Lumbering Songs from the Northern Woods

Terry Goldie is an associate professor of English at York University and
author of Fear and Temptation.

The days when folk music was ubiquitous, when you couldn’t turn around without hearing another bad version of Pete Seeger or Joan Baez, are gone, lost in those earthy seventies. But folk song as an area of serious study continues to thrive.

In English Canada it thrives thanks to some very well-planted roots, the work of many scholars, of whom the best known are probably Helen Creighton and Edith Fowke. At a time when folksong was considered by most to be “old foolishness” or even “hillbilly music,” they strove constantly, collecting material from any source they could find, often with inferior equipment and always with inferior funding.

This collection is only one example of what will come to be called the Fowke legacy. Many will cringe at the pun which Fowke’s name inevitably creates in this field and others will dislike the pretentiousness implied — but Fowke’s achievement is such that it must be called a legacy.

This collection was originally published by the American Folklore Society in a severely academic-looking book with a drab green cover. It should make many nationalist hearts glad to see it once again in print, by one of the ultimate Canadian publishers, NC Press, in a beautiful cover with a Tom Thomson painting on the front.

The book remains very useful, although the format shows its age. The standards of the American Folklore Society were high; thus, there is some excellent information here in Norman Cazden’s note on the tunes, in the bibliography, and in the cross references for the individual songs. But there has been a great deal of water under the bridge of folksong analysis in the last 16 years and there no doubt would be some significant additions and changes if a new edition had been prepared. For example, the thematic arrangement of the songs is as inconsistent as such pseudo-taxonomies always are. Still, the songs remain superb and the book as a whole is certainly superior to most similar volumes, including recent, more apparently up-to-date examples.