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By Eric Volmers
Published Mar 13, 2025
Last updated 4days ago
11 minute read
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Pinpointing the origins of The Irish Rovers is not an exact science. It’s a bit fuzzy.
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This is perhaps not overly surprising for a band that scored a massive hit in 1980 with Wasn’t That A Party, which may still be the ultimate drinking song. But while the early members of The Irish Rovers – Will and George Millar, their cousin Joe Millar and his best friend Jimmy Ferguson – were all from Ireland, the band did not start there. While the Irish Rovers may have “gotten serious” in Calgary, eventually sharpening their skills as hosts of an open-mic night at The Depression Club downtown, they didn’t form in Calgary either.
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George Millar was a 16-year-old living in Toronto when he met Ferguson at an Irish function in 1963. He bonded with the 23-year-old fellow Northern Ireland emigrant over a love of music from their motherland. They were eventually joined by Joe, who was also a fresh arrival from the Emerald Isle, and the Irish Rovers were born. Initially, they were a less-than-professional enterprise whose biggest ambition was to earn enough to buy beer and cigarettes. Jimmy was old enough to buy beer. George provided the cigarettes, and they would get together in George’s family home “when my parents weren’t too angry at us.”
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In 1964, George and Ferguson decided on a whim to visit George’s older brother Will in Calgary. He was also a musician but had made a hasty exit from Toronto a year or so earlier for various reasons. The two saw Will as the real thing: a working musician. Not only did he host a children’s show on TV, but he also had a regular gig roaming around Phil’s Pancake House with his guitar, entertaining children. They soon discovered that Will was “much more serious than we were.”
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“We were in it for fun, cigarettes and beer,” says George, in an interview from a tour stop in Nova Scotia. “You made $35 a week, and we were delighted with that. Will would say, ‘We have to rehearse!’ So we said, ‘Alright, maybe an hour.’ He said, ‘No, no, all day.’ That’s when we really started melding into a proper band.”
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So while Calgary played a vital role in the early rumblings of the Irish Rovers, it was only the beginning of a wild, colourful ride that saw the band become unlikely rock stars. By Will and George’s admission, it was a success that often seemed fuelled by serendipitous meetings and blind luck. Their story involves Calgary snow storms, broken-down cars, an impromptu move to California, bizarre hit songs, a sibling feud, Calgary’s first Irish bar and a lot of shoot-from-the-hip restlessness. More than 60 years later, George is still on the road and currently on a tour that brings the band to Calgary’s Grey Eagle Casino on March 15. He is the last original Rover performing. Will became a well-regarded visual artist after leaving the band in the early 1990s and lives on Vancouver Island.
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“If someone had said you’re going to be doing this for 60 years, I would have said ‘No, no, no. I’m only doing this for a year or two and then I’m going back to school,’ ” says George. “I knew I wanted to get back to school eventually, but it never did happen. That’s just the way it was. Things got better and better and better, and I had no idea it was going to happen.”
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Still, according to Will, the real first flicker of the Irish Rovers can be traced to his desperate arrival in Calgary in 1961 after some troubles in his adopted home of Toronto. Ten years after arriving in Canada from Northern Ireland as a 14-year-old, he was earning money as a singer at a Calypso club in Toronto but had run afoul of the local musicians’ union for performing without a card. He also had conflict with his young bride’s disapproving parents. So they both jumped into his Volkswagen one wintery day and eventually landed in Calgary in the middle of a blizzard.
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“I ran away with this pale, blue-eyed blond wondering what we were doing, and I ended up in Calgary during a snowstorm with no heater in the Volkswagen,” Will says. “I thought, ‘Holy Jesus, what kind of country have I arrived in?’ But, to my amazement, on 16th Avenue at the Beacon Hotel, there was a lounge that had a neon sign flashing outside and it said ‘Calypso Lounge.’ I said, ‘Jesus! God has spoken to me!’ So in I went with my bride and guitar and, long story short, I went up on stage with the Latin combo and I got the audience singing along and the guy hired me.”
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That guy was the owner of Phil’s Pancake House, with locations near Calgary’s Motel Village and in Banff. Will became “the rambling musician” who would circle the tables as kids celebrated their birthdays and ate their pancakes. This presumably helped him land a hosting gig of a children’s show called Just 4 Fun five days a week on Channel 4 CFCN.
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Will remembers his young brother and Ferguson arriving in Calgary after hitching a ride on a school bus. They were only meant to stay two weeks but ended up moving in with “Brother Will” before all three were kicked out of their house for “all the noise we were making,” Will says. Yes, he acknowledges that George and Ferguson did have a small group that was likely called The Irish Rovers back in Toronto – “I’ll give them that,” Will says – but they were hardly full-time musicians. The real beginnings of the Irish Rovers, he says, was when they joined him in Calgary.
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“They were maybe doing once-a-week at the YMCA folk club that was in Toronto at the time,” he says. “They came out and joined me into the big time around the pancake tables!”
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Eventually, they also became mainstays at the downtown folk club, The Depression, where they hosted a jam that would feature a young singer named Joni Anderson, who later became Joni Mitchell.
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“We were there for at least five or six months, but what it did was got us used to being on stage and working with an audience and how to work with them and get singalongs going,” George says.
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What led to the band’s departure from Calgary and arrival in California, where they would eventually find their biggest success, depends on who is telling the tale. George’s version is the more colourful of the two. He says the troubles began when Will invited George and Ferguson onto Just 4 Fun, where they performed a drinking song called Whiskey You’re the Devil.
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“Well, the kids loved it, but the switchboards went absolutely red with rage with all these parents saying ‘What are you doing to our children?! You’re singing drinking songs at half-past-three in the afternoon?’ ” George says. “So Will got fired and that was the end of our TV experience.”
