- What Is This Book About?
- Beginning in the Middle - Mariposa, 1961
- The Invention of Folk Music
- A Child Shall Lead Them
- Canadian Beginnings
- Gibbon and the Canadian Mosaic
- Red Is The Colour- The Other Mosaic –1900’s-30’s
- The Early Labour Song Tradition in Canada
- Red Front to Popular Front
- New Deal and No Deal
- Birth of a Nation
- Put Canada First!
- People’s Songs and People’s Music
- The Golden Age of Canadian Folk Song 1947- 1962- The Beginning
- The Emergence of a Repertoire
- The First Tour- The UJPO Folksingers
- Foreign Affairs
- World Music in the Golden Age
- Founding Folkies
- From Bonavista to the Vancouver Island
- Sam Gesser and Folkways Canada
- Country and Folk
- The “Revival”- Folk as Pop
- Mariposa Revisited- The End of the Beginning
- The Boom - Early Canadian Folk Professionals and the Marketplace
- The Songwriters
- East is East and West is West- Halifax, Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg, Regina, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver & Smaller Towns and Smaller Scenes
- Folk Rock
- The Real Boom- Folk in the 70’s
- The Festivals
- The Message in the Music- Political and Social Images in Songwriting and Folk Music in Canada in the 60’s and 70’s
- Bigger Than Ever- the 80’s
- New World, New Music
- The Little Folk- Children and Folk Music
- Looking Forward – Looking Backward- Folk Music at the End of the Century and the Beginning of the New Millennium
- What Does It Mean
In Nova Scotia in the first decade of the last century Roy Mackenzie, an academic on holiday in his native province, gathered ballads from acquaintances of his youth, sure that he was preserving the last remnants of a dying tradition. Almost one hundred years later hundreds of artists perform folk music at almost one hundred festivals and from countless stages in clubs and concert venues. Much of the music they perform bears little resemblance to what Professor Mackenzie and his associates thought of as folk music. Yet the songs they collected are still there, joined by a dozen other traditions. Reports of the death of folk music, pronounced with regularity throughout the 20th century have been found to be not only premature but also simply wildly erroneous. How that genre of music came into being, who created it, how it found its proponents and its audience is a tale worth telling. This book will look at the academics, the collectors, the singers, the entrepreneurs, and everyone else who had a hand in creating folk music in English Canada. It will look at how a musical form that began as the nostalgia of the political right became the vehicle for the ideas of the political left. It will trace a story that is about more than music, a story that encapsulates much of the history of the search for national identity in a state that has never been fully convinced that it is a nation. Moreover it is also the tale of dreamers, fools, hustlers, visionaries, and some of the best-loved artists and art this country has produced.
Beginning in the Middle- Mariposa, 1961
The Mariposa Folk Festival in 1961 was a defining moment in the emergence of folk music as a mass form of popular music. The book begins with an analysis of who performed at the first one, what they sang, and how they got there. The collective repertoire of the Mariposa performers both reflected the creation of a genre of music called folk and outlined how this music would develop over the next 40 years.
The terms folklore and folk music were first used in the 19th century. Why, how, who, where and when these terms were developed is an important aspect of how the music was seen in the 20th century.
The completion of Francis James Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads had a monumental impact on the study of folk music. The early English Canadian collectors were profoundly influenced by Child and his chief disciples, including George Kitteredge, who trained many of them. What is the significance of Child and how was and is his influence still felt?
Gagnon and Barbeau in Quebec; Mackenzie, Creighton and their contemporaries in English Canada. An exploration of the first collectors and their collections, philosophy, and methods focusing on the period between 1910-1930.
Gibbon and the Canadian Mosaic
John Murray Gibbon invented the term Canadian Mosaic, produced the first folk festivals, and had a large impact on the creation of Canadian identity. He did it for love, and as a senior executive for the Canadian Pacific Railway. The use of folk music as a device for assimilation, the 1920’s festivals, Gibbon’s concept of folk music and the Canadian Mosaic.
7.
Red Is The Colour- The Other Mosaic –1900’s-30’s
While Gibbon promoted class harmony through “multiculturalism”, left-wing ethnic organizations - Jews, Ukrainians, Finns, and others, created choirs, and other musical groups that both maintained their traditions and created a vibrant revolutionary cultural milieu. From this milieu emerged many singers and songs of what became known as the “folk revival”.
