Edward Potts McCurdy, also known as Ed McCurdy, was born on January 11, 1919, in Willow Hill, Pennsylvania, and was an American and Canadian singer of both contemporary and English folk music, a songwriter, and character actor. He started his career as a disc jockey at a gospel radio station in Oklahoma by 1938. In the early 1940s, he gained popularity singing romantic songs in nightclubs across North America. He moved to Vancouver in 1948, hosting a radio show for CBC Radio and releasing his first folk album, Canadian Folk Songs, in 1949. He achieved success with his folk show at New York's Village Vanguard in 1950 and recorded many albums in the 1950s and 1960s, including "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream", an anti-war anthem covered in seventy-seven languages. He retired by the late 1960s due to health problems. He passed away on March 23, 2000.
