For 36 years, Canada had a Friday night TV date with a lanky troubadour who lived in Mississauga. His name was Tommy Hunter and his game was country music.
He didn’t have hit records. He didn’t dance. He hardly ever wore sequins. He didn’t yodel. All he did was invite a nation onto his front stoop and his back parlour, assemble some friends to sing some familiar songs, get everybody to relax and then entertain them like crazy.
He was the most Canadian of celebrities, a star without apparent ego. He really didn’t need one because he put us all at ease right away, from the cream of the superstar country crop in Nashville to an impossibly young Eileen Edwards — later to become Shania somebody-or-other — making her national TV debut.
The collective blood pressure of the nation started dropping mid-evening as 10 percent of the country tuned in to see what small pleasures Canada’s “Country Gentleman” had for us this week.
Despite an endless parade of producers who wanted to modernize him, gussy him up and turn him into a showcase for the latest musical trend, Hunter knew his audience well and knew that they wanted the real goods he was delivering – honest music delivered in an honest way.
“I don’t want any hot-shot material,” he once told an interviewer. “When a new writer comes along and says he wants to write comedy, I tell him he’s got learn how to write, “Hello folks,how are you tonight?” When his audience tuned in, they “wanted to feel like they were putting on an old slipper,” Tommy says. Our feet have never been in such comfortable hands.
They called it The Tommy Hunter Show but they could just as easily have called it what they named a later CBC show — Heartland — because that’s where he touched this country. The show was a kind of regional religion in parts of Canada that otherwise had little in common.
That’s why, when Tommy went out to play the legion halls and churches and community theatres across this land, the public flocked to see him. Over its lengthy existence, The Tommy Hunter Show had a consistency of character — the host’s character — genial and exuberant and gentle on our minds.
He has a special place in our local history because he wrote our theme song, “Mississauga” when the municipality was incorporated as a city 40 years ago. He even had the foresight to use the future mayor on backing vocals.
The song was his idea and he guided the whole process, getting the studio for free; collecting Mississaugans from all walks of life; putting them on a bus downtown; and making them an integral part of the recording party. If Tommy Hunter’s one-time background vocalist is known as the “people’s mayor,” then surely Tommy himself should be known as the “people’s troubadour.”
The chorus of his civic theme song urged the listener to “Come on out to Mississauga, it’s the greatest place we know.”
It’s advice the rest of the country should heed — simply because it’s coming from arguably the greatest example of a home-grown, natural story-telling entertainer Canada will ever have the pleasure to know.
Welcome to the Mississauga Walk of Fame, Tommy.