The Early Labour Song Tradition in Canada
The Knights of Labour, Wobblies, and other early unions and workers’ organizations used music to varying degrees to animate their activities. As folk music was created, these songs became an organic part of it, supplemented by later compositions in the 30’s and 40’s.
In the mid 30’s the Communists began looking for a popular culture with national roots and discovered folk music. The US experience, the anti-fascist songs of Spain and Germany, and the new awareness of the rebel tradition in Canadian history all contributed to the emergence of a culture of resistance in the context of the Popular Front.
While the New Deal in the US intersected fortuitously with the new interest of the Left in traditional music, in Canada the 30’s were a decade of governmental indifference to the arts. This disjuncture delayed the development of Canadian folk music for a decade.
The Second World War had a profound effect on English Canadian national identity. The post-war period saw the emergence of a new generation of artists in every discipline. The federal government took a new interest in promoting Canadian artistic creation including folk music.
The slogan advanced by the Communist Party at the beginning of the Cold War was both a reflection of the needs of Soviet Foreign policy and the heartfelt outlook of the Canadian Left. This led to the interest of many young singers in Canadian folk songs and provided inspiration to the first new songwriters. The members of the National Federation of Labour Youth (NFLY) were in the vanguard of this new nationalism. The creation of the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) and its annual festivals helped bring together youth from around the world and fuse dozens of “nationalisms” into an internationalist perspective in music as well as politics.
People’s Songs and People’s Music
In 1946 People’s Songs was created in the US. While its Canadian branch was small, it had a profound impact on left-wing youth and the development of a new alternative musical culture. Through its bulletin, recordings, and the work of “People’s Artists” such as The Weavers, Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives, Earl Robinson and others, Peoples Songs helped spark the emergence of the Canadian “revival”.
The Golden Age of Canadian Folk Song 1947- 1962- The Beginning
The period between the early post-war years and the British Invasion (The Beatles, et al.) of the early 60’s was uncommonly rich for folk music in Canada. The folklorists, the lefties, the CBC… Alan Mills, Edith Fowke, Ken Peacock, Ed McCurdy, NFLY, the UJPO Youth Singers, The Travellers, Folkways Canada, 40,000 people out for Robeson’s concert at the Peace Arch, Bonnie Dobson, Karen James, the first coffee houses and folk clubs, Mariposa- it was a great decade and a half for folk music.
By the early 50’s a body of songs known as folk music had been assembled. Traditional songs from Quebec, Atlantic Canada, and Ontario, coexisted with Afro-American freedom songs, Yiddish and other Eastern European material, songs of the newly created peace movement, union songs and more. Folk music in a still recognizable form had arrived. The sources and their integration.
The First Tour- The UJPO Folksingers
In 1952 and 1953 the United Jewish People’s Order (UJPO) organized two cross-country tours by a folk song group- The UJPO Folksingers. For the first time, a professional level ensemble brought the new folk repertoire to audiences between Quebec and British Columbia. The story of the 1952/53 tours, who attended, who organized, who sang, and what they sang is a great insight into folk music in Canada just before the boom.
Canada was not the only country where the emergence of a genre of music that integrated national culture, dissident songwriting, and international repertoire into a seamless body of music was occurring. Developments in folk music in US, UK, Australia, Latin America, and Europe. The continuing impact of WFDY and the youth festivals.
While for the first time a generation of singers was discovering the riches of Canadian traditional music, there was a corresponding surge in the performance of, and audience for, songs from many other traditions- Calypso, Revolutionary songs from Spain, China, and Indonesia. Songs like Wimoweh and Guantanamera became standard fare long before they were heard on the radio. Malka and Joso popularized in Toronto the approach taken by Theodore Bikel in the US, building a repertoire of international folk songs.
Between the late 40’s and the early 60’s a generation of folk singers started their careers. A few have endured until today; more have been forgotten. They all, to varying degrees, left their mark and influenced those who came later. They include The UJPO Youth Singers, Alan Mills, Wade Hemsworth, Art Samuels, Mary Jane and Winston Young, Karen James, Merrick Jarrett, Bonny Dobson, The Couriers, The Travellers, Omar Blondahl, Alan McRae, Peter Wyborn, Tom Kines, Ian and Sylvia, The Raftsmen, and more.
From Bonavista to the Vancouver Island
The Travellers came out of the interlocking membership of the Jewish Folk Choir of Toronto, The UJPO Youth Singers and The UJPO Folk Singers. They will celebrate their 50th anniversary in a few years. Praised as Canada’s seminal folk song group and dismissed as a Canadian knock-off of The Weavers or Kingston Trio, their story is a microcosmic history of folk music in Canada.
