Life Is Like Canadian Football and
Other Authentic Folk Songs

Introduction

A Long Time Ago

To partake in the collection of folk song is to partake in the communication of the real. My progenitors and peers and opponents alike have been building this tradition for millennia now—a generations-spanning assignment of attending and recording. For this reason, the inaugural inductees into folk song collection’s hall of fame must not be Johann Gottfried Herder or the Brothers Grimm, but the first literary writers tout court, those mediums who conjured The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Iliad out of the fog of oral conveyance and down into the relative fixity of inscription.¹

However, the most significant starting place for the author of the present book is with James Macpherson, the Scottish man of letters who, in the mid-eighteenth century, discovered the first “legitimate” scribblings by the medieval bard called Ossian.² At the crest of an allegedly light-filled epoch, where reason and rationality were silently lauded, these newly unveiled treasures commanded readers back to the warm bosoms, and bowels, of being.³ Of course, Ossian himself should also receive credit. Nonetheless, the remnant fragments of Ossian’s poetry might never have been located, and reanimated in the bustling marketplaces of print, if not for Macpherson plucking the poems out of the back of a dilapidated fireplace. First published more than a century before Thomas Alva Edison invented his sound-recording machine, Ossian’s voice nevertheless echoed into the aurem interiorem of significant historical actors like Thomas Jefferson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Napoléon Bonaparte.⁴ Consider the possibility: each of these prime movers, upon first reading Ossian’s words, delivered by way of Macpherson and then packaged into a literary commodity for mass consumption, had never been so moved.

In fact, on the eve of his vanquishment of the Russians and Austrians at Austerlitz, Napoléon famously set down his leather-bound volume and wept.⁵ The words on the page must have appeared as salve to the finally reposing tactician, snow falling across Moravia at dusk, calming and carrying the Emperor back through the deep recesses of time. One can hear the silence arriving, the battle cries faltering, and the slow swelling—the pure gushing—of primordial sonorousness. Such a transcendent aesthetic experience could only have strengthened Napoléon’s constitution, enabling him to push further and harder into the wider world.

Which leads to my preliminary question: What would our modern maps look like, or sound like, if indeed they could look or sound like anything at all, if not for the blood and guts of the folklorists?

Let’s Go A-Huntin’

In the United States, Francis James Child made his contribution by chasing down snippets of medieval balladry, songs that we now call the Child Ballads in honour of their conduit.⁶ Child was a professor of English literature at Harvard University, so it is logical that his primary sources would remain strictly textual.⁷ Later, at the turn of the twentieth century, John A. Lomax changed the rules of the game by tracking down cowboys singing their tunes in the flesh.⁸ Traipsing across America’s buttes and plains, publishing calls in local periodicals, Lomax got his hands dirty, and also, presumably, his ears. We would have neither “My Darling Clementine” nor “Home on the Range” without Lomax’s pioneering fieldwork.

Meanwhile, Canadian folk song collection begins roughly in the second quarter of the twentieth century, when adventurers including Helen Creighton, Marius Barbeau, and Maud Karpeles scoured the hinterlands of the Maritime provinces, Quebec, and Newfoundland, intent on registering the pastoral produce they believed was threatened by technology and mass media, among other contaminating influences.⁹ They were after “organic” as opposed to “artificial” musical materials.¹⁰ Subsequent waves of collection and analysis have lent breadth to an ever-expanding archive; anthologies have been made of the folk songs of Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, and Ontario, among others.¹¹

Indeed, the industry of folk song collection runs like a superabundant mineral mine, the jewels ready to withstand inexhaustible processes of extraction, assemblage, and sale. Ancient and medieval folk performers were required to choose selections in order to perform, given the physical limitations of human speech and time.¹² Modern gatherers and preservers of the folk have, for the most part, avoided this curatorial approach. Thus the modern reader of the printed folk song text is in possession of an often-encyclopedic totality of possible combinations of folkloristic information, in addition to various historical and sociological data through which said information can be situated and interpreted.¹³ Some of the masterpieces in this tradition weigh over ten kilograms per volume.

