Norm Hacking
| Norm Hacking | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 1, 1950 |
| Origin | Scarborough, Ontario, Canada |
| Died | November 25, 2007 (aged 57) |
| Genres | Folk music, spoken word |
| Occupation(s) | Singer-songwriter, musician, poet, author, columnist |
| Instruments | Guitar |
| Years active | 1976–2007 |
| Website | www.normhacking.com |
Norm Hacking (August 1, 1950 – November 25, 2007) was a Canadian folk music singer-songwriter.
Hacking spent his first six years living in a house that used to be his grandparents, in the Gerrard Street and Victoria Park Avenue area of Scarborough, Ontario. When he was six his family "moved out to 'Scarberia'," he would jokingly say. Hacking described most of Scarborough at that time as a "sea of mud". "There was nothing but polywogs and field mice and there was even a chicken farm on the corner of Kennedy and Lawrence."
Of his father, Hacking said "My old man was AWOL pretty early in life. He left when I was six." He described his mother Kathy as a "saint".
After attending Winston Churchill Collegiate Institute, Hacking started performing while a student at Scarborough College (a campus of the University of Toronto), where he graduated as an English major. His career as a musician began when a representative from the student council, who had heard him play, asked him to perform at a concert. "I said, 'You're crazy, are you out of your mind.' And he said '50 bucks, six songs...' You got me. I got up and nobody threw anything. In fact, several women who wouldn't normally speak to me came up after the gig and were cluttering about how they liked the music. And I said, 'Wow, this is good.'"
He then accepted an invitation to play the pub two weeks later, which he did with a lead guitar accompanist. "By the end of the night you couldn't hear yourself playing, it was so loud. And the table in front of the stage, they had been playing euchre all night and screaming and yelling, and they all got up in unison and mooned the stage. I said, 'OK, so that's how it is'."
Hacking would eventually become a regular at various establishments in Toronto. The recordings of early performances in 1976 and 1977 became his first solo album, Norm Hacking Live (1977).
Critically acclaimed albums Cut Roses (1980) and Stubborn Ghost (1988) followed, and led to many festival and concert appearances. A video of the song "Sammy", from the album Cut Roses, aired on The Nashville Network. Upon becoming the single caregiving parent to his young son Ben, however, he cut back on touring.
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