hangs on my wall.”
Like the other country music stars who played at the Horseshoe from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, Anderson recalls Starr as being a cordial and honest host. “He always honoured our contracts,” he says.
The tavern owner and music promoter was also an avid golfer. He once tried to get Anderson to go tee it up with him, but for some reason that Anderson can’t recall, the invitation to play a round together never panned out. Starr did drive Anderson up to CFGM, the country music station in Richmond Hill, for an interview once, though. Whisperin’ Bill said he always enjoyed the candid conversations he had with the Horseshoe’s original owner on those short trips.
* * *
In the mid 1960s, Starr hired Dick Nolan and the Blue Valley Boys (Johnny Burke, Roy Penney, and Bunty Petrie) as the Horseshoe’s house band. They would play during the first part of the week, and then back up the Nashville headliners on the weekends.
Nolan was a pioneer of a Newfoundland style of country music, and was just nineteen when he brought that unique East Coast style to Toronto — first to the Drake Hotel, and later to the Horseshoe Tavern. By the time he died in 2005, Nolan had recorded forty albums and sold approximately one million records. He was the first Newfoundlander to have both a gold (fifty thousand units sold) and a platinum record (one hundred thousand units sold), and was also the first musician from The Rock to appear at the Grand Ole Opry. He’s best known for his 1972 hit “Aunt Martha’s Sheep.”
When Nolan migrated to Toronto in 1958, he was set on seeing what the big city could offer. Before landing his first gig playing music, he waited tables at another country bar — the 300 Tavern at College and Spadina.
June Carter Cash and the Carter Family play the bar in the 1960s, when it was known as Nashville North, backed by the house band featuring lead guitarist Roy Penney.
Blue Valley Boy Roy Penney grew up with Nolan in Corner Brook, Newfoundland. The pair had been performing in several of the bars in their hometown before they were even of legal drinking age. Penney says during his stint at the Horseshoe in the mid-1960s, the Nashville musicians took him into their inner circle. He made fast friends with many of them, including the Carter Family, Little Jimmy Dickens, Billy Walker, and Charley Pride. They respected his hard work and dedication.
To prepare for each week’s gigs, Penney would stay up late listening to the latest country and western hits on CFGM radio and capturing them with his trusty tape recorder so that he could play them back and learn the guitar licks. Many nights, if he didn’t go to Aunt Bea’s after-hours club or the Matador, he would drive the stars back to the Executive Hotel, where most of them stayed during their time in Toronto. Sometimes they would invite him up to their rooms and he would go and share a drink and chat about music. One night, Little Jimmy Dickens gave Penney a sneak preview of one of his new songs. It was a silly number called “May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose.” Well, that song went on to be a huge hit for Dickens, reaching number one on the country charts and number fifteen on the pop charts. Penney felt privileged to have been able to hear it first. For a good many years, the Horseshoe Tavern was the centre of Penney’s life. Today, it’s where his warmest memories still reside.
Jack Starr (far left) poses next to famed Grand Ole Opry star and hillbilly singer Little Jimmy Dickens.
From 1963 to 1967, New Brunswick native Johnny Burke (née Jean Paul Bourque) played with Penney as the Blue Valley Boys’ bassist. Burke was playing the New Shamrock Hotel at Coxwell and Gerrard when Nolan came to the club to hear him perform one night. After his set, Nolan asked Burke to join the band. The catch: they wanted the guitarist to play bass, which he had never played before. “I told them, ‘I don’t even know how to hold one!’” Burke says. “They replied, ‘We can teach you pretty quick.’” So Burke borrowed his bass player’s instrument and went to the Drake Hotel for an audition. A few fumbled notes surely occurred, but somehow the musician pulled it off. He was a Blue Valley Boy.
The next thing you knew, Starr hired Burke and the rest of the band — luring them away from their regular gig at the Drake by offering them each the union scale of $110 per week. “That was really good money in those days, because before I got into music, I was working in a silkscreen printing shop for forty dollars a week, working ten hours a day, six days a week,” Burke recalls. “At the Horseshoe we did three, and later four, forty-five-minute sets a night, from 9:00 to 1:00, six days a week.”
The Blue Valley Boys had Sundays off, but for the rest of the week they backed every Nashville act who came through town: from legends and Grand Ole Opry mainstays like Bill Anderson, Conway Twitty, Little Jimmy Dickens, Stonewall Jackson, George Hamilton IV, Tex Ritter, and Ferlin Husky to the new breed of burgeoning 1960s outlaw country acts, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson. Burke remembers when Tex Ritter appeared one Saturday night; the lineup on Queen Street stretched for several blocks — all the way down to Peter Street.
The local country and western fans made the Nashville artists feel right at home in Canada; the Horseshoe was one of the most welcoming venues they played on the touring circuit, which included stops at places like the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas and the Palomino Club in Los Angeles. George Hamilton IV was a regular at the bar; he especially loved Canadians, and playing the Queen Street tavern was always a treat. He sums it up in the liner notes to Canadian Pacific, the 1969 tribute album to his northern neighbour that features covers of songs written by Canadian folksingers such as Gordon Lightfoot and Joni Mitchell:
Toronto is one of the great cities of the world and one of my truly “special places.” (Along with Winston-Salem and Nashville.) It’s becoming quite a booming music center and is even often referred to in country-music circles as the Nashville of the North. Two network Canadian country-music shows originate in Toronto (The Tommy Hunter Show and Carl Smith’s Country Music Hall ) and there are several clubs in the area that feature country music fulltime and a twenty-four-hour a day country music station — CFGM.
Another anecdote from Burke’s four-year ’Shoe run involves Little Jimmy Dickens: “One afternoon Jimmy [Dickens] came in, and the fiddle player was playing a fiddle tune and I was playing bass just with my left hand, and I was hitting the snare drum with my right hand. Little Jimmy said, ‘I like that!’ so I played the whole week with him that way, which was a pain in the ass!”
Dottie West, who, along with Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline, is considered one of country music’s most influential female artists of all time, also played the Horseshoe. West arrived at the tavern in 1964, bringing with her the top ten hit “Love Is No Excuse” she had just recorded with Jim Reeves (who died tragically later that year in a plane crash). Burke recalls, “[West] asked me to learn Jim Reeves’s part. Every time she came to play the Horseshoe, I did Reeves’s part on that song with Dottie, which was a thrill.”
Another night, the band who was appearing at the Horseshoe (their name escapes Burke all these years later) happened to have their set scheduled right in the middle of a Stanley Cup playoff game. Montreal was playing Toronto. Burke and the Horseshoe house band played a set before the game started, but by the time the headliners were set to start things up, the puck was dropping in the good ol’ hockey game. The crowd protested; they wanted to watch the game. So, naturally, the musicians put down their instruments, sat with the rest of the audience, and watched the Maple Leafs battle the Canadiens on the one little TV that was perched in the corner over the bar. “If you couldn’t see it, you would just wait for the screams,” Burke recalls.
In 1967, Burke left the Blue Valley Boys and formed East Wind; the new band had a couple of appearances at the Horseshoe as
