long and fruitful career based on that enduring concept.

Charlie Camilleri was a pivotal figure in the Canadian music business during his exemplary 30-year career at CBS Records. Rejecting a chance to manage American pop star Gene Pitney in the 1960s, Camilleri stayed home with his young family in Mississauga and, instead, paved the way for several generations of performers to make their marks in this country.

From Mississauga Music Walk of Fame inaugural inductee Ronnie Hawkins, to Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Tony Bennett, rock group Chicago, Tom Jones, Kris Kristofferson, Bruce Springsteen and Wynton Marsalis — on to Celine Dion who he helped introduce to an English Canadian audience through one of the many Variety Club telethons he helped organize — Charlie Camilleri was a key go-to guy if you wanted a musical career in this country.

He knew everyone in the business and he respected and worked with them to foster their careers. Larry LeBlanc, the veteran music writer who won an honourary Juno last year, says Camilleri was a musical “Everyman” in the 60s and 70s when the industry was relatively small. He did print and radio promotion for artists, visited retailers, picked up the acts at the airport and got them safely to the hotel.

He was also the artist’s surrogate family when they were in town. Camilleri’s gregarious personality and his common touch meant he became very close to the artists. “Charlie seemed to know everybody,” says LeBlanc. “Other people showboated. Charlie did things quietly, but he did things.”

When the extraordinarily talented and extraordinarily eccentric Glenn Gould was on CBS, there was only one man at the record company he would regularly talk to. As as happened with so many of the artists he handled, Charlie’s business relationship turned into a personal one. Every Christmas, a call would come into the Camilleri household in Lakeview from Gould and there would be a long conversation about everything under the sun.

Many of the artists dropped into the Camilleri household to have supper, often before they worked the CNE summer shows. And Camilleri’s personal service often included hitting the road with the artists. He travelled the Canadian circuit with Johnny Cash, one of many who became a close friend.

But it wasn’t just the big name international stars Camilleri promoted. He helped build homegrown careers for artists like Kelly Jay and Crowbar, Larry Gowan and Burton Cummings.

When he retired, CBS named a major internal award for Charlie. CBS Nashville honoured him. Legendary promoter Michael Cohl gave him a lifetime backstage pass for any Concert Productions international show. The founders of the Juno Awards Walt Grealis and Stan Klees of RPM Magazine made Camilleri the first inductee into their planned Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame.

At the same time he built his legendary professional career, Camilleri was creating a volunteer profile that was almost as impressive. A lifetime supporter of local sports and community projects, Camilleri coached Cawthra baseball and hockey and partnered with Eve Petrescue to build the local human infrastructure in Lakeview that made them work.

His charity of choice was Variety Club. He personally sponsored Tony Bennett into the local chapter and he raised millions of dollars in more than 25 years of involvement with Variety Village. Camilleri made Variety Club the charity of choice for the music industry for many years.

His work earned him the highest honour he could receive from the International Club and the highest he could receive from the Canadian organization, its Heart Award. On the inscription, the group said the award proved that contrary to Leo Durocher’s belief, nice guys can finish first.

Along the way, he also won Grey Cups in 1946 and 47 with The Toronto Argonauts and won the 1950 Canadian softball championship. After his retirement, he was a pivotal figure in keeping the Argo alumni club active.

When you think about the giants of the Canadian music business, Charlie Camilleri’s name won’t be the first you come up with. Or the second or the third.

But his name belongs among the elite. He used his talent for promotion and friendship to foster a fledgling industry and help build it into the powerhouse it became in his time. And he did it all with charm and grace that belied the reputation of the industry he worked in.

It is our pleasure today to add his name to the Mississauga Music Walk of Fame.

Despite what some people might tell you, the Southside Shuffle was not born 15 years ago at the St. Lawrence soccer fields at the foot of Hurontario St., where Downchild and Fathead held forth for a small but enthusiastic crowd.

It actually started many years before that, in a house at the foot of Mississauga Rd. — in what is now J.C. Saddington Park — the house where Chuck Jackson’s grandparents lived. That’s where the ritual gatherings of the clan took place, often on Sunday afternoons. Everyone grabbed an instrument and took a featured spot on the musical bill of fare.

Brothers, cousins, uncles, aunts, parents, and grandparents played various instruments, mostly guitars — Chuck probably plucked away on his first bass purchased from the Dixie Music Centre in Dixie Mall — and his grandfather played spoons.

It was a musical mishmash full of mayhem and fun and a lesson in the collective joy of making music which Jackson tucked away in his fertile Credit River delta memory banks.

