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The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern. David McPherson
Читать онлайн.Название The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781459734968
Автор произведения David McPherson
Жанр Музыка, балет
Издательство Ingram
The first country performer, though, was Shorty Warren, from Jersey City. As Starr later told the Globe and Mail, “Country music was not a socially accepted genre at the time, so the tavern provided an escape for country music lovers.”
Starr’s business acumen, marketing and promotional powers quickly built the Horseshoe Tavern from an intimate eighty-seven-seat restaurant serving food, beer, and liquor, and catering to a neighbourhood clientele, to a five-hundred-seat music venue serving the growing musical needs of expats and migrant workers from Atlantic Canada — and also satisfying the growing legions of Hogtown’s country music fans. Stompin’ Tom Connors recalls this reputation in his second memoir: “Everybody who was a country fan and who landed in Toronto for any reason, either by plane, car, bus, or train, for any length of time, sooner or later wound up paying a visit to the Horseshoe.”
2
Nashville North
I won’t stay home and cry tonight like all the nights before
I’ve just learned that I don’t really need you anymore
I found a little place downtown where guys like me can go
And they’ve got bright lights and country music
Bright lights and country music, a bottle and a glass
Soon I’ll be forgetting that there ever was a past
And when everybody asks me what helped me forget so fast
I’ll say, “Bright lights and country music”
— Bill Anderson and Jimmy Gateley, “Bright Lights and Country Music”
You can make a case that the high point of the Horseshoe Tavern’s existence was during its heyday as a country music bar. I am not talking about the mainstream country you hear over the airwaves today. I am talking about vintage country, the kind your grandparents tuned in to on their transistor radio after a hard day’s work — listening to a station from Wheeling, West Virginia, or Nashville, Tennessee, at the farthest reaches of their FM dial. From the mid-1950s to the late 1960s at the Horseshoe, lineups around the block were common. The tavern’s stationery proclaimed, “Toronto’s Home of Country Music.” Seven nights a week, honky-tonk tunes spilled out onto Queen Street. Nashville legends — and future Country Music Hall of Fame members — picked and strummed their guitars and sang their timeless songs on the ’Shoe’s stage to adoring audiences. Some of them even recorded albums at Starr’s bar. You could see the admiration all the Nashville acts had for the Toronto venue and for its charismatic owner. Take the famed American bluegrass musician Mac Wiseman, for example. As he writes on the sleeve of his 1965 album Mac Wiseman Sings at the Toronto Horseshoe Club, “The Horseshoe uses top country & western artists fifty-two weeks a year and the great success being enjoyed by this fine club must be attributed to Mr. Jack Starr and his friendly, efficient staff. Mr. Starr is not only a very smart club manager; but he’s also a wonderful person and a true friend of country music. Anytime you are around Toronto, drop in at the Horseshoe, and tell Jack — Mac sent you.”
Donn Reynolds, Canada’s “King of the Yodellers,” poses outside the Horseshoe Tavern.
This is a part of the tavern’s rich history few know about. Many of those famous performers from that era have passed on; others have fuzzy memories of those days. Thankfully, a handful of these musicians — and some of the fans — are still around to share their stories. Allow me to transport you back to those good, old country days.
* * *
Fifty years ago, the Horseshoe was known in the music industry as Nashville North and was a regular stop for the top country stars of the day, including those great acts from the Grand Ole Opry. The list of performers who graced the ’Shoe’s stage during this period could fill this book. The following is just a sampling of the country heavyweights who played there: George Hamilton IV, Faron Young, Kitty Wells, Bob Luman, Ferlin Husky, Little Jimmy Dickens, the Carter Family, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Loretta Lynn, Bill Anderson, Charley Pride, and Tex Ritter.
Nearly every country superstar of the time, save Hank Williams, Porter Wagoner, and Buck Owens, played there. Although according to Wayne Tucker, who wrote the definitive biography of Dick Nolan — the leader of the Horseshoe’s house band during this period — Owens, known for pioneering the Bakersfield sound, did make an unannounced, impromptu appearance.
Buck Owens was a big name in the 1960s and his fees were high. For this reason he didn’t actually play the Horseshoe. But one night Buck dropped into the ’Shoe just to hear the music. He was keeping a low profile amongst the crowd and he had asked Dick, the emcee, to keep his presence a secret. Dick knew that Buck had a temper but he ignored his request and announced that he was in the audience. Then to stir the pot he said: “Would you like to hear him sing?” So an angry Owens had no choice but to take the stage and do a number for free.
When the club was full, it was full, which was nearly every night. Bill Anderson, Tex Ritter, and Willie Nelson were some of Starr’s favourite acts. Years later, many performers still recall with fondness the genteel Jewish businessman who treated them so well: “Every Christmas, there were a load of turkeys in the backroom for the band,” recalls Roy Penney, who played lead guitar in the house band in the 1960s. “He and I used to swap cufflinks; that was our annual tradition. He always treated the band well. On Saturday matinees we would get a big steak dinner on the house.”
Russell deCarle, founder of Prairie Oyster, shares a story about a time when, years ago, the six-time Juno Award winners were rehearsing for an album in Nashville at SIR Studios and Waylon Jennings was getting ready for a tour and rehearsing in the same space: “We would meet at the water cooler and have a coffee with Waylon every afternoon for about half an hour for four days. One of the first things he asked, when he found out we were from Ontario, was about Jack Starr and the Horseshoe … he had nothing but great memories of working there.”
Live music had come to the Horseshoe in a roundabout, unorthodox way. Some of Starr’s most loyal customers were blue-collar workers; many were Maritimers who had arrived in Toronto in the fifties and sixties looking for jobs. Similar to Starr’s own father’s reasons for journeying from Eastern Europe to Ontario, these dreamers sought opportunities and better lives for their families. In an editorial called “Finding the Heart of Canada,” published in the Toronto Star on May 7, 2002, Bernard Heydorn, author of Walk Good Guyana Boy and a past member of the Star’s community editorial board, captures the ’Shoe’s clientele, whom he mixed with back in the 1960s and early 1970s: “Many of the patrons were folks who came from outside the city. They were migrants from rural Canada, northern Ontario, and down east. There were farmers and fishermen, truck drivers and factory workers, coming together from the heartland of a great nation.”
Other patrons were just drifters and society’s outsiders, looking for adventure, escape, or a change of scene. Greg Marquis eloquently captures these characters and their stereotypes in his essay “Confederation’s Casualties: The ‘Maritimer’ as a Problem in 1960s Toronto”: “In the eyes of urban Ontarians, Maritimers had several characteristics. They were fatalistic young drifters who lived off welfare, drank heavily, engaged in violence, listened to country and western music, and broke the law in order to survive.”
Despite Marquis’s assessment, the violent stereotype of these East Coast emigrants did not hold true at the Horseshoe Tavern. Violence was rarely an issue. Everyone came for a good time and respected Starr enough to not cause trouble. So, how did the Horseshoe go from being a restaurant that served some of the best prime rib in Hogtown and was a watering hole for blue-collar factory workers, rounders, and cops in the downtown core to becoming Canada’s top country and western bar, with lineups on Queen Street that stretched for several