Burton Cummings

Burton Cummings (born December 31, 1947, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) is a Canadian singer-songwriter who was the keyboardist and lead singer of Canada’s first rock superstars, the Guess Who. As a solo artist, he had several popular albums and a string of hits through the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Early life

Cummings was raised by his mother and grandparents in the North End of Winnipeg after his father left when he was very young. He studied piano from age five and sang tenor roles in Gilbert and Sullivan productions at St. John’s High School in Winnipeg. He played keyboards and saxophone with the locally popular rhythm and blues band the Deverons from 1962 to 1965 and dropped out of high school to pursue his music career.

The Guess Who years

In early 1966 Cummings replaced Bob Ashley on keyboards in the Guess Who. Chad Allan, the band’s founder, left a few months later, making the 18-year-old Cummings the group’s new lead singer. Cummings teamed with guitarist-singer Randy Bachman to become one of the most prolific and popular songwriting duos of the era, churning out classic songs such as “These Eyes,” “Laughing,” “No Time,” “No Sugar Tonight,” and “American Woman” (the first song by a Canadian band to hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart) before Bachman’s departure in May 1970. While Bachman initially took Cummings under his wing, the relationship between the two became strained after the group achieved stardom. The band’s string of popular albums and hits continued after Bachman left with “Share the Land,” “Albert Flasher,” “Rain Dance,” and “Clap for the Wolfman,” among others. Cummings then became disenchanted with the more progressive rock direction the Guess Who took with guitarist-songwriter Domenic Troiano and left to pursue a solo career in 1975.

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Solo stardom

Moving to Los Angeles, Cummings provided backup vocals on Eric Carmen’s Boats Against the Current album before releasing his own self-titled album in 1976. The album, on which Cummings adopted a soft-rock, adult-contemporary sound, was produced by Richard Perry, whose credits included recordings by Barbra Streisand, Carly Simon, and Ringo Starr. The lead single, “Stand Tall,” reached number two on Billboard’s U.S. adult contemporary chart and number 10 on the U.S. singles chart, while the follow-up “I’m Scared” was almost as successful, and the album was a hit in Canada. In the process Cummings won Juno Awards as most promising male vocalist and male vocalist of the year.

Powered by its signature title track, Cummings’s more rock-oriented follow-up album, My Own Way to Rock (1977), bettered its predecessor’s chart position in Canada by one place, peaking at number four. The self-produced Dream of a Child (1978)—which featured Cummings’s rich, sculpted voice on a range of plaintive ballads including “Break It to Them Gently”—became the best-selling Canadian album in history to that point. Cummings enjoyed his greatest popularity at the turn of the 1980s, headlining concerts in Canadian stadiums and arenas and touring in the United States. Woman Love (1980), best remembered for the single “Fine State of Affairs,” gave Cummings another Canadian hit but was not released in the United States because of a dispute with Columbia Records. Best of Burton Cummings was also released in 1980. “You Saved My Soul,” the most successful single from Sweet Sweet (1981), was written and recorded for the film Melanie (1981), in which Cummings made his acting debut.

Later career and Guess Who reunions

Cummings continued to perform live and record through the 1980s and 1990s, and he toured Europe as the keyboardist in Ringo Starr’s All Starr Band for a period. Above the Ground (2008), Cummings’s first full album of new material since 1990, was made with his touring band, the Carpet Frogs (which started as a Guess Who cover band). The live album Massey Hall followed in 2012.

Beginning in 1983, Cummings was part of a number of reunions in various configurations with his former Guess Who bandmates, one of which produced the live album Together Again. Another live album resulted from the Running Back Thru Canada Tour in the summer of 2000, one of the highest-grossing tours in Canadian music history. In 2006, despite a long-standing and unresolved feud over songwriting royalties, Cummings and Bachman released the Bachman-Cummings Songbook, featuring past tracks from the Guess Who, Cummings, and Bachman-Turner Overdrive. A collection of demo recordings of original songs performed by Cummings and Bachman in 1987 was released in 2006 under the title The Thunderbird Trax. Jukebox, on which the two artists covered some of their favourite songs from the past, followed in 2007.

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The original version of this entry was published by The Canadian Encyclopedia.