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1956-1964
Edith Fowke purchased her first tape recorder in the fall of 1956 (Fowke 1965b: 1). Very soon her song collecting
began in Ontario, specifically Peterborough County. In researching how Edith came to begin her fieldwork in the
Peterborough area, I found two slightly different, but not necessarily contradictory, accounts.
Earliest Field Collecting
In a 1978 interview, Edith mentioned that in 1956 she had a friend who had a cottage in the Peterborough area. He
had told her that some people there reminded him of rural people in the Appalachians. Edith followed up on this lead
and went to Peterborough. She first contacted the individual who wrote a history column in the local newspaper, the
Peterborough Examiner. When Edith asked him if he knew any old timers interested in songs, he replied in the
negative. She then contacted the President of the Peterborough Historical Society. He also replied in the negative, but
he suggested she visit a Mr. William Towns, a man known to be interested in local history (Weihs et al. 1978: 5-6).
Another account of how Edith came to be aware of Mr. William Towns is outlined on the first page of an eight-page
manuscript I located at the Trent University archives in Peterborough. The manuscript is an essay which appears to
have been written by Edith Fowke around 1965. In this work, titled "Folk Songs Of Peterborough," Edith gives a slightly
different version of the story. She says that in the autumn of 1956 she was spending the weekend with friends in the
village of Milibrook, just southwest of Peterborough. Her host Spencer Cheshire took her to see Nick Nickells of the
Peterborough Examiner. Nickells had gathered a lot of information about old timers in the district, gave Edith some
names, and put her in touch with William Towns of Douro (Fowke 1965c).
Regardless of how she came to know him, William Towns was the key to the successful beginning of Edith Fowke's
song collecting in Ontario. Towns lived in Douro, a small village about fifteen miles east of Peterborough that had
been settled by Irish Catholics in the 1820s. He operated the large general store, which along with St. Joseph's
Roman Catholic church across the street, dominated the centre of the village. Edith went to that store on an autumn
day in 1956 and asked Mr. Towns if he knew anyone interested in old songs. He replied that his wife Mary sang some
old songs, as did his father in law, Michael Cleary (Weihs et al.1978: 6).
Edith's first recording session took place in the Towns home, directly behind the store. She recorded 81-year-old
Michael Cleary as well as Mary Towns. Edith commented on the fine voice of Mary Towns, who had learned the folk
songs from her father in the Irish oral tradition.
The Towns family told her of other singers in the area and Edith began seeking them out. Three singers in the
immediate area were recorded shortly afterward: Dave McMahon, Jim Doherty, and Emerson Woodcock. Through
Woodcock, Edith met Tom Brandon. At the time, Brandon was one of the better young singers of the older songs she
recorded. As the network of source singers grew, so did Edith's workload, as she drove the 90 miles from her Toronto
home to Peterborough each weekend to record them (Fowke 1977b; Weihs et al. 1978: 6).
These tape recordings were of great significance to Canadian folksong scholarship. Edith had discovered songs that
had never been heard outside the Peterborough area. She also found unique versions and variants of older songs.
These songs had never been documented; they existed only because they had been passed on in oral tradition,
person to person, through generations, by family, friends, and co-workers. Edith had found a wealth of songs that up
to 1956 were relatively unknown.
Edith compared her discovery to finding gold (1965b: 1):
Luck was with me for the first area I tried was Peterborough, some ninety miles northeast of Toronto, and
there it soon became clear that I had struck a very rich lode.
Forty-two years after Edith met William Towns in Douro, Ontario, I went to visit the same place. I drove there in
February, 1998 to retrace Edith's footsteps and to get a feeling of what she may have encountered. I found the village
of Douro very much out of the way, in Douro Township, just east of the city of Peterborough. No major highways pass
through, or even come close to it. The road into the village had virtually no traffic on it. The village itself is still
dominated by St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church, its accompanying presbytery and the equally large and
impressive, red and yellow, P.G. Towns General Store. The elementary school, parish hall, cemetery, and a handful of
homes make up the remainder of the village centre. There are plenty of old trees and these only add to the sense that
this place, at least on the surface, has remained untouched by outside influence for many years. Douro in 1998 quite
likely looked the same as it did when Edith Fowke first visited in 1956.
When I walked into the store, I felt as though I were actually following in the footsteps of Edith Fowke. The interior of
the store had a comfortable rural feeling. It is probable that Edith Fowke encountered the same atmosphere when
she first entered. The store was still operated by the Towns family; the proprietor was now Michael Towns, the son of
William and Mary Towns. Michael's wife Rosemary and his sister Mary also worked in the store.