I am not here to criticize. There are benefits to the mode of presentation described above, just as there are benefits to the purchase of bushels of D-grade gemstones, if one’s purpose is to build a mound of gemstones. From another angle, however, one can begin to glimpse ways in which the author of the exemplary modern folk song text has tended to display tunes and tales as desiccated specimens on a table, to group their data into allegedly discrete categories, and to present their findings as the contents of a static reservoir. This is unfortunate because the object of study—folk song—is neither dry, nor categorizable, nor static. The object of study is in fact a muddy and mobile target that must be followed in real time.

Furthermore, the author of the exemplary modern folk song text has rarely reckoned with the sources and structures of their own biases. Why have I chosen the songs I have chosen? Why have I chosen these songs and not others? Who am I? These questions have gone unasked and unanswered. The intermediaries engaged in folk song collection have therefore rarely achieved the authenticity and sincerity they have so often demanded of their subjects, of their folk.¹⁴

As I Roved Out

I claim that an existential account of folk song, Canadian or otherwise, has yet to be written. Such a text would of course need to include songs themselves; additional requirements are the texture and fabric of the nets used to corral and capture each and every last gathered morsel. I am not alluding only to technology and scholarly methodology, but additionally to the taste and disposition, and thus the life, of the collector.

For although we still have Macpherson’s treasures, we do not have—and will never have—a rigorous account of his experience of finding Ossian’s mouldy poems. And although we have collections of countless stories and songs thanks to Creighton and Barbeau and Karpeles, we do not yet have—and will never have—a robust description of the fun they had in the thrill of the hunt, the dark desires that propelled their expeditions, or the rich resentments that fueled their drive toward discovery.¹⁵In other words, we have not yet listened to the folk in its copious totality, which includes “the folk” per se and the songs thereof, but also the disciplines and intermediaries (such as Creighton, Barbeau, and Karpeles—and me) through which “the folk” as a concept has been written and rewritten again, whether with dark ink, magnetic tape, electronic circuitry, or oral performance.¹⁶ Having collected folk songs for the past decade or so, at the time of this writing, I would therefore like to take the opportunity that so many of my predecessors and contemporaries have neglected to take.

According to Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, to gaze at an experiment is to fundamentally alter the structure of the observed reality.¹⁷ Should not the same be said of folkloristic technique? Should not the acts of looking, longing, and capturing thus be included—as primary sources—alongside any folkloristic transmission? The Oxford English Dictionary claims that folk song is defined as “song[s] originating from the common people; also, […] modern imitation[s] of such […] song[s].” But what does it mean to originate and to imitate? How does one know when and in what context to, for example, originate rather than imitate? Or vice versa? My hunch is that a rigorous exploration of these terms has the potential not only to refine but, in fact, to explode and thereafter regenerate the very concept of authentic folk song.¹⁸ Accordingly, you can ponder as Molotov cocktail—but also as fertilizer—the blunt fact of the pages that follow, across which the art of the folk song collector is conceived as nothing more, and nothing less, than the art of the folksinger.¹⁹ The parasite must become a host.²⁰

To be clear, the purpose of the present volume is therefore to collect and to communicate, in a single text, the most significant folk songs that I myself have yet brought to light. At the time of writing, I have been performing (often at a financial loss) and teaching the songs collected here for nearly a decade, but I have not yet left behind the detailed diagram, setting out the development of my techniques of song collecting, that I believe is warranted. I want to inscribe—to carve out that which I have done. Desiring more than to offer a static compendium organized by theme or region or “motif,” I additionally aim to dramatize the folklorist’s development as such.²¹ Therefore, I have collected here only those particular songs that have contributed to public apperception of folk song in the twenty-first century, in which I have played a role.

