Cheryl Keyla

When Royalty Records of Canada introduced itself to the Canadian industry in the pages of RPM in November 1973, it named three artists. One of them was a Calgary singer and songwriter named Cheryl Keyla, and her first single was already at the pressing plant. 'Singer in the Band', backed with her own 'Anywhere With You', reached Calgary radio before the year was out, turning up on a CFAC playlist that December. The label was weeks old. So, more or less, was her recording career.

What set her apart on that first single was the writing. Country singers of the period were expected to interpret, and Keyla did, but the songs with her name on them were the ones Royalty pushed. 'Good Time Girl' and 'Blues Country Style' followed in 1974, both hers, and by that summer 'Good Time Girl' was showing up in country playlist reporting across the country. In June, RPM placed her at Joe Kozak's Project 70 Studios in Edmonton, a newly expanded eight-track room that was becoming the working base for Royalty's prairie roster. Alberta country was being made in Alberta now, by people who lived there, and the records were starting to travel.

Too Much Love came out of those sessions in 1975, catalogue R2000-15, produced by Kozak with R. Harlan Smith. Eight of its eleven songs are Keyla's: the title track, 'If You Don't Change', 'Singer in the Band', 'Blues Country Style', 'You Made It Easier', 'Anywhere With You', 'Hey There Mister' and 'Good Time Girl'. The three she did not write were Jessi Colter's 'I'm Not Lisa', 'Paper Roses' and John Rostill's 'If You Love Me Let Me Know', all current or near-current at the time. For a young artist on a young label, filling two thirds of an album with your own material was not the usual arrangement.

The record worked its way across the country on the strength of the title track, and the label's thank-you list reads like a map of where country music actually got played in 1975: CFAC and CKRD in Alberta, CFCW out of Camrose, CJVI in Victoria, CKOM in Saskatoon, CKLW and CKFH in Ontario, CFOM in Quebec. When RPM got to the album in January 1976, it counted the eight originals, called the record easy-listening country with plenty for programmers looking for Canadian content, and said plainly that Keyla should be getting more singles out.

She kept recording. 'Kentucky Blue Eyes', paired with 'Blue Label Blues', came later in the decade, and as late as May 1979 the B side was still finding air, playlisted by CHMM-FM in Winnipeg. After that the trail goes quiet.

The catalogue she left is small, and it sits at a particular moment: a Calgary songwriter recording her own songs in an Edmonton studio for an Alberta label that nobody outside the prairies had heard of yet. Royalty went on to become one of the durable names in Canadian country music. Too Much Love is part of how it got there.

-Robert Williston