Larry, who turned 80 on August 30, 2022, has deep roots in the neighbourhood. Although born in Vanier, (above the Vanier Grill on Montreal Road, which was then a butcher shop), he moved to 104 Stanley Avenue at age 10 and has lived in the same 136-year-old house on Crichton street since marrying Joanne (Bonell) on August 1, 1964. After a 26-year career with the city of Ottawa’s finance department, Larry started working from home a few years after the first edition of Capital Country News was released in 1980 (the original name of what became CMM).
Larry is proud of the massive wall of 15,000 vinyl LPs and 10,000 CDs that he’s been faithfully collecting since 1957. The seeds of his love for country music were actually sown by listening to CKBY (now Y 105) as a 12-year-old when he’d tune into a noon-hour show with Bob King and the Happy Wanderers. From then on, he started buying albums, one of his first being a Buddy Knox LP, an obscure and long-forgotten country musician from Happy, Texas.
Also in 1957, he was in the audience at the old auditorium on Argyle street when a guy by the name of Elvis Presley performed in his only Ottawa concert. “Joanne and I both attended that concert but we didn’t even know each other then…we met a few years later on Sept. 26th, 1959 on bus #3” Larry affectionately recalled. Although he liked some of the 1950s rock and roll, acknowledging that he “was into Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Ricky Nelson”, Larry never really took to rock and roll in the 1960s, adding “my interest [in country LPs] really was towards the songwriters of the song. I would buy an album based on who wrote the songs as opposed to who was singing them so I developed a fairly large collection of vinyl”.
Perhaps his most significant achievement is helping to promote new Canadian country artists. He points with pride at the framed picture showing the first 25 cover stories of CMM. “When we started the newspaper one of my first chores was writing album reviews. It became a popular part of the paper because people would focus in on what my reviews were for their purchase of albums” Larry explains.
Larry speaks enthusiastically about the hundreds of Canada’s most beloved country musicians who he interviewed in the home office, like George Fox, Paul Brandt, Charlie Major, and Stompin’ Tom Connors. to name but a few. The “cantankerous” Stompin Tom drove up Crichton street in a big white limo after receiving the Order of Canada at Rideau Hall, case of Moosehead in hand!
Larry remembers that Stompin Tom took some strong stands on the American influence on the Canadian music industry but was not necessarily factual in some cases. “He was upset because an American act would come in and be billed as the headliner on a Canadian show and that irritated him. He eventually went into isolation and returned all of his Juno Awards” Larry adds. In late 80s, Larry asked his Toronto writer to track Connors down in southwestern Ontario resulting in a 2 part cover story. “Dean Cameron of Capital Records saw the story and saw an opportunity to reissue all of his music on CDs and it was like a huge rebirth of Stompin Tom to the university and college crowd”.
Another fun fact emanating from Larry’s razor-sharp memory is when he featured a story on “Eileen Twain” back in 1983. This is Shania’s actual name and she was born in Windsor, he informs me, and he didn’t necessarily foresee her as becoming the international success when his article first appeared all those years ago.
With someone as steeped in country music history, I Larry commented on the revolutionary changes in both country music and the recording business since he launched CMM. “Ottawa was very much a hotbed of country music in the 1970s and into the 1980s”, he says, but things have changed so drastically in the last 20 years and what you hear on the radio now is not country music. It started with Garth Brooks, whose popularity was so immense that all the major record labels wanted to comb what he did and everyone started to sound the same”. He promptly shows me a photo of Garth with Joanne at the Civic Centre and he’s holding a copy of their Country Music News magazine. Larry says that CMM were the only media allowed access after the show, and laughs that he and Joanne chatted with Brooks more about their dogs than music!
Joanne, whom he calls his “soulmate”, is central to his memories of publishing CMM, having been his partner in the production of its 332 editions. Unfortunately, she was diagnosed with dementia in 2020, but she is never far from his thoughts. He visits her daily at an assisted living facility on Montreal Road.
Larry also has his own health issues these days, having been diagnosed with blood cancer in 2020 and just this year, he received a pacemaker implant, which prevented him from attending the ceremony to receive his Impact Award in May.
But despite these personal challenges, Larry remains committed to preserving the memory of Canadian country music and is a passionate chronicler of the history of the local music scene. He is a freelance writer for Bounder magazine, having recently written a retrospective piece about “The Golden Rail”, a country music club in the old Lafountaine Hotel on Montreal Road that was demolished in 1986 to make way for a condo development. “At one time, we had a series of country clubs right across the city. It was the same in most cities across Canada until the no-smoking by-laws came into existence and pretty much killed the bar circuit” he laments.
He’s also posted over 30,000 photos on Facebook promoting Canadian country music performers. He credits his two children, Kenni-Jo, 52 and Kirk 48, for showing him how to use social media. (But don’t count on them to help with preserving the memory of country music, as they did not inherit his love for the genre).
Larry’s life has been immersed and enriched by a love of country music. And as long as he keeps active, the promotion and preservation of country music history is in excellent ands.
I take a final look at the wall of vinyl and CDs, then glance at a framed picture that seems especially fitting for someone with such a massive record collection: “Bury me with my old records. It’ll be my vinyl resting place”.
Larry Delaney with his collection of 20,000 albums; Photo by John Leefe.
Larry Delaney in conversation with John Leefe: