#1273: Sing A Song by David Clayton-Thomas
Peak Month: April 1972
7 weeks on Vancouver’s CKVN chart
Peak Position #12
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube.com: “Sing A Song”
In 1941 David Thomsett was born in Surrey, England. He immigrated with his family to Willowdale, a suburb of Toronto, when he was six years old. Living with an authoritarian father who physically beat him as a routine way of punishing his son, David left home and began to live on the streets at the age of 14. This led to a few years of petty crime, being in and out of juvenile detention centers, the Millbrook Reformatory and subsequently the Burwash Industrial Farm, an agricultural setting established in the 1910s to rehabilitate prison inmates, and next house Japanese-Canadians during World War II. While in jail a battered, old mail-order guitar was left to him by an outgoing inmate. It was then Clayton-Thomas discovered a talent for music that allowed him to believe in a different kind of life.