- Album list
- Singer Intro
Raffi Cavoukian, CM OBC (Armenian: Րաֆֆի, born July 8, 1948), better known by the mononym Raffi, is a Canadian singer-lyricist and author born in Egypt and known best for his children's music. He developed his career as a 'global troubadour' to become a music producer, author, entrepreneur, and founder of the Centre for Child Honouring, a vision for global restoration.
Personal life
Born in Cairo, Egypt, to Armenian parents, he spent his early years in Egypt before immigrating with his family to Canada in 1958, eventually settling in Toronto, Ontario. His mother named him after the Armenian poet 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.
In the early 1970s, Raffi frequented a guitar store near Yonge and Wellesley called Millwheel, where he met other developing Canadian musicians such as David Wilcox and John Lacey. Raffi ran a coffee house at the University of Toronto up until 1980. He befriended Lacey, a folk guitarist from Oakville, Ontario, who helped Raffi improve his finger picking (John went on to become a steel guitar player). Raffi continued playing folk guitar in various coffee houses in Toronto and Montreal before hitchhiking to Vancouver in 1972 to find 'fame and fortune.'
He returned to Toronto after a few years and was invited to sing for a Toronto public school. Despite his own hesitations about singing for kids, he was an immediate success, and thus he began his career entertaining children.
He moved to Saltspring Island near Victoria, British Columbia, in 2008.
Raffi started his own fund, and now is an environmentalist as well as a musician.
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