Handsome Ned

Robin David Masyk (June 4, 1957 – January 10, 1987), known as Handsome Ned, was a Canadian country singer and songwriter. Although he only released a small number of singles and was never widely known outside of Toronto during his lifetime, he has been credited as the catalyst for an early-1980s country music and roots rock revival in Toronto which paved the way for acts such as Blue Rodeo, Prairie Oyster, Skydiggers and Cowboy Junkies to break through to greater fame, and as one of the key figures in the transformation of the city's Queen Street West district into a cultural hotspot.

As well, he received a posthumous Juno Award nomination for Best Male Country Vocalist at the Juno Awards of 1990, after some of his archival recordings were released in 1989, as the album The Ballad of Handsome Ned. He returned with his family to Stoney Creek, Ontario in 1970. After discovering a taste for classic country music of the 1950s, he moved to Austin, Texas for a year to learn more about the genre playing there as a headliner and providing a platform for other like-minded artists. and was a regular organizer of country-themed music events such as the "Handsome Ned Picnic" and "Honky Tonk Heart". The Handsome Ned Picnic, an annual event for at least three years, included acts such as The Razorbacks and Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet as performers,

Handsome Ned was the host of a weekly eclectic music show on CKLN-FM called The Honky-Tonk Hardwood Floor Show.

He appeared in an advertising campaign for Molson Export in 1986. In the same year, Jim Masyk compiled and remastered archival recordings of Ned's songs for the album The Ballad of Handsome Ned, resulting in Ned's posthumous Juno nomination. Jim Masyk later compiled another two-CD set of additional archival recordings, which was released in 2000, as The Name Is Ned.

Filmmakers Chris Terry and Ross Edmunds released the documentary film You Left Me Blue: The Handsome Ned Story in 2010. The film premiered at NXNE in 2010, but saw no further distribution at that time. In the same year, Dale Heslip's documentary film Blue Rodeo: Lost Together briefly touched on Ned's role in the band's early days. These both led to a resurgence of interest in his story, resulting in You Left Me Blue receiving limited commercial release in January 2026.