Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs Read online

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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).

  3See 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).

  Part One: Songs of the Basement

  When the Stars Begin to Fall

  An attitude exists—which can be more precisely termed an ideology, for it is both arbitrary and partisan—under the spell of which one’s ambitions appear subject to the sovereignty of exterior actants.27 Through this lens the world becomes a transportive contraption, like a carnival ride or Dictaphone; one simply flicks the switch and receives what comes. Will I be called upon to play in the big game? Will the quarterback throw me the long bomb? Will hidden Canadian cultural treasures finally disclose themselves? Will the revolution be permitted? Under the spell of this kind of questioning, there is little to do but wait and see.

  Where does this ideology come from? How does it function?28 On one hand, fate has the capacity to console in times of crisis. For example, when Canadian cultural treasures do not ultimately reveal themselves to a suchlike treasure hunter, the concept of inevitability operates as ointment, or laudanum, for the accompanying feelings of failure. This is a defense mechanism. Rather than attributing loss to individual weaknesses, or to the exploitative essence of capitalism, the claim can be made that it was just not in the cards, an excuse equally available to folklorists, fullbacks, and fascistic Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

  On the other hand, the concept of fate can amplify the ego in times of plenty. When a player scores the winning touchdown in the big game, for instance, it might feel as though the preceding movements of their own hands and limbs were long ago scrawled down by some sagacious scribe, across some lustrous surface. “It is written, and so it shall be, and so I have done,” the champion might cry while spiking the ball into the end zone’s turf, or playfully wiggling their bum. Victory on any field must be attributed to the complex interpenetration of economic and political machinations—to the (contingent) structuring processes of privilege, oppression, and exploitation combined with the (chaotic) responses of individual players.29 I do not have room to explain here in further detail the complexities of historical metamorphosis.30 However, embracing the notion that what must exist will exist is less conceptually difficult. Thus, mottoes in this fashion conceptually lubricate (i.e., enable) action in games, markets, wars, and bedrooms alike.

  Was I destined to discover the CFL Sessions? More than one bumbling CBC journalist has asked. It is true that there had been only a vague awareness, on my part, of Staunton R. Livingston’s output when I began my internship at Library and Archives Canada in the spring of 2008. Livingston was a ghost, a cipher, spoken about in reverential whispers near water coolers in campus/community radio stations, yet he left few clear documentary traces. Furthermore, rather than having unearthed Livingston’s tapes in the virile acts of rummaging or foraging, the unmarked box carrying the Sessions fell, in fact, directly upon my head while I was shortcutting through the processing shelves one rainy morning on my way to the toilet.31 These details do lead credence to the destiny narrative, toward which we can imagine the average CBC broadcaster gravitating in the production of a characteristically spectacular exposé.32

  I know I am not preordained to sustain the weight of a forgotten generation of cultural producers. My deeds and designs have not been documented anywhere, by anyone, until now. At the same time, I must admit that I cannot stop picturing myself down in the basement of Library and Archives Canada, crouching above the unlabelled, dusty box, and holding for the first time that glowing pile of reel-to-reel tapes in my hands, the mummified corpse of a long-lost love. I am about to initiate a world-historical drama that has been plotted across the stars for centuries. On the horizon are verdant bounties of uncollected materials, and traversed yet improperly charted territories; glistening and nearly impossible machines, plus unfathomable networks and storage formats; dear, faithful, generous collaborators; and, most voluptuously of all, trounced lickspittles capable of connecting nothing with nothing, treading in the fluxing backwash brought forth by my labours. This image brings me great pleasure. And the feelings of pride and power evoked by this scenario are significant if the reader of the present text is to understand the position that I have played in Canadian folk song collection.33

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  Horseman34/span>

  I’m a horseman running ahead of the light.

  I’m a fortress moving against the night.

  My back is broken and my muscles are torn,

  But in the wake of my body moves a shelter.

  I prayed for strength and I am strong.

  I prayed for love and I belong on this field.

  I prayed for courage and I am courageous.

  I am a sword, and the lord is my shield.

  Sing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home.

  Sing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home.

  My brothers and I, we join hands.

  We put our heads down, and we pump our legs.

  I am the slowest but I will keep up.

  In the wake of our bodies moves a shelter.

  I prayed for strength and we’re strong.

  I prayed for love, and we belong on this field.

  I prayed for courage and we are courageous.

  In the wake of our bodies moves a shelter.

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  The Ramblin' Boy

  Given that academic folklore is a relatively young discipline, and considering that this young discipline has still not quite established itself within the university as its postwar pioneers had hoped, I am surprised at how elitist many contemporary folklorists are in relation to their field.35 “Who are you under?” I heard my folklorist colleagues ask with suspicion more than once during the scheduled coffee breaks at the annual International Association for the Study of Folk Music conference, the one time I attended. In the parlance of the folklorists, “being under” means studying or having studied with a particular mentor, thus having been imprinted by a particular pedigree; the question is a means of quickly establishing connections, lineages, and allegiances in the competitive marketplace of ideas.36 Of course, the question also ordains the policing of boundaries, since not everyone making major contributions is or has been under anyone. I, for example, despite my profound contributions, lack professional training as a folklorist.

  It would be a lie, however, to state that I did not have experience in the field of practical, commercial folk song presentation. Because one sweltering July, at the age of twenty-four, I volunteered in Gannat, France, at one of Europe’s largest traditional music festivals. The experience would profoundly mark my trajectory as a future folk song collector.

  Founded in 1973, Les Cultures du Monde was, in the early days, a small gathering where one imagines moccasin-wearing college kids swapping “Kumbaya” or perhaps even “Frère Jacques” on vintage accordions.37 A few of these elderly visionaries were still involved when I attended. But by 2006, the annual ritual had been scaled up to corporatized proportions; deploying hundreds of volunteers and artists, organizers expected over twenty-five thousand visitors and four hundred musicians and dancers over the course of the two-week-long event. The operation had become a masterful combination of modern command and control, with a dash of good old-fashioned alchemy: a machine that could convert love—the universal love of folk music—directly into surplus profits and capital growth
.38

  My discrete role in the assembly line was as follows: In exchange for a dormitory bed and two square meals per day, I worked as translator and guide for the eight-piece Slovakian folk symphony Politran. It was my function to accompany the band on their daytrips to surrounding villages, where they performed melancholic melodies on violins, pipes, and cimbalom while dressed in traditional Slovakian garb.39 Responsible for liaising between the venue technicians and Pavel, the octogenarian bandleader, as stages were set and any post-concert arrangements made, I served as a kind of medium.

  On one occasion, our party was divided into pairs and ferried to home-cooked dinners scattered across a small village, where we had earlier that day played the annual street carnival. This was probably in Saint-Bonnet-de-Rochefort. I was partnered with a shy teenager, Susan, with whom I enjoyed a dinner of barely seared steaks and buttery beans. “C’est très bien,” I said more than once to our hosts, Anne and Martin, on behalf of us both. After dessert, we went to the garden for digestifs, where our hosts’ precocious French child interrogated me about my reading habits amid dark vines and flat stones. Anne asked Susan what initially had drawn her to traditional music, to which Susan responded, through me, “the music.”The hitherto quiet grandmother posed questions too, which I was unable to answer, about Quebec.