From the Vaults digs deep into the CBC archives for unforgettable musical performances
Footage includes a teenage Shania Twain, Sammy Davis Jr.'s very own TV special and Bob Dylan in 1964
A 14-year-old singer named Eilleen Twain, who now goes by Shania, crooning away on The Tommy Hunter Show.
Leonard Cohen's first-ever televised performance in 1966 on Take 30 and jazz pianist Oscar Peterson performing his ambitious Canadiana Suite, which hasn't broadcast in more than 50 years.
These are some of the rare performances uncovered by CBC's new series From the Vaults.
Hosted by Amanda Parris of CBC Arts: Exhibitionists and q's Tom Power, the half-hour series is a deep dive into the CBC archives. Over the course of six episodes, From the Vaults delves into some of the most iconic musical performances that aired on CBC. The show stretches across decades and musical genres, with footage from the archives going as far back as the 1950s.
Watch the From the Vaults trailer
"As Canadians, we are very humble and we don't necessarily take a lot of pride in our musical story and I think this series can hopefully open some eyes to that story," said Sam Dunn, co-founder of Banger Films, the production company that produced the series.
Dunn, also an executive producer for the show, assembled a small team of writers and producers. With more than one million hours of footage in the CBC vaults, the big question for the team was: where do we start?
"It was a combination of leaning on people that knew ... a lot more than we did and also just going down into the archives and spending hours and hours and hours watching old film reels," Dunn said.
Not only did the team immerse themselves in footage but they also called up music experts to pick their brains about the musical performances on Canadian television that have been forever immortalized in their memory.
One of those performances — and a favourite of producers — was Sammy Davis Jr.'s musical special on CBC's Parade in 1959.
"It's got some of the most incredible performance footage you'll ever see of any music genre," Dunn said.
But what makes this performance significant, he said, is it was recorded at a time when a black entertainer hosting his own hour of television was unheard of.
"At that time there was sort of an informal racist policy in the U.S. around how many black artists could appear on American television. A lot of major corporations controlled advertisement and controlled basically what people were going to be watching."
In this video, Paul Anka applauds Sammy Davis Jr.'s 1959 performance on CBC
Despite Davis's celebrity status and the fact he performed alongside Frank Sinatra, advertisers in the U.S. wouldn't co-sign an African-American hosting his own show. The civil rights movement was afoot but there was still a long way to go.
Dunn credits two CBC producers who opened doors by sending an invitation to Davis to perform on CBC. Backed by a 30-piece orchestra, Davis's appearance on Parade was the first time the legendary performer would host his very own musical special.
"Those are the kinds of stories we wanted to tell," Dunn said. "Where it wasn't just, here's an amazing performance, but let's tell a story that says something about the time, that says something about Canada and that says something about the artist."
Dunn says they chose artists who had a lot to say about the world they were living in.
"Music was a vehicle for them to get a message out there."
Watch pioneering drag performer Craig Russell singing on CBC
Craig Russell was a Toronto performer who helped bring the underground world of drag into the mainstream during the 1970s. His performances impersonating the likes of Judy Garland and Ella Fitzgerald captivated audiences while bringing drag to a wider audience and thus giving visibility to the LGBT community in Canada.
There's also grainy black and white footage of a young Bob Dylan singing The Times They Are a-Changin' on CBC's Quest in 1964, one year after he walked off The Ed Sullivan Show after a CBS executive refused to let him perform a song deemed too controversial.
There are plenty of cameos, too, including artists such as Sarah McLachlan and Paul Anka speaking about their own careers and reacting to videos from the vaults. The team at Banger Films screened 600 hours of footage over five months and managed to narrow down their choices to under four hours for the series. And that is only a snippet of what is available in the CBC archives.
The CBC Archives
The archive libraries at CBC/Radio Canada in Toronto and Montreal hold hundreds of thousands of hours of legacy video and audio, all of which will be transferred to digital formats as part of an ongoing digitization project.
"I know everybody who works on the team with me is super excited. This is like the crowning glory of their careers to be able to digitize the entire CBC in a very short time," said Russ McMillen, who is a co-ordinator for the project.
McMillen has worked in the archives department at CBC for the past 20 years and has seen first hand the evolution from film recordings to digital files. In the Toronto headquarters, the archive stretches across 10,000 square feet in the basement. One storage vault is equipped with air purifiers and set at 7 C to help preserve the oldest film reels.
"The colder and drier it is, the longer the film lasts," he said.
It's a delicate process preserving reels of Canadian history, but in these precise storage conditions it will be hundreds of years before they will be unusable. "Film never stops deteriorating, but we've slowed it down so we have enough time left to transfer them."
Here's a look at the CBC archives in Toronto:
McMillen has favourites in the archives, too.
"We have every single episode of The Beachcombers. And I've had to check to make sure," he said with a chuckle. Nightcap and episodes of Wayne and Shuster are a close second.
And it's impossible for any one person to see everything in the archives. "I think we worked it out to something like 135 years if you just sat down and watched 24 hours a day, seven days a week."
But audiences can see some of it on From the Vaults. The series premieres on Thursday, Nov. 15 at 9 p.m. ET on CBC, the CBC TV streaming app and cbc.ca/watch.
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