Canadian star, Raffi Cavoukian, is celebrating his 75th birthday today

Canadian star, Raffi Cavoukian, is celebrating his 75th birthday today.

Raffi was born in Cairo, Egypt, to Armenian parents who fled Turkey during the Armenian genocide. In 1958, his family immigrated to Canada, eventually settling in Toronto, Ontario. His mother named him after the Armenian novelist Raffi. His father, Arto Cavoukian, was a well-known portrait photographer with a studio on Bloor Street in Toronto. His older brother, Onnig Cavoukian, known as Cavouk, is also a famous portrait photographer. His younger sister is Ann Cavoukian, Ontario’s former Information and Privacy Commissioner. His parents died within twelve hours of each other, his mother dying first of abdominal cancer. He visited Soviet Armenia once in 1972.

In the early 1970s, Raffi frequented a Toronto guitar store near Yonge and Wellesley called Millwheel, where he met other developing Canadian musicians such as David Wilcox and John Lacey. He befriended Lacey, a folk guitarist from Oakville, Ontario, who helped Raffi improve his finger picking. Raffi continued playing folk guitar in coffee houses in Toronto and Montréal before hitchhiking to Vancouver in 1972 to find “fame and fortune”.

He returned to Toronto a few years later and was invited to sing for a Toronto public school. Despite his hesitations about singing for kids, he was an immediate success, and thus began his career entertaining children.