The main body of the present volume follows a basic chronological order. In “Songs of the Basement,” I offer a selection of Staunton R. Livington’s CFL Sessions, a series of field recordings conducted in the 1970s, which I discovered in the basement of a hegemonic Canadian cultural apparatus in 2008—the fortuitous act that nudged me onto my present path. With “Songs of the Field,” I share a sampling of songs field recorded by me within the contingent and arbitrary borderlines of Canada. And “Songs of the Cloud” presents the most interesting compositions generated by the artificially intelligent folk song database that I co-authored in 2013 while in Dawson City, Yukon. Interspersed throughout these chapters is an episodically structured Volkskunderoman, across which the development of my philosophy of song collection, and the development of my self, are chronicled.²² Lastly, beefy acknowledgment and bibliographic sections house complete information regarding the vast sources, both living and dead, consulted in the production of this book.

It is of course possible to begin at the beginning. However, more adventurous readers may wish to chart a different path through the present text by starting with the references and working backwards.²³ One might wish—including, perhaps, the career-minded folklorists I know—to read the songs first. This decision will be of no consequence, however, because, as the folk itself knows intuitively, time is not necessarily chronological; it is possible to experience existence as an eternal repetition of a single event, like the refrain of a folk song—or like a touchdown.²⁴

Ours are terrifying yet promising times; opportunities abound.²⁵ I fear that my life’s work will now be easy prey for cultural industries—that these songs will be commodified as a bound, bourgeois shelf decoration, the base reality of so many “folk” anthologies, and subsequently as episodic television series, T-shirts, and echoic VR experiences.²⁶ Who knows the limits of the logic of capital? But I also hope that the song, the collector, the medium, and the addressee will be codirected toward purposeful triumph, by way of struggle and resolution.

Alas, much must be left to you, dear reader, or receiver, for I am not a psychologist, or even a librarian. Within the current communicative context, I am only a humble scribe who modestly hopes that this volume’s motley mix of songs, scholarship, and story will provoke my opponents within the so-called sanctioned bastions of folk song collection. Yet, my greatest desire for the present text is that it will circulate beyond all official gates and walls, to inspire the next generation of authentic folk song collectors, and, therefore, folksingers. Will you be among them?

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Notes

1 Anonymous, The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. Nancy K. Sanders (Hardmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972); Homer, The Iliad, trans. E. V. Rieu (London, UK: Penguin, 2003).

2 James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian Translated by James Macpherson(London, UK: Strahan and T. Cadell, 1796).

3 See Dafydd Moore, Enlightenment and Romance in James Macpherson’s The Poems of Ossian: Myth, Genre and Cultural Change (New York: Routledge, 2017); Celestina Savonius-Wroth, “Bardic Ministers: Scotland’s Gaelic-Speaking Clergy in the Ossian Controversy,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 52, no. 2 (2019): 225–243.

4 On Ossian’s translation into the American context, see Jack McLaughlin, “Jefferson, Poe, and Ossian,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 26, no. 4 (1993): 627-34.

5 Presumably Napoléon was working with the French edition. See Ossian, fils de Fingal, barde du troisiè me siècle: Poésies Galliques traduites sur l’anglais de M. Macpherson, 2 Vols (Paris: 1777).

6 Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Volumes 1-10 (Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1882-1898).

7 On the complexities of Child’s understanding of ballad transmission and aesthetics, see Michael J. Bell, “‘No Borders to the Ballad Maker’s Art’: Francis James Child and the Politics of the People,” Western Folklore 47, no. 4 (1988): 285–307.

8 Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

9 As the historian Ian McKay has argued, focusing in particular on Creighton’s legacy, song collection in Atlantic Canada can be understood as an anti-modernist and ideological project, the function of which has been to obscure the complex and dynamic conflicts within capitalistic modernity. Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994). For similarly critical approaches to the legacy of Barbeau, see also Andrew Nurse, Gordon Ernest Smith, and Lynda Jessup, eds., Around and About Marius Barbeau: Modelling Twentieth-Century Culture (Gatineau, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2008).

10 John Storey, Inventing Popular Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003).

11 Barbara Cass-Beggs, Folk Songs of Saskatchewan (New York, NY: Folkways Records, 1963); Edith Fowke, Lumbering Songs from the Northern Woods (Austin, TX: University of Austin Press for the American Folklore Society, 1970); Edward D. Ives, Folk Songs of New Brunswick (Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane Editions, 1989).

