Artist / Band

Catherine McKinnon

Origin Saint John, New Brunswick → Halifax, Nova Scotia → Toronto, Ontario, 🇨🇦

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Biography

Catherine McKinnon was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, on May 14, 1944. Her family moved often, and she started young: she sang on radio in Saint John at eight and was on television in London, Ontario, at twelve. She later studied music at Mount Saint Vincent College in Halifax.

In 1962 she became a featured soloist on Singalong Jubilee, the CBC Television show out of Halifax that gave so many Maritime singers their start. When the program took up ‘Farewell to Nova Scotia’ as its theme in 1964, McKinnon’s voice carried the song into living rooms across the country, and it has been hers ever since.

Her first album, Voice of an Angel, came out on Arc Records in 1964 and became the biggest seller of her career. Manny Pittson produced it and wrote the sleeve notes, and Brian Ahern, years before he produced Anne Murray and Emmylou Harris, played guitar. The songs ran from ‘Cape Breton Lullaby’ and ‘He’s Young But Daily A-Growing’ to Malvina Reynolds’ ‘What Have They Done to the Rain’, with folklorist Helen Creighton credited for the traditional material. A second volume followed, and her younger sister Patrician Anne sang on both.

Patrician Anne had a record of her own in late 1965. As Patrician-Anne she cut P.F. Sloan’s ‘Blue Lipstick’ for Arc, and it made the RPM chart that November. She married Brian Ahern and worked on CBC television, but cancer, diagnosed in 1973, shortened her career. She died in Toronto on October 10, 2001.

RPM named Catherine McKinnon Top Female Singer in 1965. She was a regular face on Don Messer’s Jubilee and Music Hop and had her own CBC Radio series, That McKinnon Girl. In 1966 her recording of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s ‘Until It’s Time for You to Go’ became a modest Canadian hit, she made a Christmas album, and she moved from Halifax to Toronto.

The Toronto records reached well past the folk songbook. After Something Old Something New in 1967 came Both Sides Now in 1968, an Arc album produced by Bill Gilliland and split down the middle. The side marked Pop had Joe Renzetti arrangements of ‘The Look of Love’ and ‘This Girl’s in Love With You’. The side marked Folk had Joni Mitchell’s title song, Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’ and Tim Hardin’s ‘If You Were a Carpenter’. Lenny Breau played guitar, Moe Koffman played flute and saxophone, and Peter Appleyard played percussion. Everybody’s Talkin’ followed in 1969. Peter Goddard of the Toronto Telegram heard a voice “rich, controlled, completely sure in its sense of pitch,” and Blaik Kirby of The Globe and Mail called it “a sound so ravishingly beautiful you could worship it.”

Television kept her busy. She was in the Spring Thaw revue in 1967, guested with Wayne and Shuster, and starred in CTV’s River Inn in 1968 and 1969 and The Catherine McKinnon Show in 1970 and 1971. In 1974 she co-hosted Everything Goes on Global, and she also appeared on British television. Her 1970 album with the Jimmy Dale Orchestra leaned into ballads and torch songs, and she sang with the Saskatoon and Winnipeg symphonies and the Hamilton Philharmonic.

In 1969 she married actor and humorist Don Harron. Three years later she played the painter Emily Carr in The Wonder of It All, a CBC-TV musical Harron wrote with director Norman Campbell, and the stage took more and more of her time. She was in Turvey at the Charlottetown Festival in 1970, The Wizard of Oz in 1970 and My Fair Lady in 1975 at Winnipeg’s Rainbow Stage, My Many Husbands back at Charlottetown in 1982, and Don Messer’s Jubilee for Theatre Plus in Toronto in 1989, with more work at Theatre New Brunswick and Neptune Theatre in Halifax. Onstage with Harron she played Valeda, wife of his rural sage Charlie Farquharson.

She went back into the studio for a self-titled album on Intercan Records in 1980, co-produced and arranged by Paul Zaza. Hubert Laws played flute and Ernie Watts played saxophone, and the songs included Horace Silver’s ‘Song for My Father’.

McKinnon and Harron later divorced. She released Songs I Love in 2007 and kept performing in the Maritimes. In 2012 the East Coast Music Awards gave her the Dr. Helen Creighton Lifetime Achievement Award, named for the folklorist credited on her first album.

-Robert Williston