Folk haven Yorkville changed Gordon Lightfoot before its own ritzy transformation
Global News
Yorkville transformed musicians, from Lightfoot to Neil Young to Joni Mitchell, almost as thoroughly as it was transformed in the second half of the 20th century.
The Gordon Lightfoot who first performed in Toronto’s Yorkville, what’s now one of Canada’s ritziest neighbourhoods, is not the Gordon Lightfoot we know today.
Yorkville transformed musicians, from Lightfoot to Neil Young to Joni Mitchell, almost as thoroughly as it was transformed in the second half of the 20th century. The neighbourhood now known for its multimillion-dollar condos, high-end restaurants and luxury boutiques was just 60 years ago a haven for hippies and a “hothouse” for future folk legends.
“Everything that would have taken five years anywhere else took one year in Yorkville, because there was so much input,” said Mike Daley, a musicologist who’s spent the last five years researching Yorkville’s history.
“The creativity was just flowering there. And I think it’s because of the particular qualities of the Yorkville coffee house district that you didn’t see anywhere else.”
In Lightfoot’s case, Daley said, that looked like a sort of maturation. When he first started performing at the coffee shops in the bohemian community, he was part of the folk duo the Two Tones with his old friend Terry Whelan.
In 1962, they recorded an album live in one of those coffee shops and named it “Two Tones at the Village Corner.”
In the liner notes, Lightfoot describes the setting as “what used to be an old house, about the size of a shoe box.” The club was a dark room downstairs, he wrote, and the air was thick and sticky, filled with smoke.
The album opens with “We Come Here to Sing,” an upbeat folk song that proclaims while “some come here for coffee” and “some come here for tea or some such thing,” Lightfoot and Whelan come to Yorkville’s coffee houses to sing.