In fact, it could have been the inspiration for a memorable song he wrote many years later called “Dew Drop In.” There was another ritual that took place at Jackson homestead every fall — a giant family corn roast. When Chuck started the Shuffle in 1999, he made sure it was scheduled for September, in honour of his grandparents. This twin divinity of family and music is what the Southside Shuffle has always been about and what it remains about today.

Chuck Jackson lived the first 56 years of his life in Lakeview and Port Credit. His musical education got a big boost in Grade 5 at Forest Ave. Public School when the regular music teacher took a leave of absence. The substitute just happened to be the guitar player in a great Toronto band – Robbie Lane and The Disciples.

It wasn’t long before Chuck and four of his buddies formed a band they called Barewires. A couple of years later they hit the big time – playing the afternoon school dances in Grade 7 and 8. Port Credit Secondary School brought more bands – Full House, the Madison Street Walkers – and a new awakening.

At 16, he had the life-changing experience of seeing Buddy Guy in the flesh at the CNE. In 2007, Chuck would bag one of his biggest catches ever for Southside when he got Guy to agree to be in his lineup.
The same year that he saw Buddy play at the CNE, his buddy Angus McKie (Mac-Eye) went on holiday in England and returned with two records more precious than gold — an album by John Mayall and The Bluesbreakers and a song that had yet to be released in North America called Sunshine of Your Love by some new group called Cream. That really solidified Chuck’s love of the blues.

Pretty soon he hit the road — Dixie Rd. At a talent show at Dixie Mall in 1971, the judges — the well-known local group of Edward Harding and McLean — placed Chuck’s band first. They won a recording contract with Stop 8 Music and the resulting album, Get On Up with Dancer, captured the first-ever appearance of a Chuck Jackson vocal on vinyl. If you have a copy — or even better if you have it on eight-track — Chuck will be happy to sign it for you later!

Greater glory awaited on Dominion Day in 1972. Chuck and the band headlined at the A & W drive-in on Lakeshore Rd. at Front St. – near where the Starbucks now stands. The sound and light man for the show, by the way, was a kid from Erindale Woodlands named Gil Moore.

Jackson earned his stripes on the road with an r & b tribute band that played on the east coast before he joined the Cameo Blues Band in 1978. Two-and-a-half years as the house band at the Isabella Hotel refined the vocal and harmonica styles.

You pretty well know the rest of the story. He joined Canada’s premier blues band Downchild 24 years ago and is now their longest-serving vocalist.

He has flipped, flopped and flown his way to three Juno nominations, three Maple Blues Awards, the Toronto Blues Society’s Blues With a Feeling lifetime achievement award and innumerable other industry markers. Last year he was enshrined in Festival and Events Ontario’s Hall of Fame for his work founding and directing the Shuffle.

As brilliant as he has been over his long career as an artist, his work as artistic director of the Shuffle may be Chuck’s greatest achievement. He has created a vibrant, elastic, living/ breathing blues and jazz festival that has stood the test of time.

He has “borrowed” liberally from the best of the ideas he has seen playing festivals around the world and brought it all back home. The festival has changed with economic times. The big ticket main stage draws have been refined to a much more democratic, and much more accessible, regime.

For $10, you get a front-row weekend seat to the best musical entertainment that Chuck Jackson’s imagination can find. Some of the kindest words that ever fall on Chuck’s ear come from visitors who say, “man, those guys are good. I’ve never heard of them before.” That’s a tribute, of course, to his keen eye for talent.

Whether he’s singing for thousands of people at a festival or doing his weekly Sunday afternoon gig at Roc n Docs, Chuck Jackson “sits right down and cries the blues” with the same fervent commitment. When Chuck sings the blues, they stay sung. And when he founds a blues festival, it stays sound.

Memorial Park has always been central to Chuck’s life. He played ball here as a kid. He hung out with the hippies here in the 60s and he first learned to play the harp on a bench here. It’s a big part of who he is and through his efforts it’s now part of who we ALL are as a city and as a musical community. Chuck says that the Shuffle has now taken on a life of its own. In his words — “ the event itself has become the star.” Perhaps so. But if that’s so, it’s largely because of Chuck’s passion, his persistence and his perspiration.

The Southside Shuffle only became a star because one man had a vision of what it could become. It’s only fitting that Chuck Jackson’s name should find a permanent home in the park that shaped his life so vividly. He changed the park and the town forever when he first called the blues home to Port Credit — and made Port Credit the home of the blues.