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They decided to stay a bit longer in Calgary and were eventually joined again by cousin Joe and later decamped to California in hopes of getting gigs in the fertile folk scene.
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However, after hearing this rendition of the story, Will calls it “a lot of baloney.” He wasn’t fired; the reason they left was because he had “great passion to play in the folk clubs of California” and was tired of helping schlep pancakes. Their Calgary-based manager gave the boys $100 for a trip to sunnier climes of California, where they hoped to book gigs in bars such as San Francisco’s Purple Onion and Hungry I.
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“I had an old Jaguar car in Calgary that I had bought,” Will says. “I decided I was going to pile them into the car with our guitars.”
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While it may not have seemed like it at the time, the luck of the Irish was again on their side. That old Jaguar made it as far as a tiny town called Valley Ford in California before breaking down, stranding the boys 80 kilometres from the folk mecca of San Francisco. There was no flashing Calypso sign in view, but there was a seemingly sleepy Italian restaurant called Dinucci’s. They were told the nearest town with a mechanic equipped to deal with a broken-down Jaguar was about 40 kilometres away. So Will grumpily hitched a ride with a snail-paced mail truck into town to find a mechanic and tow-truck driver. When he was gone, the three remaining Rovers took what little money they had left and decided to splurge on some spaghetti at Dinucci’s.
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Oddly, this Italian restaurant happened to be owned by two Irishmen who had purchased the place only two months earlier. One of them recognized the boys’ accents and asked “what on earth” they were doing in Valley Ford. He invited them to set up in the corner and play for the rush crowd after 2 p.m., which was largely made up of farmers. They were paid with Guinness and pasta.
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Hours later, Will returned and saw that Dinucci’s was rowdy, lit up and surrounded by pickup trucks.
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George and Ferguson were “singing away like mad,” Will says. “The local farmers were filling up a plastic basket on the pool table with dollar bills.”
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They stayed at Dinucci’s for a month until a booking agent from The Purple Onion showed up and invited them to play at the iconic venue. What was meant to be a limited engagement ended up being a 22-week residency of sold-out shows. That led to bigger gigs and eventually a deal with Decca Records. They recorded a live album of Irish drinking songs, but when it came to an in-studio follow-up, lady luck again stepped in. They needed a song to fill out the tracklist and Will remembered one he had learned at the pancake house. The Unicorn became their biggest hit, a song that is regarded as an Irish-Canadian classic. In fact, it’s neither Irish nor Canadian. It was penned by American songwriter, poet and artist Shel Silverstein, who worked for Playboy as a cartoonist and also wrote Johnny Cash’s Boy Named Sue.
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“That was one of my kids’ songs I was singing around the tables,” he says. “I was getting sick of Puff The Magic Dragon and was happy to find that old spoken-word version that Shel had, and I put a melody to it.”
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Decca executive Charles (Bud) Dant asked if the Rovers had anything more commercial to go with the Irish songs. Will sang it for them and it became the title track of their first studio album. By chance, guitarist/singer Glen Campbell was in the same studio working with Burl Ives and was invited on board to play lead guitar on the track, which became a massive hit and catapulted the Irish Rovers to superstardom.
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It was not their only hit, of course. Those of us of a certain vintage may best remember the Irish Rovers for their crossover country hit, Wasn’t That A Party. It was released in 1980, at a time when the band briefly lost the Irish and became the Rovers. That song was also added as a bit of an afterthought. American folk artist Tom Paxton, who was touring with the Irish Rovers as an opening act, wrote the song specifically for the band.
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“It was Attic Records out of Toronto; we were working with them at the time,” George says. “They wanted a record done. Jack Richardson was the producer who had done the Guess Who and all sorts of good Canadian content. He was doing this album for us in Vancouver and said, ‘OK, we need at least one more song. What have you got?’ I said, ‘Well, we have this song by Tom, but it’s probably not us.’ So I played him a little bit and sang it the way Tom did. He said, ‘Put a Buddy Holly beat behind it and see what that sounds like.’ It was as simple as that. It was the last thought for the (record.)”
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There is a lot more to the story, of course. The band returned to Calgary to open The Unicorn Pub in 1979 in the basement of the old Lancaster Building on Stephen Avenue, making it the first authentic Irish bar in the city. The band eventually had pubs across Canada, including two in Toronto, two in Calgary and one in Banff. The original on Stephen Avenue stayed there until 2014.
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They had a hit television series, The Irish Rovers, which ran on CBC for six seasons.
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In 1994, Will left the group due to creative tension with George and his other bandmates. It resulted in a decades-long rift between the two brothers.
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“I thought the band was just going to break up,” Will says. “But they had other intentions. I got into a bit of a row with them. Lawyers got involved. It got a lot of bad press. My brother and I didn’t speak for years. Finally, thank God, this year we started visiting and talking with each other and laughing a lot. We went to Ireland last September together and it was wonderful. We had lots of stories to share. I’m hoping one day we can sit down with a camera and do a whole reminiscence from the beginning to the end. I told George, ‘You’ve kept the band going for another 30 years after I left. So you’ve got a story to tell, too. So why don’t we sit by the fire with a pint of Guinness and we’ll get our scrapbooks and get our memories and I think it will make a very interesting show.’ I don’t think he’s sold on the idea yet.”
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Jimmy Ferguson died in 1997 when the Irish Rovers were on the road. Joe Millar retired from touring in 2005 and was replaced by his son Ian, who still tours with the band today. Joe died in 2023.
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Not long ago, Will found an old letter he had written to his mother from back in the band’s early days.
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“I said, ‘Mom, we have to get a record and we have to get some bookings and if we don’t get anything going in our career then in the next six months you can expect me to come home and find a legitimate job,’ ” he says.
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The Irish Rovers play at the Grey Eagle Resort and Casino on March 15.
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