Peter Goddard

PETER GODDARD (19432022) was a leading Canadian music, arts, and cultural commentator for more than five decades. A trained ethnomusicologist, he covered everything from rock 'n' roll to fashion, including classical music, movies,video, advertising, opera, and visual arts.

After serving as music critic for The Varsity newspaper at the University of Toronto from 1965 to 1967, he became the first on-staff popular music critic in Canada at the Toronto Telegram until the newspaper closed in 1971. He was freelance music critic for the Globe and Mail in the late sixties and joined the full-time staff of the Toronto Star in 1972, where he remained for over thirty years. During this latter period, he contributed music columns to Maclean's and Chatelaine, as well as cultural pieces to Saturday Night and Le Monde. In 1982, he won a National Newspaper Award for criticism, the first Canadian critic of popular culture to do so.

Goddard wrote about a wide range of pop and rock acts. Ronnie Hawkins: Last of the Good Ol' Boys was cowritten with Hawkins in 1989. In 1973, his Frank Sinatra: The Man, the Myth and the Music appeared. The Rolling Stones: The Last Tour with Philip Kamin (1982) was a national bestseller. He also wrote a futuristic fiction, The Sounding, in 1988. Some of his other books (with Philip Kamin) have focused on the Who, David Bowie, Genesis, the Police, Michael Jackson, Duran Duran, Cyndi Lauper, and Bruce Springsteen. in 2017, his biography of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, The Great Gould, was published to critical acclaim.