Drive Dull Care Away. Folksongs from Prince Edward Island

Abstract

Dull Care Away. Folksongs from Prince Edward Island. By Edward D. Sandy Ives. (Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island: Institute of Island Studies, University of Prince Edward Island. Distributed in the U.S. by University of Illinois Press. Pp. xiii + 269, photographs, maps, lyrics, music, notes to the songs, list of works cited, index, CD. $24.95 paper) Few stories interest a folklorist more than the narrative of another folklorist's fieldwork: how did it happen that he or she was able to record these tales or songs? What was it like to be there in the moment when something clear and still shining (198) was passed between two strangers drawn together in mutual enthusiasm for an art form that others, even locally, had come to disregard? In Dull Care Away: Folksongs from Prince Edward Island Edward D. Sandy Ives carries his readers with him on successive field trips to the Island, between 1957 and 1982, in search of locally-made and other traditional songs. This collection of 62 songs (fourteen given on the accompanying CD), with musical transcriptions and useful comparative notes, is also a partial autobiography. It takes Ives from the start of his academic career in the mid1950s, as a teacher of English, with a sideline in performing folksongs learned from Burl Ives records, and shows the development of his ideas on folksong over the period in which he researched his three books on P.E.I. and New Brunswick songmakers Larry Gorman, Lawrence Doyle, and Joe Scott. Most interestingly, however, the book is.about the singers and others met in the course of the work, and the many negotiations, obligations, reciprocities, and adjustments of theory that are integral to fieldwork. Ives never assumes the identity of folksong collector without adding quizzical quotation marks to the word. Unlike other great song recorders in Atlantic Canada-Helen Creighton, W. Roy MacKenzie, or Kenneth Peacock each of whom published huge regional surveys of traditional song, Ives was always researching the biographies of individual makers of songs. By contrast, the survey approach, in which the paradigm of anonymous creation lingered, could seem like the surface of his discussion. The book's title, for example, is from a song that a singer had intended to sing for the Ives family at a Sunday picnic-an event which Ives felt obliged to bow out of when another, better, song-collecting opportunity offered itself. Thus Drive Dull Care Away carries for Ives not only the conviviality and friendship of the moment but the disappointment of an awaited occasion lost (58). …