Terry Jacks

Terrence Ross Jacks (born March 29, 1944) is a Canadian singer, songwriter, guitarist and record producer known for his 1974 hit song "Seasons in the Sun", an English adaptation of a song written by Belgian composer and singer Jacques Brel in 1961. Jacks is also an environmental activist, focused on pulp mill emissions in Howe Sound.

Terry Jacks was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Jacks was the oldest of five boys and his father ran an architecture business in Winnipeg, a career Jacks later studied in university, before he became a musician. In the early 1960s, when Jacks was a teenager, the family relocated to Vancouver. Jacks took up guitar and at 18 formed a band called The Chessmen with guitarist Guy Sobell. The group had four top-ten hits in Vancouver between 1964 and 1966.

Jacks and the Chessmen performed live on a Friday night in September 1965 for a "Back to School" event at the now-defunct T. Eaton Co. (Eaton's) department store at its Brentwood Mall store in Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver.

Pupils from Burnaby South Senior High School who followed music tuned in to CFUN 1410 AM, which advertised its "Request Line". Being skeptical about whether CFUN really listened to requests, they began phoning the Request Line and asked for the B side of the current Chessmen hit. To their amazement, CFUN began playing it and turned the record into a two-sided hit.

Following The Chessmen, Terry and Susan Pesklevits (Susan Jacks), whom he later married, formed The Poppy Family along with Craig McCaw and Satwant Singh. They had several hits in Canada and internationally, their biggest being "Which Way You Goin' Billy?", which went to #1 in Canada and #2 on the Billboard charts in the U.S. The song was written and produced by Terry Jacks, earning him a Gold Leaf (Juno) award in 1970 for his production. The Poppy Family performed at the Lethbridge, Alberta, Stampede in the summer of 1971.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.