Julie Lynn is coming back to Mattawa and stopping by the Mattawa Museum to celebrate the soft opening of a new exhibition.
Country music fans still hold Lynn’s music close to their hearts. She lived in Mattawa for many years, and from there, went on to have an impressive musical career, appearing on the Tommy Hunter Show, Family Brown Country, and was nominated for Country Female Vocalist of the Year at the 1978 Juno Awards.
“Everybody’s so excited,” said museum curator Judy Toupin. “She’s one of my earliest memories of growing up here, and she’s part of the fabric of Mattawa.”
Bilingual, many of Lynn’s early recordings were in both French and English. Her first album “The Nickel Song,” came out in 1970, and throughout the decade she released a handful of records and had 12 songs chart nationally.
See: Mattawa Museum opens to it’s 40th season this Saturday
For her arrival at the museum, Toupin made sure to dig through her stacks and bring her Julie Lynn collection to spin on the big day. Those records brought back some fond memories.
“Growing up here, there wasn’t a party that Julie wasn’t at that she didn’t bring out her guitar and everybody would sing along,” Toupin said. “Music is a huge part of our community, and Julie was a part of that.”
Lynn was also the first female inductee in the Ottawa Valley Country Music Hall of Fame. As Mattawa doesn’t have such a hall, museum staff felt it was fitting to honour Lynn in this upcoming exhibition.
The exhibition honours prominent women from Mattawa and highlights their achievements and accomplishments. However, as Toupin is quick to emphasize, the upcoming show focuses on those achievements made by all women in the area – the hard work and contributions by women which can often go overlooked.
“I want all women to be recognized,” for their achievements, Toupin said, and the upcoming exhibit is designed to do just that. “There were only two women represented in this museum,” when she arrived, Toupin added. “That’s just not right.”
You can see this new exhibit for yourself when it opens on Saturday, June 29th. However, the soft opening with Julie Lynn in attendance, takes place on Thursday, June 20th, at 1 p.m.
David Briggs is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works out of BayToday, a publication of Village Media. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.
