Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

Several years ago, I was contacted by a Montreal man named Peter Weldon who asked if I’d like to hear an unreleased 1969 recording of Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s original folk group, the Mountain City Four, singing the music of Wade Hemsworth with the composer himself. Absolutely, I told Weldon. I’d long loved Hemsworth’s songs and was excited to hear anything unreleased that included the wondrous McGarrigles. The Mountain City Four had begun when Weldon and another musician, Jack Nissenson, recruited the younger McGarrigle sisters to join them in song (I have a personal connection with Nissenson, but more on that later). Soon, the MC4 were packing coffeehouses as stars of Montreal’s burgeoni...

Before they became the darlings of the folk scene and the revered singer-songwriters behind such classics as “Heart Like a Wheel” and “Talk to Me of Mendocino,” Kate and Anna McGarrigle performed in a little-known Montreal singing group. It was the early 1960s and coffeehouses were springing up everywhere, filled with earnest folksingers and attentive audiences. The McGarrigle sisters were just teenagers when they joined musicians Jack Nissenson and Peter Weldon in 1962, calling themselves the Mountain City Four. “We entered into the folk scene through the records of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan,” Kate recalled. “But when we met Nissenson and Weldon, they introduced us to music at the sources and...