Colleen Susan Peterson (November 14, 1950 – October 9, 1996) was a Canadian country and folk singer, who performed both as a solo artist and as a member of the band Quartette.[1][2]
Career
Peterson began performing in coffeehouses in Ottawa in 1966.[3] She won an RPM Gold Leaf Award for Most Promising Female Vocalist in 1967 and, in 1968, joined Bruce Cockburn, David Wiffen, Richard Patterson and Dennis Pendrith in a later version of the folk band 3's a Crowd.[4] She then joined the band TCB that recorded an album on the Traffic label. She left after that. In 1970, she was cast in the Canadian production of Hair.
She subsequently moved to Kingston in 1971, forming the band Spriggs and Bringle with Mark Haines. She then relocated to Nashville in 1974,[5][4] and released her first solo album, Beginning to Feel Like Home, in 1976.[6] She had a hit single on the Billboard country charts with "Souvenirs", and won a Juno Award for Most Promising Female Vocalist in 1977.[7]
In 1986 Peterson released the single "I Had It All", which was a hit on the Canadian country charts and launched the most successful phase of her career. She released the album Basic Facts, her first in ten years, in 1988, and had a string of ten hits, including "No Pain, No Gain", which hit No. 1 on the Canadian country charts in 1991.
Peterson toured and recorded with Quartette until 1996, when she was diagnosed with cancer. Unable to perform with the band during her cancer treatment, she chose her friend and collaborator Gwen Swick to fill in for her, and died in Toronto on October 9 of that year. She is buried in Little Lake Cemetery in Peterborough, Ontario.
Tributes
Peterson was inducted into the Ottawa Valley Country Music Hall of Fame in 1995.[11] Additionally, she was posthumously inducted into the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame in 2000.[12][13] In 2003, the Colleen Peterson Songwriting Award, an award for young emerging songwriters, was created in her memory.[14] In 2004, her friend and songwriting partner Nancy Simmonds worked with several musicians to produce a new album, Postcards from California, from unreleased demos she had recorded with Peterson in the early 1990s.
^"Colleen Peterson". Hall of Fame Inductees. Canadian Country Music Association. Archived from the original on October 22, 2014. Retrieved December 8, 2014.