Sam Gesser and Folkways Canada
The recording activities of Sam Gesser are responsible for most of the traditional Canadian folk songs available on record. As the distributor of Folkways Records in Canada, Gesser provided an invaluable resource when folk music labels could be counted on one hand. As a concert producer, Gesser opened the ears of thousands of Montrealers to folk music. Canada’s first folk music impresario.
Before folk music was anything more than a category in the minds of a few academics, there was one popular music form that attempted to create an authentic Canadian music. From the 30’s through at least the 60’s a group of country music artists created a body of work with local, regional, and, to some degree, national content. Mac Beatty, Wilf Carter, Stompin’ Tom Connors and a score of others wrote a lost chapter in Canadian music before country meant Nashville.
In 1958 The Kingston Trio stormed commercial radio with Tom Dooley and changed the rules of the folk music game. Suddenly folk music was a pop music contender. The so called “revival” or folk “boom” coincided with the crisis of the Communist Party and the first wave of what became known as “youth culture” or “the 60’s”. New markets opened up for folk music in Canada, drawing in new artists and presenters and forcing folk music to come to terms with itself as a commodity.
Mariposa Revisited- The End of the Beginning
In 1961 folk music was a major component of North American popular music. Inspired by the first Newport Folk Festival held in 1959, a group of folk aficionados in Toronto decided to organize a folk festival. At the first Mariposa all that came before was on stage with what would come next. Traditional singers accompanied by their folklorist minders alternated with more commercial interpreters such as Ian and Sylvia.
The Boom - Early Canadian Folk Professionals and the Marketplace
For a few years in the early 60’s folk music was seen by the music industry as a viable form of popular music. Artists such as Bonnie Dobson, The Halifax 3, Karen James, The Couriers, Ian and Sylvia, etc. were contenders. Most signed with major US labels that were building folk music stables. Some adapted to the demands of the industry, some resisted. Some went on to fame and money; some didn’t. The first coffee houses and folk clubs began in major cities; the outlines of an industrial infrastructure took shape.
In 1962 Bob Dylan did with Blowin’ in the Wind what The Kingston Trio had done 4 years before; he changed the rules of the game. The folksinger as interpreter of traditional songs was replaced by the singer-songwriter or the interpreter of the songs of the singer-songwriter. Ian and Sylvia, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, & Leonard Cohen met the test. Others didn’t. Folk music became stratified between amateurs, local professionals and semi-professionals, and the “stars”. Increasingly folk singer and singer-songwriter were interchangeable.
East is East and West is West- Halifax, Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg, Regina, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver & Smaller Towns and Smaller Scenes
By the mid 60’s a network of clubs, coffeehouses, house concerts, and the occasional impresario offered folk musicians performance opportunities in many centers, large and small. These venues supported touring artists and offered local performers the opportunity to hone their skills. They also offered a haven to a generation of young people looking for cultural, social, and political alternatives to the mainstream. In a sense, these clubs were the inheritors of the left-wing youth organizations of the previous decade- offering an environment of likeminded souls. A survey of major, and some minor, Canadian cities tells us much about how folk music developed in this period and its resonance among the first wave of the baby boomers.
It can be said that folk and rock music saved each other. Folk music gave rock content and lyrical depth while rock breathed new life into folk music, and provided a musical dynamism that took it to new and larger audiences. Neil Young, Denny Doherty, and Zal Yanofsky went from folk clubs to become major artists in folk based rock. The already established songwriters started recording and performing with electric bands while a new generation of folk artists and groups used elements of rock music to establish a new sound in Canadian folk music. Names like Perth County Conspiracy, Humphrey and the Dumptrucks, Fraser and Debolt and Three’s A Crowd became identified with a hybrid approach to folk music. Songwriters including Bruce Cockburn and Murray MacLachlan began to establish themselves as successors to the “big 4”. In England, Pentangle and Fairport Convention defined a new approach to the interpretation of traditional songs and Canadians took note of new possibilities.