Ronnie Hawkins has a way of landing in the middle of everything. From being born two days after Elvis Presley, to recording at the legendary Sun Records studio in Memphis in the 1950s, to anchoring the wave of rock and roll that swamped the Yonge St. strip in the 60s, to hosting John Lennon and Yoko Ono at his Mississauga Rd. farm as they launched their Peace Campaign in 1969, to playing Bob Dylan in Bob Dylan’s own movie, to acting in Heaven’s Gate — one of the biggest box office flops of all time — to dancing the Last Waltz with the boys in The Band — the Hawk has seen and done it all And quipped about it every step of the way.

He was born in Huntsville, Arkansas in 1935 — and reportedly did his first Camel Walk at the age of two.

He studied phys. ed at the University of Arkansas but really majored in rockabilly on the chitlin’ circuit. When his friend Gordon Jenkins, — stage name Conway Twitty — told him about how they loved southern-fried music in Canada, Ronnie was on his way north.

Turned out he was sentenced to be up here for 40 Years — and counting. He met and married Wanda and found a home on Yonge St. He mentored several generations of musicians in the best rock and roll finishing school of all time — Mr. Dynamo’s Nightly Bar-by-Bar World Tour.

Bob Dylan called Ronnie his “hero “ and said he was “the guru of rock and roll.”

He’s on Canada’s Walk of Fame and in the Rockabilly Hall of Fame and has won a Juno but his real claim to fame is that he’s never stopped believing in the hard core music he loves.

Through innumerable ups and downs, career breakthroughs and fallbacks, from disco to rap and back, Ronnie Hawkins has never wavered. He has remained true to the music he loves — old-school kickass rock ‘n roll.

So, Who Do You Love? How about the guy from down south who taught the Northland how to rock?

If you can make your passion your profession, you will never have to do any real work again. It’s a philosophy that many men and women have dreamed of, but few have successfully executed.

Pre-eminent among musicians who have transformed their careers on the stage into a business that hasn’t just survived off the stage, but has earned its stripes on the forefront of the Canadian music industry, is Mississauga’s Gil Moore.

Everyone knows the story of Triumph, the Mississauga band who performed anthemic metal miracles in arenas around the world in the 1970s and 1980s, releasing more than a dozen albums, selling millions of records and eventually earning a place in the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame.

In 1978 the band opened its own private studio on Mavis Rd. so it could tinker with its songs and not have to worry about booking studio time. When Triumph stopped performing a decade later, Moore dedicated himself full-time to the studio.

“Who doesn’t want to work at Disneyland each day?” he said when asked about his motivation in launching the studio. It is a decision that Canadian musicians — and musicians everywhere — look back on with deepest gratitude.

Metalworks has gone from a hole-in-the-wall industrial unit, with 20 students, to a musical mecca that is now more than 17,000 sq .ft. in size and features six studios, state-of-the-art lighting and sound, and audio facilities and innovative teaching techniques that reflect its owner’s unmistakable stamp of professionalism — a word that isn’t always top of mind in many aspects of the music business.

“Word of mouth from the artists is important,” Moore told The Mississauga News in an interview last year. “I think trust is number 1.” When the referrals are coming out of the mouths of artists with first-hand experience at Metalworks whose names are David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, Katy Perry, The Cranberries, Rush, Prince, Tom Cochrane, Christina Aguilera, Guns ‘N Roses, Nelly Furtado, Anne Murray, Feist, and Metric, to name but a few — that’s a gold-plated endorsement.

Metalworks was named Recording Studio of the Year at the Canadian Music Industry Awards for a dozen consecutive years – so often that it might as well have been renamed the Gil Moore Recognition Award.

With all of the accolades that Triumph and Metalworks have received, you might think that a little some of that might go to a person’s head. But Gil Moore remains the same native son of Mississauga, the same unpretentious guy who founded Gil Moore Audio as a teenager and attended Streetsville and T.L. Kennedy Secondary Schools.

The same guy who always had a yen for construction – which may be why the never-ending expansion of Metalworks continues to this day. If you need a Mississauga Idol judge or sponsor, Gil is there. The prize may be studio time for just the winner, but somehow, he finds time for the top three finishers to record.

Metalworks sponsors the Q107 Homegrown contest , which is no accident. Moore has always had a deep and abiding respect for homegrown talent and he’s always respected his roots — which were planted deep in Mississauga, where he still lives.

He grew up in Erindale Woodlands and his parents, Martha and Herb, wrote columns for many years in The Mississauga News. One of those columns was called Suburban Style.

The Moores would be infinitely proud to know that their son has come to epitomize his own form of suburban style — one grounded in respecting and teaching the entire business of music, from conception to performance to recording to marketing and beyond, to succeeding generations of musicians.

Yes, Gil Moore is a wonderful musician, but we recognize him today for all the things he has done that make him so much more than that — those things that make him a true champion of his craft and a perpetual leader of his industry.