Connie Kaldor

Connie Isabelle Kaldor, (born 9 May 1953) is a Canadian folk singer-songwriter.

She is the recipient of three Juno awards.

Kaldor was born in Regina, Saskatchewan.

She graduated from Campbell Collegiate in Regina in 1972 and the University of Alberta in 1976 with a BFA degree in theatre.

Kaldor performed with various theatre groups, including Theatre Passe Muraille, The Mummers and 25th Street House Theatre, until 1979, when she gave it up to start a full-time music career.

In the early 1980s, Kaldor opened for Stan Rogers in a tour across the United States and the two musicians played the Canadian Workshop together at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas in June 1983, after which Stan Rogers tragically passed away in a plane crash returning home from the festival.

She was also among the first performers to play the Edmonton Folk Festival in 1980 where, alongside Sylvia Tyson and Stan Rogers, the trio was called the "nucleus of the first Edmonton Folk Music Festival.” That same year, she was selected by the co-founders of the Winnipeg Folk Festival, Mitch Podolak and Ava Kobrinsky, to be part of The Travelling Goodtime Medicine Show, with Sylvia Tyson, Stan Rogers, and Jim Post.

According to Gary Cristall, who helped book the Vancouver Folk Music Festival in the 1980s, "The squeals of delight from the audience give a sense of the impact [of its lyrics]."

Kaldor began her career in the 1980s, a time when it was difficult to be booked as a female artist in Canada at festivals and venues.

According to a recent interview with Kaldor herself, at the beginning, festival directors would tell her, “Sorry, we already have our women's act this year.” Nonetheless, Kaldor persevered and became a feature at folk festivals, thanks in part to the women in her audience who often "lobbied to have her included on folk festival rosters."

She was hired at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, which for the first time was highlighting a genre then called women's music (devoting space in the program to answer the question, ‘what is women’s music?').

As her career progressed, Kaldor continued to write songs from a feminist perspective.

Her song 'Strength, Love and Laughter' is recognized as, "important song in Canadian feminist music."

In 1981, she founded her own independent record label, Coyote Entertainment, and has released eighteen albums.

Part of the Canadian Wave, Connie has performed alongside talents such as Stan Rogers, Ferron, and Valdy, and contributed to a newly emerging and distinctly Canadian sound.

In 1985 she received a Most Promising Female Vocalist Juno Award nomination (now called the Juno Award for Breakthrough Artist of the Year) for her album Moonlight Grocery and in the year 2000, her album Love is a Truck was nominated for a Juno in the Folk Roots category.

In 1988, Kaldor wrote the lyrics for Svetlana Zylin's musical, feminist interpretation of the bible, The Destruction of Eve.

In 1988, the National Film Board produced a short film for her song “Get Back the Night” as a “statement against senseless violence.” In 1997, the Canadian Congress for Learning Opportunities for Women selected her song, “One Hit” to create pedagogical materials for Canadian classrooms addressing the topic of domestic violence against women.

She has won the Juno Award for best children's album three times, in 1989, 2004, and 2005.

In 1997, she was featured performer in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan on the last broadcast of Peter Gzowski's CBC national radio program Morningside.

The musical premiered in 1998 in Toronto with Company of Sirens.

Kaldor has been particularly vocal about the issues of domestic abuse and gender based violence.

In 2000, She co-wrote the theme song for the animated television series based on the comic strip For Better or For Worse.

Her song "Wanderlust" was covered by Cosy Sheridan.

In 2003, her television show @ Wood River Hall debuted on VisionTV.

In 2005, she was invited to perform at the Saskatchewan Centennial for Joni Mitchell as well as the Queen of England.

In 2006, she was made a Member of the Order of Canada.

In 2009, she received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the University of Regina.

She also received an Alumni Association Honour Award from the University of Alberta.

In 2014, she became the first songwriter to receive a Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award.

In 2019, Kaldor wrote Missing and Gone, "which addresses the issue of murdered and missing Indigenous women and children".

Most recently, Kaldor wrote the song, "Woman Who Pays," which responds to the series of 8 femicides in 8 weeks in Montreal in 2021 which resulted in the death of a friend of her daughter-in-law.

In 2020, her song, Seed in the Ground, was selected as one of 20 songs for the Canadian Music Class Challenge in honour of the Juno Awards 50th anniversary.

Kaldor and her husband, music producer and Hart-Rouge member Paul Campagne, have two sons and live in Montreal.

She now performs with her husband and two adult children, Aleksi Campagne and Gabriel Campagne.

She jokes that, "Shari Ulrich and I, I think we’re the only two people in the Canadian music scene that actually gave birth to their backup bands.”

According to the Garnette Report, Kaldor is "considered one of Canada's finest writers."

Connie Kaldor is recognized as a feminist performer alongside artists like k.d. lang, Ferron, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Pauline Julien.

From the very start of her career, Kaldor's lyrics have showcased the perspectives and experiences of women, "often using humour to disarm her audience."

One of her earliest successes, the song Jerks called out cat-calling jerks in its lyrics, singing, "there are jerks in cars/jerks in trucks/some want to bug you/some want to f…f… find out what you’re really like… jerks!"