I found the Towns to be warm, friendly, and knowledgeable, and they did not hesitate to answer my inquiries about
Edith Fowke and Mary Towns. Michael easily remembered Edith's visits to the family store, and the family home
behind the store. He recalled how Edith encouraged his mother to keep singing the old songs. When Edith took her
to Innis Lake, Ontario to sing at the Mariposa Folk Festival, the entire family went along. Michael also mentioned that
his mother, through Edith's encouragement sang at McGill University and Trent University.
In 1959, Edith selected two of the Mary Towns field recordings to be included on the album Folk Songs of Ontario. In
1961, Mary Towns was one of three Ontario singers Edith took to perform at the International Folk Music Council
meeting in Quebec City (Fowke 1990: 297).
Michael told me that Edith would have liked his mother to do more travelling and singing, but she was a very devoted
family woman, and felt uncomfortable being away from her husband, children, and the store. Over the years Mary
maintained her friendship with Edith, through visits and letters. They both died in 1996, a few months apart.
Among the belongings of Mary Towns, placed between the pages of a large book, was a newspaper clipping that
describes the honouring of Edith with the Order of Canada. The daughter of MaryTowns, who is also named Mary,
said that the relationship with Edith was very important to her mother. Michael Towns perceived that the two women
had a great mutual respect. His mother was so pleased that she, along with her father, were Edith's very first
informants.
Alan Mills
The recording sessions in the Peterborough area represented only part of Edith's work in 1956. During the same year
she had been collaborating with her friend Alan Mills to prepare 13 quarter-hour programs for CBC radio, called The
Song History of Canada. Edith wrote the scripts; Alan sang the songs and narrated. The series ran from July to
September. At the same time, Edith and Alan persuaded the U.S.-based Folkways recording company to release an
album based on the radio series. The recording . Canada: A History in Song was chosen by the New York Times as
one of the best recordings of 1956. Alan and Edith then completed the year with a series called Songs of the Sea
which ran on CBC radio from October to December. All this radio work was in addition to the regular radio broadcasts
of Folk Song Time (Fowke 1996b).
John Robins
Although Edith had taken on a significant amount of folksong oriented work in 1956, she found time to pursue her
interest in folklore by editing a book of stories by Dr. John Robins. Robins, an English professor at the University of
Toronto, had learned Paul Bunyan folk tales as a young man working in Ontario lumbering camps. Edith became
acquainted with Dr. Robins when he was broadcasting a series based on the legendary lumberjack for CBC radio in
1951.
Upon his death in late 1952, Robins' widow turned all his Paul Bunyan writings over to Edith. Edith edited the material
and prepared the final text for ten of the stories that were specifically set in Canada (Fowke 1957: Foreword). These
stories were published by the Ryerson Press in February of 1957 under the title Logging with Paul Bunyan. Robins
was a major influence on Edith's career in collecting folk song and folklore. Edith had thought highly enough of him to
have the 1954 publication Folk Songs of Canada dedicated to his memory: "Dr. John Robins, whose love of folk
songs was contagious." (Fowke and Johnston 1954: 5).
Apart from the Paul Bunyan stories, Dr. Robins had collected other pieces of folklore. In the summer of 1945 he
notated some square dances and calls by hand in Goulais Bay, Ontario, on the eastern tip of Lake Superior. He also
made a list of some of the fiddle tunes played in the area at the time (Fowke 1976: 215-16).
Edith probably became aware of this work when she came into possession of his writings. She would use the
material much later, in her 1976 book Folklore of Canada. It is quite likely that Dr. John Robins and his work were
among the significant influences in the 1950s that led to Edith Fowke to begin collecting folk song and story in
Ontario. In Many Voices: A Study of Folklore Activities in Canada and Their Role in Canadian Culture, Carole
Carpenter emphasizes that "Robins was instrumental in Edith Fowke's involvement in folklore" (1976: 50).
O.J. Abbott
Early in 1957, Edith was interviewed on the television program Tabloid, a very popular CBC early evening news and
talk show which originated in Toronto. During the interview, Edith spoke about the hundreds of folk songs she had
found and recorded in the Peterborough area. One of the interested viewers of that show was Mrs. Ida Dagenais. She
wrote Edith and told her that her father O.J. Abbott knew a lot of old Ontario lumbering songs. Edith wrote back and
asked Mrs. Dagenais to send the titles of some of the songs Mr. Abbott sang (Weihs et a!. 1978: 6). When Edith
received the list of songs, she became very interested and decided to spend part of the summer of 1957 in the
Ottawa Valley recording Abbott.
Although he lived in Hull, Quebec, O.J. Abbott had learned the songs he sang when he was a young man working on
farms and in lumber camps on the Ontario side of the Ottawa River in the 1880s and 1890s. He was 85 years old
when he was first recorded, yet he sang with good intonation in a clear, strong voice. His songs were of high quality
and complete, but most importantly, he knew a very large number of them. In the first week alone, Edith recorded 84
songs (Fowke 1965: 11-12). O.J. Abbott had become one of her most prolific informants.