The Real Boom- Folk in the 70’s
Someone said the 60’s really took place in the 70’s and in folk music one could make a case for this. Between 1970 and 1980 folk music in Canada went through an unparalleled growth spurt. Not only did an entire new generation of songwriters emerge, but entire new genres began to form; Celtic folk rock from Newfoundland (Figgy Duff); the first world music ensemble combining Chilean and Greek refugees in Toronto (Companeros); the first unabashedly feminist singer songwriter (Rita MacNeil); West Coast Folk (Pied Pumkin and Flying Mountain); a handful of aboriginal singer-songwriters including Willie Dunn, Alanis Obomsawin, Shingoose, Winston Wuttunnee, and Guyanese, Arawak singer, David Campbell found an audience at folk festivals and the concerts they spawned. Stringband created a repertoire combining traditional music, songs by group members, and those by other new writers, pioneered extensive national touring and were among the first to create their own record company, shattering the hold of the “majors” over folk music. Dave Essig, Stan Rogers, Roy Forbes, David Wiffen, Ferron, Willie P. Bennett, Connie Kaldor; a whole lexicon of names that would become important to folk music in the next decades were first heard in this period. Independent recordings and radio in both campus/community form and, more than ever, the CBC, took the music across the country.
In 1970 there was one folk festival that counted- Mariposa. By the end of the decade there were a dozen with more popping up every year- Winnipeg, Sudbury, Owen Sound, Vancouver, Edmonton, Regina… The folk festivals acted as transmission belts to a mass audience for artists from diverse regions of the country. An artist could arrive unknown and leave a major concert attraction. The festivals created social milieus around them, which attracted many souls who would go on to other creative endeavors. They became more than simple musical events, embodying as they did, a certain dissident, counter-cultural spirit.
The Message in the Music- Political and Social Images in Songwriting and Folk Music in Canada in the 60’s and 70’s
From the definition of a first folk music repertoire in the late 40’s and early 50’s, politics and folk music were linked. The roots of the music as a popular art form in the political left maintained a permanent space at the folk music table for songs that addressed social and political issues. Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Malvina Reynolds, Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, and Phil Ochs in the US, and Ewan MacColl in England were important influences on Canadian songwriters. The peace, civil rights, and anti-Vietnam War movements, to mention the most important, had a resonance in Canada and songs from these movements were widely sung in folk circles. Yet by and large there is a dearth of songwriting by Canadian folk songwriters that deal with Canadian issues. The Travellers recorded an album of Canadian labour songs as their centennial project, and continued to perform topical material from a previous age but they were not writers. Canadian folk singers relied on interpretations of non-Canadian material or commented in general terms on the ills of the world. Despite or perhaps because of the strong Canadian nationalist movement in the 60s and 70s most political commentary was aimed at the misdeeds of our neighbors to the south. Lightfoot’s Black Day In July and Ian Tyson’s “House of Cards” are examples, not to mention Ohio by Neil Young, who by then had moved to the United States. Even the “quiet” and then the not so quiet revolution in Quebec, including the declaration of the War Measures Act did not inspire much more than a maudlin plea for unity by Ian Tyson and Peter Gzowski in the early 60’s Song for Canada. In the ironic and the satirical compositions of Bob Bossin and Nancy White there was a whiff of rebellion, as there also was in the work of Perth County Conspiracy, but it was a few women writers influenced by the women’s movement and aboriginal songwriters, for whom Canada was not any better than the US, that the few songs with bite were found. Rita MacNeil in her first album, Born A Woman and Willie Dunn with his Ballad of Crowfoot are exceptions that stand out in two decades regarded in popular mythology as the time of the protest singer. The vast majority of singer songwriters who emerged in Canada in these decades turned their art to celebrating the land and exploring universal themes. They created a vocabulary of Canadian images that matched the new sense of national identity that produced such diverse phenomena as Trudeaumania and the Waffle. For the first time there was a bank of Canadian contemporary songs that went beyond ditties and approached art.
If the 70’s were a decade of massive growth for folk music, the 80’s were even bigger. There was more of everything- more festivals; the emergence of new “stars” including Rita MacNeil, and Loreena McKennitt, each selling hundreds of thousands of records; new writers, new genres of music. Stan Rogers was poised to become a major artist. In Atlantic Canada young players began to explore the traditions unearthed by the folklorists during the first half of the century and reinterpret them. Women artists inspired by the women’s movement and the creation of “women’s music” in the United States entered the field in force. Ferron, Heather Bishop, and Connie Kaldor gained national and international audiences. The Winnipeg Women’s Music Festival demonstrated what a richness there was. Stephen Fearing, James Keelahan, and other new voices began to be heard. The mainstream of the industry began to pay attention for the first time since the 60’s and old issues of the commercial value versus the artistic value of the music began to be raised again.
