Artist / Band

Buck 65 (Richard Terfry)

Origin Mount Uniacke, Nova Scotia → Toronto, Ontario, 🇨🇦

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Biography

Richard Terfry was born in Halifax and raised in the rural community of Mount Uniacke, Nova Scotia, far from any established hip-hop scene. As a teenager he split his life between baseball diamonds and the late-night radio signals that drifted into the countryside. Music won out after a knee injury ended a promising run in the sport, and he threw himself into learning how to rap, scratch, and produce on whatever equipment he could afford — cassette decks, turntables, and a Portastudio that became the heart of his earliest recordings. With little local infrastructure to lean on, he built his own world from scratch, absorbing influences as varied as Kool Keith, Leonard Cohen, Townes Van Zandt, and the raw edges of early abstract hip-hop.

In the early 1990s he began releasing homemade tapes under the name Stinkin’ Rich, quickly becoming a central figure in Halifax’s small but fiercely inventive underground rap community. His first cassette, Chin Music, pressed in tiny quantities, caught the attention of Sloan and their indie imprint Murderecords, who released Game Tight and the rare red-vinyl 7" Stolen Bass. These lo-fi recordings — made partly “in the middle of nowhere” on four-track and partly at Halifax’s Sound Market — revealed the dry wit, scratch-heavy production and lyrical originality that marked him as one of the most unusual voices in Canadian hip-hop.

By the mid-1990s he retired the Stinkin’ Rich persona and emerged as Buck 65, a name that would follow him into the national spotlight. His first major release under the new moniker, the expansive double-cassette Weirdo Magnet (1996), showcased a wider creative vocabulary: jazz textures, spoken-word digressions, experimental beat-collage, and an ear for narrative detail that set him apart. Through the late ’90s he continued to record prolifically for small independent labels, developing a style that blended hip-hop with folk, blues, country, and dusty cinematic atmospheres — a sound that was never quite definable, but always unmistakably his.

The early 2000s marked a turning point. Signing with Warner Music in 2002, he released Square, a bold and introspective album that earned a Juno nomination and broadened his audience beyond the underground circles that had carried him for a decade. Its follow-up, Talkin’ Honky Blues (2003), pushed his hybrid style even further, folding pedal steel, banjo, and storytelling into a beat-driven framework. The album won the 2004 Juno Award for Alternative Album of the Year and cemented Buck 65 as one of Canada’s most distinctive and boundary-pushing artists.

As his musical career grew, so did his presence on the airwaves. After years of guest hosting at CBC, he became the voice of the national drive-time program Radio 2 Drive in 2008, where his wide-ranging tastes and understated delivery introduced audiences to new Canadian songwriters and broadened the station’s musical identity. It was a natural extension of the eclecticism that had defined his records from the beginning.

Across more than three decades, Buck 65 has remained a restless experimenter — a storyteller, beat-maker, broadcaster, and genre-bender who built a career from the margins of rural Nova Scotia and carried it onto an international stage. From the homemade Stinkin’ Rich cassettes to his major-label albums, his work forms one of the most original catalogs in Canadian music: deeply personal, quietly radical, and constantly evolving.
-Robert Williston

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