2016 Inductee: Bobby Dean Blackburn

Written by John Stewart

Legacy stories run in rich veins through Bobby Dean Blackburn’s life. His great-grandfather Elias Earls traveled the Underground Railroad from Kentucky to its terminus in Owen Sound where he married a local girl. Bobby Dean has recently served as artistic director for the town’s Emancipation Festival, established in 1862. His ancestors likely attended the same picnic celebration in their own time and sang some of the same songs.

Like the pioneers in his family, Bobby Dean’s musical sojourn has traveled a long road that’s taken him across the GTA, Ontario, and Canada. It started at York Memorial High School where his band The Gems won a talent contest and played the first-ever school dance. His reward was a threat of expulsion from the principal for “deteriorating the morals” of students by playing rock and roll.

He quit school at 16. He’s essentially been on the road ever since.

Bobby Dean and the Gems fought the Battle of the Bands with Toronto’s other top groups The Consuls and the Wildwoods. He recorded a version of You Are My Sunshine at age 13 at Fred Roden’s Record Corral on Yonge St. There was an offer from Nashville, which his father flatly turned down. The Gems headlined dances before Bobby Dean truly made his name at the Zanzibar a Go Go, playing 4 hours every afternoon.

There were no after-hours clubs back then, so the Zanzibar became the home-away-from-home for every name jazz, blues, and R&B player passing through town.

Music critic Jack Batten described it in 1973 as “the only room in Toronto, maybe in the whole world, where jazz musicians can wander in at any hour of the afternoon and jam away the daylight hours to an appreciative audience of their peers and their fans.” Bobby Dean was the ringmaster.

A short list of those who jammed at his Zanzibar Finishing School includes Paul Butterfield, Rick James, Buddy Miles, Jimmy McGriff, Taj Mahal, Richard “Groove” Holmes, David-Clayton Thomas, Roland Prince, Dougie Richardson, Don (D.T.) Thompson, Eugene Smith and Steve Kennedy. The Blackburn homes in Brampton and Malton, where the family lived for the better part of 40 years, were filled with musicians coming to pay their respects and play.

Blackburn took a three-year hiatus when his doctor diagnosed “smoker’s cough.” He resumed playing after B.B. King told him “you should never quit playing because you never know when you might make it.” He moved to the Bruce Peninsula about a decade ago and has revived his career – and not coincidentally the local bar scene – up there.

Blackburn’s CV includes a gospel TV show that tapped his childhood roots singing lead in Baptist church choirs, 3 years playing solo in Yellowknife and a gig on an Alaskan cruise ship.

He was the first black coach in the Mississauga Hockey League. He went back to Westwood Secondary School at 57 to complete his high school diploma and was chosen as valedictorian by hi fellow adult students. His four sons have grown up imbued with their father’s music and his passion for it. Their Maple Blues-winning Juno-nominated “band of brothers” proudly carries the Blackburn name.

Bobby Dean counts a recent appearance with Blackburn at Summer Folk as one of his career highlights. Many of the group’s songs carry lyrical references to the family history.

In one, son Duane sings “My father played the blues/ always the real deal/ down on Yonge St.” Bobby Dean Blackburn is the real deal to a lot more people than just his sons. Music has been his life for six decades. It still is. Every gig in every bar in every town across Canada has taken him another step towards his arrival today on the Mississauga Music Walk of Fame.