During this era, radio also helped get the word out about the Opry stars. Bill Bessie hosted a weekly program on Saturdays between noon and 1:00 p.m. on CBC Radio in which he would interview the Nashville stars who were playing the Horseshoe or the Edison that night. CFGM Radio, based in Richmond Hill, Ontario, also helped spread the country and western gospel. Starting in 1968, the FM station broadcast of country hits was fifty thousand watts strong, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It was the first Canadian station to program country music exclusively; later, in 1976, the broadcaster even produced a show dedicated to the genre, called Opry North, that mimicked Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. The popular syndicated show continued until CFGM ended its country music policy in 1990.
Jack Starr with future Country Music Hall of Famer Loretta Lynn in the late 1960s.
As country music grew, the station increased its wattage and expanded its listener base. Alan Fisher was a DJ for CFGM in those years, and he had the chance to chat with many of the Nashville stars when they played in Toronto, frequently at the Horseshoe. He would also introduce them in the evenings as the emcee when the radio station sponsored some of the shows.
“One of the features of the show had me interviewing one of the stars who would be appearing in town that week, either at the Horseshoe Tavern or at the Edison on Yonge or from the Nashville North CTV show,” Fisher recalls in his book God, Sex and Rock ’n’ Roll. “I got to meet and interview a lot of them, including Bill Anderson, Loretta Lynn, George Hamilton IV, Bob Luman, and many more.”
Before Bernie Finkelstein went on to make his mark in the music industry, managing the likes of the Paupers and Bruce Cockburn and founding True North Records, he was just an adolescent with little interest in school and a growing love for anything to do with music. He was also a friend of Fisher’s. In later years Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, another band he managed, was a mainstay at the ’Shoe, but he says his first time walking through those timeless doors as an underage teenager remains his fondest.
I remember going with Al [Fisher] down to the Horseshoe one afternoon when he was a DJ working for CFGM. I had never been in there before, and my first impression was of it being quite glitzy. Ferlin Husky was playing. Anybody who knows anything about country music knows “Wings of a Dove,” which was his big record. That remains even today an unforgettable experience. I’ll never forget that first time at the Horseshoe. For me, the real excitement was all those country-music-loving women in their bouffants. Who knew what mysteries lurked under those wild hairdos?
Ferlin Husky was one of the stars Fisher interviewed. He played the Horseshoe many times, including that memorable first night for Finkelstein in 1969. “Wings of a Dove,” a gospel song, was a number one country hit for him in 1960 and one of his signature songs. The future Country Music Hall of Famer (2010), who went on to sell more than twenty million records, was one of the more popular performers at the venue in the late 1950s and 1960s.
The Horseshoe didn’t just draw residents of Hogtown looking for a hoedown. Many came from the outskirts of Toronto; some drove more than a hundred kilometres to hear that good old country music, and some even flew! Jack Starr told Dick Brown, in a feature piece for The Globe and Mail in 1973, about a time a mother and her daughter flew up on a Friday evening from St. John’s just to catch a performance by Husky, and then jumped on a plane back to Newfoundland on Saturday afternoon.
Country fans could not get enough of the Toronto twang and the dancing that usually accompanied it. After the Horseshoe wound down, shortly after 1:00 a.m., their appetite for more had to be satiated. To keep the party going, Toronto’s first after-hours country and western club, the Golden Guitar, opened in 1964, and then Beatrice Martin, the Horseshoe’s hostess with the mostest for more than a decade, opened her own after-hours club that same year. Aunt Bea’s short-lived Nashville Room on Spadina, south of College, catered to the country music fans’ desire to keep the honky-tonkin’ going long into the wee hours. According to reporter Jack Batten, Aunt Bea had neatly coifed silver-blond hair. She was always smiling, and her smile was contagious. She made friends with everyone she met. In an interview with the Toronto Daily Star, Aunt Bea described how her speakeasy came to be.
Country fans are such a loyal bunch, you know. They can never get enough of their music. And the musicians are the same — they like to keep on playing all night. On weekends, especially, nobody wants to quit after the Horseshoe closes at 1:00 a.m. and for years they all kept saying to me, “Oh, Aunt Bea” — everybody calls me that — “why don’t you start another place for afterwards.” Finally, I did, and now the Nashville Room’s open until four or five in the morning every Saturday and Sunday. And we all have a wonderful time, listening and dancing and talking.
Gary Clairman, Jack Starr’s grandson, pretends to play the drums at Aunt Bea’s after-hours club one Sunday morning.
For a brief period during the Horseshoe’s heyday as a country music mecca, Bea’s Nashville Room, with a capacity of about 250, was packed every weekend night long after last call ended at the ’Shoe. It was so popular that many patrons were turned away at the door.
The Matador, which opened in 1964 and was run by the late Ann Dunn — a single mother of five who, as the story goes, wanted a place that wouldn’t interfere with her parenting duties — lasted a lot longer. The after-hours club quickly found a home as a notorious booze can and hip honky-tonk spot that satisfied the appetites of patrons and musicians alike. These twenty-four-hour party people wanted to carry on the celebrations on the weekends into the wee hours, long after the Horseshoe and the other honky-tonk bars had closed. Many of the artists who’d been booked at the Horseshoe, along with a parade of patrons, headed over to this speakeasy at Dovercourt and College once the ’Shoe had closed down — keeping the conversations and the music going until 5:00 a.m. Cowboy boots were nailed onto the wall behind the stage. Here, only real traditional country music was played. There was a house band at the Matador, but everyone who went there was like one big family. Performers swapped songs and shared the stage. In between sets, everyone went upstairs to mingle, or downstairs, where there was always a high-stakes poker game being played. Barnboard walls marked the turn-of-the-century building that was once a ballroom and dance hall for soldiers on leave during the Great War. Naturally, signs with “Cowgirls” and “Cowboys” indicated the route to the washrooms.
Over the years, patrons had the chance to witness legendary early-morning jam sessions by the likes of Johnny Cash, Johnny Paycheck, and Conway Twitty. In the 1970s, the Matador was also the stompin’ grounds for Stompin’ Tom Connors following his Horseshoe gigs. Later on, Canadian folksinger-songwriters Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen found their way there, as did many other celebrities; Cohen even wrote the song “Closing Time” about the after-hours club. The venue continued to operate until 2006.
Back at the Horseshoe, the entrepreneurial Starr was looking for ways to expand his business. In the early part of the 1970s, with Martin as the hostess, on long weekends throughout the summer bus tours left from the Horseshoe’s door and travelled the white line south to Music City, visiting the sites like the Country Music Hall of Fame and taking in performances at the Grand Ole Opry. Three hundred music lovers would line up for a chance to get a seat on one of seven buses that made these regular pilgrimages to the home of country music. Sometimes, Starr would tag along on these road trips.
Baseball fence at the old Maple Leaf Stadium at Bathurst and Lake Shore, with a banner advertisement for the Horseshoe Tavern from the early 1950s.
During this period, Starr expanded his business to include music publishing. He promoted big packaged shows outside the Horseshoe at places like Maple Leaf Stadium, the old baseball stadium on Lake Shore Boulevard,