AL OSTER

Al Oster took a trip up north on a whim in 1957. He was so impressed by the Alaska Highway that he wrote a song about it and persuaded his family to move to Whitehorse. He wrote “Midnight Sun Rock” and recorded it on his first album Yukon Gold with ten other compositions of Yukon folklore. That version of “Midnight Sun Rock” was inducted into the Nashville Rockabilly Hall of Fame in 2002.

The Al Oster Show, a half hour weekly television program, ran for two years on the local WHTV cable service and Al also worked five evenings a week at WHTV as their first announcer/operator. In 1961, CBC offered him a 15-minute radio show called “Northland Echoes” and it aired for 3 years.

After the release of his first album, he was invited to tour northern Alberta on the Yukon Gold Show. Al sold over 2,000 Yukon Gold albums on the 3.5 month tour and wrote his most famous song “Paddlewheeler” while driving between bookings. On the way home, the band did a show at every Alaska Highway maintenance camp.

In the mid-1960s, Al was a headliner on the first pan-north radio show out of Whitehorse called “Northern Jamboree” hosted by Les McLaughlin and the album Echo of the Yukon was released in 1966.

In 1967, Al performed with Hank Karr and his group at the Canadian Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal. The CBC recorded an LP there featuring Hank and Al called The Yukon Stars.

In 1968, his ballad “Irena Cheyenne” earned the first songwriter award ever presented in Canada by BMI. Al’s classic “My Book of Yukon Memories” was written from the heart and reached number 30 on the Billboard Charts. Al was invited into the Order of Canada in 2000 for his role in recording Yukon stories in a musical format and received the Commissioner’s Award for Public Volunteer Service in 2006.