Probably the most important development in the 80’s was the emergence of world music as a force in folk music. Locked up for years as ethnic music and given token status at best on the folk scene, the 80’s saw the beginning of a real presence for artists and music that did not come from the Anglo-Saxon, Celtic or French tradition. Not only was there more appreciation for artists who presented the music of their country of origin, there was more and more music that was created by the fusing of traditions, and the evolution of styles that were entirely new. Toronto’s Companeros gave a hint of the possibilities with their fusion of Greek and Chilean music. Groups like African Heritage and Kartari Taiko in Vancouver, Finjan, a Winnipeg Klezmer band, and others opened the door for the world music boom of the nineties and beyond. Folklorists and ethnomusicologists began to create performing ensembles drawn from various ethno-cultural communities and take the music onto the stages of festivals and clubs.
The Little Folk- Children and Folk Music
Folk music had always had a strong symbiosis with children. Early in the century British Folklorist Cecil Sharp had advocated using folk songs to create cultural identity in the schools. Alan Mills had one of the first folk music shows on CBC in the mid 40’s- Folk Songs for Young Folk. Edith Fowke had pursued the campaign of taking folk music into the schools and other locations. Summer camps in the 50’s and 60’s were one of the most prolific breeding grounds for the future folk music artists and audiences. Merrick Jarrett and Sharon Trostin (later Sharon of Sharon, Lois, and Bram) were performing folk music for children in the early 60’s. In the early 80’s this long marginal activity exploded with the first recording of Raffi. Soon a major industry was created for “kids’ artists”. Like most other areas of folk music, there was the commercial arena and its few stars, while other artists created less saleable but more interesting and challenging work. The new market for children’s music joined with the “world music” boom as a new emphasis on cultural diversity opened the doors of the schools to artists from many musical backgrounds. Infrastructures developed and made full time music making a possibility for more artists than ever before.
Looking Forward – Looking Backward- Folk Music at the End of the Century and the Beginning of the New Millennium
The last decade of the 20th century saw new features emerge in Canadian folk music and many old forms resurgent. As in earlier decades Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Ewan MacColl had had a profound influence on Canadian artists, so Billy Bragg and Ani DiFranco inspired new approaches in the nineties. The grrrls, the punk folkies, Celtic stomp and other new variants entered the scene. The environmental movement and the anti-globalization campaigns provided inspiration for new political songwriting. The growth of world music continued and accelerated. From the most hybrid and visionary to the most traditional, the music of scores of cultures is being performed. The Atlantic Canadian invasion made Gaelic a living language on the folk scene. Celtic music was heard everywhere in the most diverse treatments. At the same time several generations of songwriters continue to perform and create. New technologies have made the music more available than ever. There are 300 web sites of Canadian folk musicians listed on the Northern Journey list. Never has there been more and more diverse folk music in Canada. Never has there been a more clear distinction between those artists who use folk music to conjure up the ghost of a kinder and gentler past and those who are using the music to create a vibrant new culture outside the framework of the mainstream of the music industry. All the debates about the nature of folk music continue and every variant that has existed under the name folk during the last hundred years remains a living part of the mix.
At the beginning of the 20th century a few collectors of what were then called “living antiquities” began writing down ballads and other folk songs. Mackenzie, the first English Canadian folklorist, asserted that to find a real folk singer one had to look for a person of at least 80. The early folklorists were convinced they were gathering the last remnants of the genre. By mid century the young activists of the Left were assembling a body of music they called folk, that included traditional songs they inherited from the folklorists, new songs by writers operating outside the margins of the pop music industry, and music from a variety of non-Canadian traditions. They, more than anyone else, created folk music as a component of popular culture. By the early 60’s this body of work had acquired a dynamic of its own and was spreading among a new generation mainly unaware of its roots. For the next four decades folk music has evolved, growing and mutating, picking up audiences as it did. Today folk music is pervasive, eclectic, and inclusive. The folklorists were wrong. When Great Big Sea recorded Lukey’s Boat on their first record and sold several hundred thousand copies of it, it reached more ears than ever heard it by an out port pier. The vision of a “people’s music” hatched by a few thousand socialists 50 years ago has become a reality. Yet not in the way they planned. Folk music and the organized workers’ movement never acquired the organic connection envisioned by the left, and while a real link between many folk music artists and an array of social movements has existed and continues to exist, folk music also has evolved into the minor leagues of the pop music industry. Folk music has become the official opposition of the mainstream of the popular music industry- in it but not of it. Ambiguous, contradictory, and plain indefinable, folk music in English Canada continues to grow.
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