[2] The group was founded in 2011 by Daveed Goldman and Nobu Adilman,[1] initially as a one-off event for the birthday party of Matt Murphy.
[1] In December 2015, they performed John Lennon's "Imagine" at Lee's Palace as a fundraising event to raise money for Syrian refugees.
Their rendition of David Bowie's "Space Oddity", performed at the Art Gallery of Ontario six days after Bowie's death, went viral on the internet and saw the choir invited to perform at two Bowie tribute shows in New York City, at Carnegie Hall and Radio City Music Hall;[5] a performance of Prince's "When Doves Cry" in May 2016 drew 1,999 participants to Massey Hall;[6][7][8] and their regular Clinton's Tavern session on May 25, 2016 was devoted to The Tragically Hip's "Ahead by a Century" following musician Gord Downie's announcement earlier in the week of his diagnosis with terminal brain cancer.
[9] On June 19, 2016, they performed Cyndi Lauper's "True Colors" at Nathan Phillips Square, at a memorial vigil for the Orlando nightclub shooting.
[11] This gathering, unusually, focused on performances of multiple songs by The Tragically Hip instead of just one, including "Ahead by a Century", "Bobcaygeon", "Courage (for Hugh MacLennan)" and "Poets".
In April 2018, Rick Astley joined with the choir for a performance of his 1987 hit "Never Gonna Give You Up", which had a burst of renewed publicity in the mid-2010s due to the internet phenomenon of rickrolling.
[14] On October 11, 2018, six days before the one-year anniversary of Downie's death, the Tragically Hip's Johnny Fay and Rob Baker joined Choir!