Anglo-Canadian Folksong: A Survey

Abstract

T he first important collector of English-Canadian songs was W. Roy Mackenzie, who began his collecting in his native Nova Scotia in 1908. Even then he bemoaned mournful truth that the oral propagation of ballads has in-our day and generation almost ceased (Mackenzie 1919:227). In the sixty odd years since, we have found that the folksinger is a much hardier breed than ahyone believed, and collecting has gone on apace. Dr. Mackenzie published some Nova Scotia songs in the Journal of American Folklore (1909-1912), and in 1919 he described his collecting adventures in a delightful book, The Quest of the Ballad. In 1928 he published 162 texts with forty-two tunes in Ballads and Sea Songs from Nova Scotia, the first major Anglo-Canadian collection, and one so well documented that it is still an important reference for folklorists. Another early book, Arthur Huff Fauset's Folklore from Nova Scotia published in 1931, contained a section of twenty song texts collected mainly from Negroes around Halifax. In 1929 Dr. Mackenzie's successor, Helen Creighton of Dartmouth, began her collecting, and in the next forty years she found more than 4,000 songs in the area Dr. Mackenzie believed was sung out. From this, the largest single collection of English-Canadian songs, have come four books: Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia (1932), Traditional Songs from Nova Scotia (1950a), Maritime Folk Songs (1962), and Folk Songs from Southern New Brunswick (1971). The Nova Scotia books contain a total of over 500 songs; the New Brunswick one has 118.