According to my father, it was Harold “the Colonel” Kudlets, a talent broker in Hamilton, Ontario, who brought Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins and Levon Helm up to Canada. Kudlets, a Glasgow-born Jew, knew Charlie Halbert, an agent down in Helena, Arkansas, who’d sent Conway Twitty up north a year earlier. In the spring of 1958, Kudlets booked Hawkins and his band, The Hawks, into Hamilton’s Golden Rail Tavern, and later, at two spots in Toronto: Le Coq d’Or, on the Yonge Street strip, and the Concord Tavern, located farther west on Bloor Street.
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