12 Albert Bates Lord, The Singer of Tales (New York, NY: Athaneum, 1960).

13 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

14 Both authenticity and sincerity are significant within the field of Canadian folk song collection, though in different measures and applications. According to Lionel Trilling’s account, sincerity has a social valence, whereas authenticity is understood as a non-instrumental end in itself. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). We might then say that Canadian folk song collectors have until now aspired toward sincerity in their professional identities and personas while also aspiring, as collectors, to capture the authentic being of the folk. This is not to say, however, that Canadian folk song collectors have tended to be very self-aware regarding these aspirations.

15 Of course, I am not the first folk song collector to write an autobiographical or even a semi-autobiographical text. Helen Creighton chronologically recounted her development as folk song collector and person in her book A Life in Folklore, and Alan Lomax reflected on his own experiences throughout his ample oeuvre, including his celebrated publication The Land Where the Blues Began. Helen Creighton, Helen Creighton: A Life in Folklore (Toronto, ON: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1975); Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1993). However, the bulk of this writing has been clearly plagued by bad-faith repression and obscene self-promotionalism, which we must seek to juke, or dodge, in a Livingstonian fashion.

16 The notion that concepts are both produced and productive is generally attributed to the work of Michel Foucault. See, for example, Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1971). The idea that concepts are produced and productive—but in ways owing to the media technologies through which those concepts have been articulated—is often attributed to German literature scholar Friedrich Kittler. See Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). However, I must also acknowledge here Regina Bendix’s institutional, if not existential, history of the discipline of folklore, which similarly approaches the concept of the folk as a constructed category. Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997). And do not forget Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt, American Folklore Scholarship: A Dialogue of Dissent (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988). As you can see, research on folk song is nearly as collaborative and intertextual as the folk itself.

17 Werner Heisenberg, The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory, trans. Karl Eckart and Frank C. Hoyt (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1930).

18 Cf. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

19 Hence, for my future folkloristic interpreters, the classical structuralist analyses common in the field might be applied to either the poetry collected in the present text or the prose. Try, for example, Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957); Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin, TX: University of Austin Press, 1968); Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1955–1958).

20 Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

21 For the sake of sharp contrast, consider the school of folkloristic research inspired by Russian formalism and structuralism, which seeks to reduce Folk Poetry to a mechanistic structure across which oppositions and conflicts are played out and resolved. See, for example, Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (1968; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984); and Stith Thompson, The Folk Tale (1946; Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977).

22 Volkskunderoman is a neologism coined, as far as I am aware, by me in this very sentence. It elegantly combines the German Künstlerroman—or novel of artistic development—with the famously German term for the folk, Volk. Denotatively, the word clearly conveys the form of the present text. The Germanic connotations, however, are strictly to be understood as ironical, given the chasmic distance between the Livingstonian conception of the folk, which is high-modernist, and that found in the original Germanic sources, which is romantic. For discussion of the Künstlerroman in the context of Canadian narrative communication, see Sian Harris, “The Canadian Künstlerroman: The Creative Protagonist in LM Montgomery, Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence,” PhD dissertation, Newcastle University, 2009.

23 I myself prefer to begin any book with the bibliographical sections. In my view, one wants to peruse, virtually, the libraries and archives in which the author has spent their time before joining their text on its unspooling journey. Furthermore, it is possible to decide, before even finishing the bibliography, whether or not the author is a responsible researcher. And in some fascinating examples, the bibliography is the central text, thereby calling into question the distinction. See, for example, Peter Meyer Filardo, “United States Communist History Bibliography 2018,” American Communist History 18, no. 1-2 (2019): 97–168.

24 The concept of recurrence has on occasion assuaged the present author’s anxieties, as he has confronted the infinity of sensations, experiences, events, and interpretations that might have made it into the present text, required in the end to boil everything down into a single, advancing line. A task which has seemed all but impossible in my weakest hours. See Mirceau Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1905).

25 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

26 See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).