Big Town Boy was a big-time pop hit in the early 1960s and it was sung by Harrow small-town girl Shirley Matthews. Matthews had performed at school dances at Harrow high school and with her church choir before leaving for Toronto to join her older sister Joyce. Matthews found work in Toronto as a telephone…

KINGSVILLE — The skirl of bagpipes returns to Lakeside Park this Saturday with the long-awaited return of the Kingsville Highland Games. As a result of the two-year absence because of COVID-19 restrictions, there has been pent-up demand for tickets and organizers are seeing signs the event will have a larger crowd than in 2019 when…

It was 1955, a Sunday, and Kingsville doctor Quartus Bliss was playing scrabble with his 14-year-old son, Michael. His office doorbell rang. At the door was a police officer with a heavily intoxicated man, his cheek deeply slashed. Dr. Bliss was in failing health and because Michael was expected to follow him into the medical…

Brett Humber and his musical life have come full circle. As a kid he learned how to play electric guitar in his parents’ basement. Now, in the same basement, he’s recording an eclectic range of Essex County musicians, singers and songwriters. Humber is the sole proprietor of Sound Foundry Studios on McCain Sideroad, but when…

KINGSVILLE — To quote a line from one of their songs, Katie and Josh Pascoe were ready last June to “back up the Chevy’” and head west for a two-month, multi-province, western Canadian tour. But sorting through the changing COVID-19 restrictions from province to province and the growing uncertainty whether the bars and clubs their…

It’s all done purposely and mimics the speaking style and oral traditions of First Nations peoples across North America, Grisenthwaite said. “It’s very deliberate, the spelling. It’s almost rez in its tone,” he said, referring to the slang term for a First Nation reserve. “Not every story I write has that (style) … I tend…

KINGSVILLE — As a kid Glen Drover never asked his parents for toys, only music albums. His drive to play guitar was so strong he would strum on the strings of an old tennis racquet while watching his older brother Brian play. Eventually the kid brother was handed the guitar. Drover showed immediate talent and…

KINGSVILLE — The video of Johnny Cash singing Hurt is likely the saddest video ever recorded. Both Cash and his wife June Carter were ill at the time the video was shot and both died within a year of its release in 2003. The heart-wrenching song — first recorded by Nine Inch Nails — deals…

KINGSVILLE — It’s a lasting image for anyone who visited the Leach home late in the evening. There was Joe sitting in his leather armchair — lamp overhead, wisps of white hair luminous under the light, face in profile, glasses resting below the bridge of his nose — reading. Joe Leach died just over a…

HARROW — United Church minister Darrow Woods has a mind for murder … when he writes about his fictional protagonist Rev. Thomas Book, who sets about solving the mystery of two deaths connected to the sexual abuse of young women. Of the seven deadly sins, four — lust, wrath, greed and envy — are the…