Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr. was a Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist who achieved international success in folk, folk-rock, and country music. He is credited with helping to define the folk-pop sound of the 1960s and 1970s. He has been referred to as Canada's greatest songwriter and his songs have been recorded by some of the world's most renowned musical artists. Lightfoot's biographer Nicholas Jennings said, "His name is synonymous with timeless songs about trains and shipwrecks, rivers and highways, lovers and loneliness."
Tanya Tagaq, also credited as Tagaq, is a Canadian Inuk throat singer, songwriter, novelist, and visual artist from Cambridge Bay (Iqaluktuuttiaq), Nunavut, Canada, on the south coast of Victoria Island.
Ian Dawson Tyson was a Canadian singer-songwriter who wrote several folk songs, including "Four Strong Winds" and "Someday Soon", and performed with partner Sylvia Tyson as the duo Ian & Sylvia.
Jackie Washington was a Canadian blues musician.
Mariposa Folk Festival is a Canadian music festival founded in 1961 in Orillia, Ontario. It was held in Orillia for three years before being banned because of disturbances by festival-goers. After being held in various places in Ontario for a few decades, it returned to Orillia in 2000. Ruth Jones, her husband Dr. Crawford Jones, brother David Major and Pete McGarvey organized the first Mariposa Folk Festival in August 1961. The inaugural event, covered by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, featured all Canadian performers. The festival grew in popularity, size and rowdiness until the popularity of the 1963 festival, and the lack of sufficient security, led to a backlash from town locals. The city of Orillia secured a court injunction to prevent the festival from continuing in the town limits. The first festival held in the Toronto area, in 1964, was at Maple Leaf Stadium. The subsequent three festivals were held at Innis Lake in Caledon, northwest of the city. In the 1970s it was held on the Toronto Islands before shifting to Harbourfront (Toronto) and Bathurst Street and later Molson Park in Barrie. In 2000, the Mariposa Folk Festival was invited back to Orillia by city councilors Tim Lauer and Don Evans. The festival continues to be held in Orillia. As well as folk music, the festival highlights other aspects of folk culture including dance, crafts, storytelling.
Evalyn Parry is a Canadian performance-maker, theatrical innovator and singer-songwriter. She grew up in Toronto, Ontario in the Kensington Market neighborhood. Her music combines elements of spoken word and folk.
Bonnie Dobson is a Canadian folk music songwriter, singer, and guitarist, most known in the 1960s for composing the songs "I'm Your Woman" and "Morning Dew". The latter, augmented by Tim Rose, became a melancholy folk rock standard, covered by Skating Polly, Fred Neil, Ralph McTell, Lulu, Nazareth, the Grateful Dead, the Jeff Beck Group, Robert Plant, the Pozo-Seco Singers, The 31st of February, Long John Baldry, DEVO and Einstürzende Neubauten, among many others.
Eve Goldberg is a folk musician, singer and songwriter based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Musically, she draws from a number of different traditions and influences such as blues, country, bluegrass, jazz, swing, and contemporary and traditional folk music.
Sylvia Tyson, is a Canadian musician, performer, singer-songwriter and broadcaster. She is best known as part of the folk duo Ian and Sylvia, with Ian Tyson. Since 1993, she has been a member of the all-female folk group Quartette.
The Colleen Peterson Songwriting Award is an annual Canadian award, presented to the year's best song by an emerging singer-songwriter from Ontario in the genres of roots, traditional, folk and country music. The award, created in memory of Canadian country singer Colleen Peterson, is sponsored by the Ontario Arts Council and the Ontario Council of Folk Festivals (OCFF), and is presented to a songwriter selected from 15 nominations put forward by the OCFF's Songs from the Heart songwriting competition, excluding overall winners of the Galaxie Rising Stars Awards. The award was initially funded in part by royalties from the sale of Postcards from California, a posthumous album collecting some of Peterson's unreleased demo recordings.
Shirley Rose Eikhard was a Canadian singer-songwriter. Although moderately successful in Canada as a performer in her own right, she had her greatest Canadian and international success as a songwriter for other artists, most notably as the writer of Bonnie Raitt's 1991 hit "Something to Talk About".
Jadea Kelly is a singer-songwriter from Whitby, Ontario, Canada.
Alanna Clarke is a Canadian singer/songwriter, guitarist, and piano player based in Cochrane, Alberta.
Kyrie Kristmanson is a Canadian singer-songwriter, guitarist and trumpeter. Born in Ottawa, Ontario, she has lived in Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Saskatchewan and in France. Since appearing at the 2006 Winnipeg Folk Festival at the age of fifteen, Kristmanson has performed widely in Canada and Europe. Her performances have been broadcast nationally in Canada by CBC Radio 2, and in France by Radio France and by France Inter.
Ian Bell is a Canadian folk musician, composer, and singer-songwriter who has been active in the Canadian folk music scene since the 1970s. With Anne Lederman, he was part of the seminal Canadian folk group Muddy York. He has been the leader of The Dawnbreakers and Professor Chalaupka's Celebrated Singing School. Bell has performed at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival and the Mariposa Folk Festival, among others. He has contributed to the development and preservation of Canadian folk music for more than twenty-five years. He sings both old songs and his own original compositions. His music has a Celtic flavour. He is a versatile musician who plays several instruments.
Laura Maria Fernandez is a Canadian singer-songwriter, pianist, music producer, artist, radio host, and real estate agent. Fernandez was born in Madrid, Spain. In 2003, she was named Best Soft Rock musician at the New York International Independent Music Festival. She hosts Café Latino on JazzFM91, Toronto, and her Latin-music was produced by Billy Bryans.
Heather Elaine Rankin is a Canadian singer, songwriter and actor. She is most well known as a member of the multi-platinum selling musical group The Rankin Family.
Owen McBride is an Irish-born folk singer and storyteller, primarily performing traditional Irish and Scottish music. McBride settled in Toronto in 1963 and became a fixture in the Toronto folk scene. McBride was a key figure in the folk revival movement in Canada and in North American in the 1960s and early 1970s, appearing at major folk music festivals like the Mariposa Folk Festival and the Philadelphia Folk Festivals. For this role, he was inducted in the Mariposa Folk Festival Hall of Fame in 2019. He continues to be an active performer in the folk music club and festival scenes.
Richard Flohil is a Canadian music promoter, publicist, former Mariposa Folk Festival artistic director and journalist based in Toronto. Flohil now runs a public relations company, Richard Flohil and Associates.
SATE is the stage name of Saidah Baba Talibah, a Canadian rock singer from Toronto, Ontario. Her 2021 album The Fool was named a Juno Award nominee for Alternative Album of the Year at the Juno Awards of 2022.