Edith spent most of her time in 1957 recording Ontario folk songs. That year Edith also was involved in a second
Folkways recording. Songs of the Sea was based on the radio programs she and Alan Mills had produced. As the
first recording, . Canada: A History in Song had done in 1956, the second one also made the New York Times list of
top recordings. Edith then collaborated with Alan Mills on a third series of CBC radio programs, based on legends of
Indonesia. Edith continued her script writing as she worked on a number of radio programs about Australian bush
ballads, with Merrick Jarrett as the singer and narrator (Johnson 1996: 9; Fowke 1996: 17).
Collecting, Publishing, Travels and Friends
Edith continued her Ontario song collecting into 1958. She had, by then, developed her own approach to collecting
and publishing. Most importantly, she recorded and noted the text of every song as it was performed, and carefully
analyzed the results (Fowke 1996: 45; Thomas 1996: 23).
The field recordings Edith produced were, in themselves, superb. She used a very high quality tape recorder and
microphone, and the performances of many singers were outstanding. The result was studio quality recordings, a
number of which were selected in 1958 to compile an album titled Folk Songs of Ontario. Released by Folkways
Records of New York City, it was the first of several record . albums made exclusively from her field recordings. Edith
wrote the extensive liner notes for the album. These included the text and history of each song and a photograph of
each singer (Fowke 1958).
Later in 1958, Edith took a holiday in the British Isles with her husband Frank. This was one of many trips to Britain
that enabled her to become acquainted with many of the folklorists and singers living there, such as Peggy Seeger,
Ewan MacColl, Hamish Henderson, and Albert Lloyd (Fowke 1990:297).
Back in North America, Edith started work with Joe Glazer on Songs of Work and Freedom, a book of protest songs .
As well, she was working with Alan Mills on a book version of their collaborative 1956 radio series, to be titled
Canada's Story in Song. Edith was also considering a publication based on songs sung by Canadian children
(Johnson 1996: 9-10).
In 1959, Edith started to record songs sung by children in her own East York, Toronto neighbour-hood. Edith's
recording of children's material parallelled her continuing fieldwork in the Peterborough and Ottawa areas (Caputo
1989: 36). Along with her radio broadcasts and field work in 1959, Edith also completed the publications she had
been working on with Joe Glazer and Alan Mills. In the summer, she took some time off to go to visit some relatives
and old friends in British Columbia, including song collector Philip Thomas and folksinger Vera Johnson (Johnson
1996: 10). In early 1960, her new publications were released: Canada's Story in Song was published in Canada,
while Songs of Work and Freedom was published by the Labour Education Division of Roosevelt University in
Chicago.
[Next]
Edith Fowke purchased her first tape recorder in the fall of 1956 (Fowke 1965b: 1). Very soon her song collecting
began in Ontario, specifically Peterborough County. In researching how Edith came to begin her fieldwork in the
Peterborough area, I found two slightly different, but not necessarily contradictory, accounts.
Earliest Field Collecting
In a 1978 interview, Edith mentioned that in 1956 she had a friend who had a cottage in the Peterborough area. He
had told her that some people there reminded him of rural people in the Appalachians. Edith followed up on this lead
and went to Peterborough. She first contacted the individual who wrote a history column in the local newspaper, the
Peterborough Examiner. When Edith asked him if he knew any old timers interested in songs, he replied in the
negative. She then contacted the President of the Peterborough Historical Society. He also replied in the negative, but
he suggested she visit a Mr. William Towns, a man known to be interested in local history (Weihs et al. 1978: 5-6).
Another account of how Edith came to be aware of Mr. William Towns is outlined on the first page of an eight-page
manuscript I located at the Trent University archives in Peterborough. The manuscript is an essay which appears to
have been written by Edith Fowke around 1965. In this work, titled "Folk Songs Of Peterborough," Edith gives a slightly
different version of the story. She says that in the autumn of 1956 she was spending the weekend with friends in the
village of Milibrook, just southwest of Peterborough. Her host Spencer Cheshire took her to see Nick Nickells of the
Peterborough Examiner. Nickells had gathered a lot of information about old timers in the district, gave Edith some
names, and put her in touch with William Towns of Douro (Fowke 1965c).
Regardless of how she came to know him, William Towns was the key to the successful beginning of Edith Fowke's
song collecting in Ontario. Towns lived in Douro, a small village about fifteen miles east of Peterborough that had
been settled by Irish Catholics in the 1820s. He operated the large general store, which along with St. Joseph's
Roman Catholic church across the street, dominated the centre of the village. Edith went to that store on an autumn
day in 1956 and asked Mr. Towns if he knew anyone interested in old songs. He replied that his wife Mary sang some
old songs, as did his father in law, Michael Cleary (Weihs et al.1978: 6).
