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 blocks on Saturday nights?
The evolution was simple.
Starr always put his customers first. And all the Horseshoe’s customers had two things in common: they liked to drink, and they liked to dance.
One afternoon, Jack left his office in the back of the club to check on his customers, as was his habit. As he was walking through the bar, talking to the folks who were there, one of the loyal customers chirped, “Hey, Jack. You should start booking live music here.” To which the owner replied, “Okay. What kind of music do you like?” “Country, of course,” the customer said.
And so country and western music it was.
The genre was certainly not something Mr. Starr and his family listened to at home on the radio. “Jack knew how to bring the music in, but he wasn’t very musical and we all hated country and western music!” recalls his daughter Natalie Clairman, whose family still owns the building. “We never went down there at all.”
But, being a shrewd and smart businessman, Mr. Starr knew satisfying his customers was crucial to running a successful small business. As he once told the Toronto Star, “I didn’t know anything about country music in those days, but I looked around and I figured that, with all the other types of entertainment available in the city, there must be room for a country place.”
The Edison Hotel on Gould Street had a foothold on Toronto’s nascent country scene; later, the Brunswick House on Bloor and the Matador at Dovercourt and College hired country acts. But the Horseshoe would acquire a reputation for booking the best — Nashville’s top talent. (It also became an unwritten rule that if you played the Edison, you didn’t play the Horseshoe, and vice versa.)
So Starr got to work, replacing the kitchen with a stage (in the backroom where the bar is located today) and renovating the space — gradually expanding the available space fivefold by purchasing neighbouring stores. By the time Starr started booking live music, the seating capacity had increased from eighty-seven to five hundred. An assortment of square and round tables with chairs were nestled right up to the stage, which was only slightly raised off the black-and-white checkered tile floor that remains to this day. With this new setup, the performers and audience melded into one.
* * *
Bazil Donovan, the bassist for Blue Rodeo, grew up in Toronto’s west end. His parents were regulars at the Horseshoe — one of the many couples who had migrated from the East Coast. His mom was a Cape Bretoner, and his dad was born in Prince Edward Island but grew up in Halifax. Bazil’s dad loved country music, while his mother was more into rock ’n’ roll — Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. “He watched what became The Band [former members of Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks] at the Concord a lot. My dad went to all of those places. My mom was seventeen when she had me,” Donovan recalls. “They arrived in Toronto in April 1956. My dad was twenty. Needless to say, they were out to explore ‘the big city,’ and the things that mattered to them the most were listening to music and dancing. I remember him bringing me home autographed pictures of some of the people he saw play at the Horseshoe, such as Stonewall Jackson. I didn’t know who the guy was, but he said, ‘Keep this, and someday it will be worth something.’ Of course, I never did.”
Juanita Garron arrived in Toronto in the early 1950s. Like many before her, she, too, quickly fell in love with the country music scene Starr started. This passion for country and western led to a job checking coats at the Horseshoe. From this vantage point, Garron heard the music nightly and met many of the Nashville stars of the day. Starr was so impressed by Garron’s amiable personality, and her good ear, that he expanded her duties over the years — sending her on the road. Garron took scouting trips to Wheeling, West Virginia, and Tennessee to see these legendary musicians and other rising stars at the Grand Ole Opry and other western venues.
Stonewall Jackson, one of the most popular country artists of the 1960s, was a regular at the Horseshoe Tavern.
According to her obituary (Garron passed away on December 22, 2014), in her lifetime she visited this country music shrine eighty-eight times. “She was approachable, awesome, kind, and thoughtful,” recalls Doreen Brown, a country artist and one-time friend of Garron’s. “She loved to talk about country music. She didn’t drink, smoke, or swear, but she was hilarious!” With a great deal of encouragement from the musicians she met, Garron later started singing country and western Bible songs and hymns. Her talent was recognized by the major country and western associations in Ontario and she was well known for her rendition of “One Day at a Time” and for singing Canada’s national anthem at the opening and closing of Ontario’s country and western music associations during their meetings, jamborees, and other events. It’s no surprise to learn that Starr later presented his former coat check girl with a certificate naming her the “Mother of Country Music.”
For more than a decade, tour buses, all with Nashville plates, were a common sight in the vicinity of the Horseshoe Tavern, and they often parked in the back alley. No matter the weather, country music fans lined up hoping to share a few words with their idols and snag an autograph. Usually, the musicians obliged. During intermissions, members of the feature band or the house band would go from table to table selling the headliner’s latest
