CASBY Awards

The CASBY Awards were a Canadian awards ceremony for independent and alternative music, presented annually by Toronto, Ontario radio station CFNY, currently branded as 102.1 The Edge. CASBY is an acronym for Canadian Artists Selected By You. The awards were first presented in 1981 under the name U-Knows, a pun on Canada's mainstream Juno Awards. The concept was developed by David Marsden, the program director at CFNY at the time, when he heard the Juno nominations announced on CBC Radio, and included was Long John Baldry — who was newly resident in Canada but had already been in the music business for almost 20 years — as most promising vocalist.