Given a poppier treatment by the group We Five a year later, You Were On My Mind became one of the first big international folk-rock hits, going to number 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart in 1965, and number one on Billboard’s Easy Listening chart, now Adult Contemporary, the same year. It subsequently became a hit for Crispian St. Peters in England and Los Barracudas in Spain and Italy.
“You Were On My Mind was the first song I ever wrote of the over 200 I’ve now published,” Tyson recalls. “I wrote it in an empty bathtub in a suite at the Earle Hotel in Greenwich Village because it was the only place the cockroaches wouldn’t go.”
Sylvia Tyson was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1992 and has served on the boards of FACTOR, the Juno Awards, and Songwriters Association of Canada, and in 1994, on a federal advisory committee on the cultural aspects of the information highway. She was honoured with the Order of Canada in 1994.
