Born: 1947 in Montréal
Debut: 1965
Genres: Adult Contemporary, Pop
Accomplishments:
- 6 Major Félix Awards
- Inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame
Songs Inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame:
- “Comme un million de gens”
- “Artistes”
- “Femme de rêve”
- “Le Labrador”
- “L’infidèle”
Other Big Hits:
- “J’ai Souvenir Encore”
- “Ma petite vie”
- “Cerveau gelé”
- “La Vie à la semaine”
- “Bébé Jajou Latoune
- “En voyage”
- “Chasse-galerie”
- “Au bout des doigts”
- “Le Blues du businessman”
- “Plein de tendresse”
- “Femmes ou filles”
- “Femme de société”
- “Un chanteur chante”
Dubois began his musical career at age 12 when he joined the country band Les Montagnards. They released an album in 1959. Becoming influenced by ’60s artists, he decided to go solo and released an album in the middle of the decade spawning the award-winning hit “J’ai Souvenir Encore” and “Ma petite vie”. With performances among other stars at the Place des Arts, awards and accolades kept coming, including a trophy for “discovery of the year” in 1967. That year also saw him perform at the Youth Pavilion at the World Expo as his “Cerveau gel锑 served as the theme for a documentary film on Montréal. While in Paris in ’69, he recorded the smash hit ‘Comme un million de gens’ which was later inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.
A string of hit songs and albums came in the ’70s and he was offered to host his own variety shows. Perhaps his biggest achievement during the decade was the album Touchez Dubois which spawned hits like “La Vie à la semaine”, “Femme de Reve”, and “Bebe Jajou Latoune”. He helped popularize Caribbean music with the album Mellow Reggae.
He appeared in the rock opera Starmania in Paris and recorded “Le Blues du businessman” which was a huge hit in both France and Québec. At the first ADISQ gala, in 1979, he won the Félix Award for best male performer.
This encouraged him to create his masterpiece in 1982, the certified-Platinum Sortie. The album and its hit singles won for him five Félix awards. In 1985, Dubois was asked to join the ensemble Northern Lights for the famine-relief single, “Tears Are Not Enough”. (We’ll talk about this later in more detail).
Dubois continued recording and giving sold-out performances in the new millennium and released the hit album Duos Dubois (2007) in which he sang with other popular singers like Céline Dion, Gilles Vigneault, Isabelle Boulay, and Natasha St-Pier. The following year Claude Dubois was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. But this actually brought him grief and resulted in his calling the CBC “racist”.
