Monthly Archive: December 2008

Forty-nine songs for a president

CBC Radio 2 has invited Canadians to name forty-nine songs from north of the forty-ninth parallel that explain to President-elect Barack Obama who we are. The difficulty is this: what exactly constitutes a Canadian?? Healey Willan, the Dean of Canadian Composers, certainly deserves a place, but he was born in Britain. Still, he described himself as “British by birth, Irish by extraction, Canadian by adoption, and Scotch by absorption.” And what about Robert Goulet who grew up in Canada but was born in the U.S.? He made his name in the Broadway production of Camelot singing “If Ever I Should...

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