(Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press)

By Josh Hall (Twitter: @Vancan19)/rdnewsNOW

of ian & sylvia fame

Canadian folk music icon Ian Tyson dies aged 89

Dec 29, 2022 | 2:30 PM

TORONTO – Canadian folk legend Ian Tyson, best known for the hit single “Four Strong Winds” as one half of Ian & Sylvia, has died at age 89.

The Victoria native died Thursday at his ranch in southern Alberta following a series of ongoing health complications, according to his manager Paul Mascioli.

Tyson began his music career in the late 1950s, first hitchhiking across the country from Vancouver to Toronto and then getting swept up in the city’s burgeoning folk movement in the bohemian Yorkville neighbourhood.

That’s where he met a kindred spirit named Sylvia Fricker and they began a relationship onstage and off eventually leading to their breakthrough second album “Four Strong Winds” in 1964.

They would continue releasing music together for years, but as their career began to stall in the ’70s the couple grew apart and divorced in 1975.

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Tyson built a solo career as a country music singer in the years that followed, with his self-released 1987 album, “Cowboyography” becoming a surprising word-of-mouth hit that helped earn him a Juno award.

In 2006, Ian Tyson was named to the Alberta Order Of Excellence for “…helping establish a unique soundtrack to capture the Alberta experience.”

According to Stony Plain Records, Tyson released his most recent single “You Should Have Known” in September 2017 on Stony Plain Records, the label that Tyson’s released fifteen albums with since the ‘80s. The song unapologetically celebrated the hard living, hard drinking, hard loving cowboy life and joins his favourites such as hits like “Four Strong Winds,” “Someday Soon,” “Summer Wages” and more.

Life has not been without its difficulties, however, writes Stony Plain’s Eric Alper. In 2006 the same year he was named to the Alberta Order Of Excellence for “…helping establish a unique soundtrack to capture the Alberta experience,” Tyson seriously damaged his voice after a particularly tough performance at an outdoor country music festival.

“I fought the sound system and I lost,” Tyson said afterwards.

With a virus that took months to pass, his smooth voice was now hoarse, grainy, and had lost much of its resonant bottom end. After briefly entertaining thoughts that he would never sing again, he began relearning and reworking his songs to accommodate his “new voice,” which, as Alper notes in a release, led to that 2017 release.

–with files from Canadian Press and Dan Reynish