TORONTO (AP) — Ian Tyson, the Canadian folk singer who wrote the trendy standard “4 Strong Winds” as one half of Ian & Sylvia and helped influence such future superstars as Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, died Thursday at age 89.
The native of Victoria, British Columbia, died at his ranch in southern Alberta following a series of health complications, his manager, Paul Mascioli, said.
Tyson was a component of the influential folk movement in Toronto together with his first wife, Sylvia Tyson. But he was also seen as a throwback to more rustic times and devoted much of his life to living on his ranch and pursuing songs concerning the cowboy life.
“He put quite a lot of time and energy into his songwriting and felt his material very strongly, especially the entire cowboy lifestyle,″ Sylvia Tyson said of her former husband.
He was best known for the troubadour’s lament “4 Strong Winds” and its classic refrain concerning the lifetime of a wanderer: “If the great times are all gone/Then I’m sure for movin’ on/I’ll search for you if I’m ever back this manner.”
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Bob Dylan, Waylon Jennings and Judy Collins were amongst the various performers who covered the song. Young included “4 Strong Winds” on his acclaimed “Comes a Time” album, released in 1978, and two years earlier performed the song at “The Last Waltz” concert staged by the Band to mark its farewell to live shows.
Tyson was born Sept. 25, 1933, to folks who emigrated from England. He attended private school and learned to play polo, then he discovered the rodeo.
After graduating from the Vancouver School of Art in 1958, he hitchhiked to Toronto. He was swept up in the town’s burgeoning folk movement, where Canadians including Young, Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot played in hippie coffee houses within the bohemian Yorkville neighborhood.
Tyson soon met Sylvia Fricker they usually began a relationship — onstage and off, moving to Latest York. Their debut album, “Ian & Sylvia,” in 1962 was a set of mostly traditional songs. Their second album, 1964′s “4 Strong Winds,″ was the duo’s breakthrough, thanks largely to its title track, one among the record’s only original compositions.
Married in 1964, the pair continued releasing recent records with regularity. But as the recognition of people waned, they moved to Nashville and started integrating country and rock into their music. In 1969, the Tysons formed the country-rock band Great Speckled Bird, which appeared with Janis Joplin, the Band and the Grateful Dead amongst others on the “Festival Express” tour across Canada in 1970, later the premise for a documentary released in 2004.
They’d a baby, Clay, in 1968 however the couple grew apart as their profession began to stall within the ’70s. They divorced in 1975.
Tyson moved back to western Canada and returned to ranch life, training horses and cowboying in Pincher Creek, Alberta, 135 miles south of Calgary. These experiences increasingly filtered through his songwriting, particularly on 1983′s “Old Corrals and Sagebrush.″
In 1987, Tyson won a Juno Award for country male vocalist of the yr and five years later he was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame alongside Sylvia Tyson. He was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2019.
Despite damage to his voice resulting from a heart attack and surgery in 2015, Tyson continued to perform live live shows. But the center problems returned and compelled Tyson to cancel appearances in 2018.
He continued to play his guitar at home, though. “I believe that’s the important thing to my hanging in there since you’ve gotta use it or lose it,″ he said in 2019.
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