Six highlights from Molly Johnson's incredible career
Celebrate the Canadian singer's Governor General's Award with these clips pulled from the CBC archives
This is part of a series of articles about the Governor General's Performing Arts Awards laureates.
Molly Johnson is a musician, philanthropist, broadcaster and lifelong entertainer, and on May 27, she'll receive the Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award at the Governor General's Performing Arts Awards' gala in Ottawa. The award, which comes with a $25,000 prize, is one of the country's top honours. But as the singer herself would tell you, her storied career is far from over.
"I'm looking forward to making great music that I can share with you in the years ahead," she said in a brief video message that was released when the GGPAA laureates were announced in late February.
And she'll be making plenty of music very soon. This June, Johnson will play jazz fests in Vancouver, Victoria and Toronto — and her own event, the Kensington Market Jazz Festival (which she co-founded in 2016) is expected to return for 2023. It'll be the latest chapter in an exceptional career that's already earned the Toronto-born artist two Junos, a Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal and the Order of Canada.
CBC's followed her work since the very beginning. Here are just a few highlights, stretching all the way back to 1965, when Johnson was only six years old.
The Mirvish Theatre kid
When Johnson released Lucky, the 2008 record that won her a Juno, she dedicated the album to a Toronto icon, theatre impresario and Honest Ed's founder, Ed Mirvish. "You know, Ed started this thing by putting me in Porgy and Bess when I was five years old," she told the Globe and Mail that year — "this thing" being a life in the arts.
Growing up in Toronto, she and her brother Clark were often cast in the Mirvish stage shows that would play the Royal Alexandra Theatre: big productions like South Pacific, Finian's Rainbow and Porgy and Bess. As the story goes, Mirvish knew the Johnson family from the Markham Street neighbourhood. "With my parents, their friendship with Ed happened because they were all involved in civil rights," Johnson told the Toronto Star earlier this year. "They were sort of sparring pals and, being mixed-race kids in 1960 in Toronto, where there weren't a lot of Black folks, Ed just started casting us in his shows."
"It was more for the fun of it. I don't think any of us thought about it as a career," Johnson told the Star. Still, those plays put her in the spotlight for the very first time, and in the summer of 1965, she even appeared on a CBC program called Luncheon Date. Taped at Toronto's Four Seasons Hotel, Johnson is barely out of kindergarten in the clip — just a smiley, soft-spoken kid in pigtails — and she's joined by a couple of family members for the segment: her brother Clark and cousin Ronnie. All three kids were appearing in a Mirvish production of Finian's Rainbow at the time.
The queen of Queen West
In 1984, CBC's The Journal ran a documentary on the Queen Street music scene. It was a time before chains like Zara and Starbucks dominated the strip — when Queen West was still "the proving ground for a lot of what's new in Canadian music, art and fashion." And Molly Johnson was at the centre of it all.
Just as she was entering her 20s, Johnson co-founded Alta Moda in 1979, an art-rock outfit that would become a fixture on Queen West. The band appears in The Journal's report, where they're introduced as "one of the most promising acts on the street," and Johnson serves as a sort of guide to what's happening in the scene — even letting the cameras into her home, where she performs for a crowd described as "Queen Street's night people." (See if you can spot Carole Pope.)
The Alta Moda years
When Johnson got the call from the GGPAAs, it took her a minute to process the news. "I went, 'Achievement? What achievement?" she told the Canadian Press when this year's laureates were announced. "I'm still technically in the same spot I was in when I had a punk band called Alta Moda in the '80s."
To be fair, a few things have changed. For one, she's no longer slinging draft at the Cameron House. But Johnson remains a working artist, and the realities aren't always glamorous. Even in her Alta Moda days, Johnson was bringing attention to that fact.
In 1987, she and her Alta Moda bandmate Norman Orenstein appeared on CBC's Switchback. On the program, they describe their group as "a very loud, very aggressive funk band," and after gigging for years, they were on the verge of releasing their major label debut. That self-titled album, which arrived later in 1987, featured "Julian," a single that would see some modest success on the Canadian charts.
Alta Moda clearly had some fans in the Switchback audience. (Johnson and Orenstein get some big cheers at the beginning of the clip.) But during the segment, Johnson downplays the glitz of being in a pop band, as the conversation turns to life in Toronto. At the time, her home was a room above the Cameron House, the Queen Street music venue where she also worked. How'd she end up there, asks host Howard Busgang? "Lack of money," Johnson quips. "This is not a good business to get into if one is interested in cash."
A new sound for the '90s
Alta Moda was over by the time the '90s began, but Johnson was still making music with her bandmate Norman Orenstein. They launched the new decade with a new band — Infidels — a rock 'n' roll project that would win the 1992 Juno for most promising group of the year.
Why the change up? They explained everything to CBC's Midday in 1992. "I think the music has changed greatly because times have changed greatly," Johnson said on the program.
But Johnson was pursuing more than one new sound at the time. While working on Infidels, she was also hosting a weekly jazz night at Toronto's Cameron House, singing standards with a group called Blue Monday, an outfit that featured Gordie Johnson (Big Sugar) on guitar.
Philanthropic 'superstar'
In 1992, Johnson launched the first Kumbaya Festival, a benefit for people living with HIV/AIDS. For four years, the show aired on MuchMusic, and as Johnson told Canadian Press, the initiative raised more than $4 million dollars for the Kumbaya Foundation and related charities during its run. Of all Johnson's philanthropic work, it's an extraordinary contribution, and in 1995, she appeared on CBC's Midday to discuss the origins of Kumbaya and how she built the foundation by calling all the "superstars" in her rolodex and putting her "rock 'n' roll mentality" to work.
'What I love to do I still do'
Though she often describes herself as a pop singer, in the 2000s, Johnson became synonymous with Canadian jazz. She began the new millennium with a self-titled album, and as the decade progressed, she built a reputation both here and abroad — notably in France, a country which named her a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters this past March.
She continues to record. Her last album, a collection of holiday tunes, arrived in late 2021, which is when she discussed the disc with Q's Tom Power — a former colleague of hers from CBC Radio. (Between 2008 - 2013, Johnson was the voice of CBC Radio 2 Morning, serving as the weekend host.)
Despite all she's accomplished — in music, broadcasting, philanthropy and beyond — Johnson often downplays her achievements, and she was characteristically humble in this 2007 interview for The National.
"I really only do the one thing, which is write songs and live my life," she tells reporter Clifton Joseph.
"At the end of the day, what I love to do I still do — which is I get together with people I really like and create music. And at the end of the day, that's not a bad thing to spend your time doing. And if I can make somebody happy or change somebody's mood with this music, make somebody think about something differently, that's great. It's a great job."
