ERIK CHRISTENSEN/The Globe and Mail
David Wiffen, the much-admired British-Canadian troubadour whose fame never caught up to his affecting storytelling and ear-grabbing singing, died Sunday at May Court Hospice in Ottawa, according to close friends. He was 84.
The folk singer’s melancholy baritone graced bluesy original compositions such as Driving Wheel, Skybound Station, South of Somewhere and You’ll Never Make a Dollar That Way (Mexico).
His songs were often marked by a moody despair he came by naturally. In his 2012 autobiography True North, record label owner Bernie Finkelstein wrote that Mr. Wiffen’s songs “could tear your heart apart, but sadly so could his life.”
Mr. Wiffen’s material was covered by the Cowboy Junkies, the Black Crowes, the Jayhawks, Roger McGuinn, Harry Belafonte, Tom Rush and Hiss Golden Messenger. In 1968, Anne Murray recorded I Don’t Want To Drive You Away under a tribute title: David’s Song. Jerry Jeff Walker, Eric Andersen and Ian & Sylvia all covered More Often Than Not.
Though his songwriting was elite, the shaggy-haired Mr. Wiffen wasn’t as popular as contemporaries Gordon Lightfoot, Murray McLauchlan, Joni Mitchell and Harry Chapin, even during the 1970s, when the acoustic-troubadour genre was in vogue.
“What has staying in the music business all these years meant to me?” he asked The Globe and Mail’s Jack Batten in 1973. “A lotta pain. Pure unadulterated pain.”
Mr. Wiffen was just 31 at the time.
According to Mr. Batten, the songwriter was not as morose as the cheerless quote might have indicated: “He is an engaging man, given more to laughing than glooming, handy with a funny one-liner (usually turned on himself) and generally good company.”
Perhaps his disposition was made sunnier by the release that year of Coast to Coast Fever, considered his finest album. The Juno-nominated LP was co-produced by his friend and fellow folk artist, Bruce Cockburn.
Mr. Wiffen was born March 11, 1942, in Redhill, Surrey, a market town south of London. He first arrived in Canada as a 16-year-old with his family when his father, an engineer, was transferred to Toronto. Mr. Wiffen returned to England but eventually doubled back to Canada to stay.
In 1964, he hitchhiked from Toronto to Alberta, where he managed Calgary’s Depression Coffee House for nine months. A year earlier, a young Joni Mitchell (then Joni Anderson) took a $15-a-week gig there, “singing long tragic songs in a minor key,” she later recalled.
Mr. Wiffen recorded his first album in Vancouver in 1965: David Wiffen Live At The Bunkhouse was a limited pressing of just 100 copies. Relocating to the thriving folk scene in Ottawa, he joined the short-lived group the Children with Mr. Cockburn, poet Bill Hawkins and others in the mid-1960s. Mr. Wiffen later joined the popular group 3’s a Crowd before recording a self-titled solo album in 1971.
He performed at the first Ottawa Folk Festival in 1994. In 2015, Mr. Wiffen was feted at the Toronto folk club Hugh’s Room by admirers including Tom Wilson, Lynn Miles and Mr. McLauchlan. The City of Ottawa declared a David Wiffen Day on Sept. 14, 2019.
Editor’s note: A previous edition of the story incorrectly attributed Willie P. Bennett’s White Lines to David Wiffen. (April 7, 2026) A previous version of this article incorrectly credited the song 'You Need a New Lover Now' to David Whiffen. The songwriting credit belongs to Murray McLauchlan.