Every year, countries in search of musical glory select artists to represent them on the global stage. If provinces got the same shot, what song would we choose to represent Ontario?
This summer, we’ll find out. In TVO Today’s Ontariovision Song Contest, 16 beloved standards and newer classics will go head to head — and you’ll get the chance to back your favourites.
So kick back, relax, and listen to some trademark Ontario tracks. Voting begins in August, and in September, we’ll reveal the province’s signature song.
Song: “Bobcaygeon”
Album: Phantom Power
Year: 1999
Band: The Tragically Hip, formed in Kingston in 1984, consisted of vocalist Gord Downie, guitarist Paul Langlois, guitarist Rob Baker, bassist Gord Sinclair, and drummer Johnny Fay. The Hip released 13 studio albums that featured hit singles such as "Ahead by a Century," "Poets," and "Grace, Too." Langlois, Baker, Sinclair, and Fay stopped performing under the Hip name shortly after Downie’s death in 2017.
One story goes like this: Gord Downie, passing through Bobcaygeon, is thinking of going camping. He stops at a small shop run by Pete Cziraky, a businessowner and, later, a local councillor. (Cziraky, who died in 2009, was so popular that he won the 2006 election after spending just $10 on the race.)
Anyway, it’s the end of the day, and Pete follows the Tragically Hip’s frontman out to his car, not having a clue who he is. He helps him with his stuff and tells him how much he loves it in the Kawarthas — the stars are just beautiful.
And one of the most memorized lines from arguably Canada’s most iconic band wrote itself from there.
Richard Kyle likes the tale but says it’s probably not exactly true. He once ran into Downie at a bar and asked about the lyric (“It was in Bobcaygeon, I saw the constellations/reveal themselves one star at a time”), and he suspects it probably didn’t have a true local connection. “Gord was fairly elusive when it came to lyrics,” Kyle says. “He’d rather people have their own interpretation of it.”
What Downie told Kyle: he was getting ice cream with his kids and it hit him — “Bobcaygeon” is the only place that rhymes with “constellation.”
“I said to him, ‘But it doesn’t rhyme.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but it’s close enough.’”
You’d be hard-pressed to find someone more Kawarthas than Richard Kyle. He lives in Bobcaygeon, plays in a tribute band called the Tragically Hits, and makes ice cream at Kawartha Dairy for a living. The band started in 2015: five middle-aged guys, each taking on the role of someone in the Hip (Kyle is guitarist Paul Langlois). The band hoped to honour the Hip’s legacy by playing their music and using the proceeds for charitable contributions.
The Tragically Hits (courtesy Richard Kyle)
Kyle has been a Hip fan almost since their first EP in 1987 and has seen them live more than 50 times. He’s been around Canadian music professionally and recreationally much of his life and built relationships with the band members. “They’re the Canadian soundtrack,” he says. “And just the way they are as people: there were never any egos with them. They’re all super-nice guys.”
The Tragically Hits gained steam, and the summer of 2020 was set to be big. Then COVID-19 tore its way through Bobcaygeon and the province. Pinecrest Nursing Home was one of the first and worst tragedies of Ontario’s experience with COVID. Within two months, roughly 30 people died in the home — nearly 1 per cent of the town’s population.
Kyle wanted to help, so he asked his social-media followers to sing “Bobcaygeon” from their front porches and post clips online to raise awareness for the town’s COVID-19 relief fund. The event went viral; Langlois himself even joined in. “We helped them raise a quarter of a million dollars or something like that,” Kyle says. “Something ridiculous.”
“Bobcaygeon” isn’t Kyle’s favourite Hip song (right now that honour belongs to “Opiated”), but it does hold a special place in his heart. “We play it at every single show,” he says. (That included during lockdowns, when the band would play on a barge on Pigeon Lake to allow for maximum distancing.)
He’s spent hours dissecting its various references. The checkerboard floors are, of course, Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern. The men they couldn’t hang? A band from the United Kingdom. The Christie Pits riots make an appearance, too.
And even if Bobcaygeon wasn’t specifically on Downie’s mind when he was composing, the song has bestowed on the town a sort of cottage-country prestige. In June 2011, 25,000 people made a pilgrimage to the town of 3,500 to hear the band play — an event that critic Jason Anderson called “a moment of Canuck-rock significance that's roughly equivalent to Roger Waters doing Pink Floyd's The Wall in Berlin.”
In August 2016, more than 6,000 people packed downtown Bobcaygeon as massive television screens streamed the Hip’s last concert, held in Kingston following Downie’s terminal cancer diagnosis. Nearly 12 million Canadians tuned in from across the country.
More than 6,000 fans packed downtown Bobcaygeon for the Hip's final show. (CP/Fred Thornhill)
Kyle wasn’t among them. Though he watched the other 14 stops of the tour in real time, he had a gig booked that night — one scheduled a year earlier. He was playing with a country band in nearby Coboconk. Hip songs weren’t on the set list, but he managed to sneak a few in last minute. “I probably would’ve rather watched the last show,” he admits. But although the recording is easily available online, he says, “I didn’t watch it, and I still haven’t watched it, and I don’t want to watch it.”
Back to the lyrics. Most locals know that the Cziraky story is probably apocryphal. But if there’s a lingering desire for a more satisfying backstory, it might be because the line feels intimately familiar. “Stars revealing themselves one star at a time? That kind of thing — that does happen here at night,” Kyle says. “As the sun is setting, you start to see the planets and the stars. And if it's a nice clear night, a beautiful view of the sky appears.”