'We won't forget you': Montreal street to be named after Daisy Sweeney
Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre says a street will be named after Daisy Peterson Sweeney, the Montreal legend who died last week at the age of 97.
Coderre tweeted out that he would "make sure" there will be a street in her name, after speaking with jazz great Oliver Jones, her former student.
Besides Jones, Sweeney also taught her brother Oscar Peterson to play piano, as well as countless other children in the community.
Sweeney's daughter, Sylvia, said she was moved to tears by the gesture.
"The city is giving back by saying, 'We won't forget you,'" Sweeney told CBC over the phone Wednesday evening.
"She was a force that walked in very many [lives], she used music as a way of teaching life."
Sweeney said her mother didn't only change lives through music, she fostered and adopted children as well.
"Our family is a rainbow of a testament to her love."
An honourary doctorate
Sweeney remembered another time Daisy Sweeney was honoured, this time when she was alive.
Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont., offered her an honorary doctorate in 1987, but Sweeney says her mother proclaimed she didn't believe in honorary doctorates, that she had to work for that kind of degree.
When she finally accepted it, "she got up on the stage, she took it and said that it was for her a symbol not of what she'd done," said Sylvia Sweeney. "But of what she had left to do."
Public service on Saturday
Daisy Peterson Sweeney founded the Montreal Black Community Youth Choir with Trevor Payne that went on to become the internationally celebrated Montreal Jubilation Gospel Choir.
The choir will be performing at a service Saturday at 11 a.m. at the Union United Church on Delisle Street.
The service, which Sweeney says Coderre is planning to attend, is open to the public. Doors open at 10 a.m.
