Biography
Nicholas Jennings is one of Canada’s leading music journalists, as well as an historian, curator, cultural heritage preservationist and author of several best-selling books. For 20 years, he was the critic for Maclean’s magazine, covering international and Canadian pop music.
Born in London, England, Jennings is the author of Lightfoot, the acclaimed biography of legendary singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, and Before the Gold Rush: Flashbacks to the Dawn of Canadian Sound, a popular chronicle of the 1960s Yorkville music scene. He also wrote Fifty Years of Music: The Story of EMI Music Canada, was a contributor to Picador’s Joni Mitchell collection Joni: An Anthology, edited by Barney Hoskyns, and wrote the overview essay on Canada for the North America volume of Bloomsbury’s Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. His written work has appeared in such newspapers as The Toronto Star and The Globe & Mail, as well as magazines, including Billboard, Inside Entertainment and TV Guide. For television, Jennings has served as writer, interviewer and creative producer of four CBC documentaries on the history of Canadian pop music, including Shakin’ All Over, This Beat Goes On, Rise Up and Life is a Highway. He was a consultant for the acclaimed documentary Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind, while on radio he has been a frequent guest on CBC, as a panelist on 50 Tracks and a contributor to Inside the Music.
As a heritage preservationist, Jennings has led walking tours of Toronto’s music history, consulted on giant music murals and successfully orchestrated a public campaign to save the iconic Sam the Record Man. He was one of three guest curators of the city’s popular When the Beatles Rocked Toronto exhibition in 2016 and co-curated the inaugural Toronto Sound exhibit and co-curated the subsequent Rhythms & Resistance: Caribbean Music in Toronto exhibit at the Friar’s Music Museum. He is a founding director of the Toronto Music Experience, a non-profit charitable organization that is now working to create a state-of-the-art music museum for the City of Toronto.