Edith's first recording session took place in the Towns home, directly behind the store. She recorded 81-year-old
Michael Cleary as well as Mary Towns. Edith commented on the fine voice of Mary Towns, who had learned the folk
songs from her father in the Irish oral tradition.
The Towns family told her of other singers in the area and Edith began seeking them out. Three singers in the
immediate area were recorded shortly afterward: Dave McMahon, Jim Doherty, and Emerson Woodcock. Through
Woodcock, Edith met Tom Brandon. At the time, Brandon was one of the better young singers of the older songs she
recorded. As the network of source singers grew, so did Edith's workload, as she drove the 90 miles from her Toronto
home to Peterborough each weekend to record them (Fowke 1977b; Weihs et al. 1978: 6).
These tape recordings were of great significance to Canadian folksong scholarship. Edith had discovered songs that
had never been heard outside the Peterborough area. She also found unique versions and variants of older songs.
These songs had never been documented; they existed only because they had been passed on in oral tradition,
person to person, through generations, by family, friends, and co-workers. Edith had found a wealth of songs that up
to 1956 were relatively unknown.
Edith compared her discovery to finding gold (1965b: 1):
Luck was with me for the first area I tried was Peterborough, some ninety miles northeast of Toronto, and
there it soon became clear that I had struck a very rich lode.
Forty-two years after Edith met William Towns in Douro, Ontario, I went to visit the same place. I drove there in
February, 1998 to retrace Edith's footsteps and to get a feeling of what she may have encountered. I found the village
of Douro very much out of the way, in Douro Township, just east of the city of Peterborough. No major highways pass
through, or even come close to it. The road into the village had virtually no traffic on it. The village itself is still
dominated by St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church, its accompanying presbytery and the equally large and
impressive, red and yellow, P.G. Towns General Store. The elementary school, parish hall, cemetery, and a handful of
homes make up the remainder of the village centre. There are plenty of old trees and these only add to the sense that
this place, at least on the surface, has remained untouched by outside influence for many years. Douro in 1998 quite
likely looked the same as it did when Edith Fowke first visited in 1956.
When I walked into the store, I felt as though I were actually following in the footsteps of Edith Fowke. The interior of
the store had a comfortable rural feeling. It is probable that Edith Fowke encountered the same atmosphere when
she first entered. The store was still operated by the Towns family; the proprietor was now Michael Towns, the son of
William and Mary Towns. Michael's wife Rosemary and his sister Mary also worked in the store.
I found the Towns to be warm, friendly, and knowledgeable, and they did not hesitate to answer my inquiries about
Edith Fowke and Mary Towns. Michael easily remembered Edith's visits to the family store, and the family home
behind the store. He recalled how Edith encouraged his mother to keep singing the old songs. When Edith took her
to Innis Lake, Ontario to sing at the Mariposa Folk Festival, the entire family went along. Michael also mentioned that
his mother, through Edith's encouragement sang at McGill University and Trent University.
In 1959, Edith selected two of the Mary Towns field recordings to be included on the album Folk Songs of Ontario. In
1961, Mary Towns was one of three Ontario singers Edith took to perform at the International Folk Music Council
meeting in Quebec City (Fowke 1990: 297).
Michael told me that Edith would have liked his mother to do more travelling and singing, but she was a very devoted
family woman, and felt uncomfortable being away from her husband, children, and the store. Over the years Mary
maintained her friendship with Edith, through visits and letters. They both died in 1996, a few months apart.
Among the belongings of Mary Towns, placed between the pages of a large book, was a newspaper clipping that
describes the honouring of Edith with the Order of Canada. The daughter of MaryTowns, who is also named Mary,
said that the relationship with Edith was very important to her mother. Michael Towns perceived that the two women
had a great mutual respect. His mother was so pleased that she, along with her father, were Edith's very first
informants.
Alan Mills
The recording sessions in the Peterborough area represented only part of Edith's work in 1956. During the same year
she had been collaborating with her friend Alan Mills to prepare 13 quarter-hour programs for CBC radio, called The
Song History of Canada. Edith wrote the scripts; Alan sang the songs and narrated. The series ran from July to
September. At the same time, Edith and Alan persuaded the U.S.-based Folkways recording company to release an
album based on the radio series. The recording . Canada: A History in Song was chosen by the New York Times as
one of the best recordings of 1956. Alan and Edith then completed the year with a series called Songs of the Sea
which ran on CBC radio from October to December. All this radio work was in addition to the regular radio broadcasts
of Folk Song Time (Fowke 1996b).
John Robins
Although Edith had taken on a significant amount of folksong oriented work in 1956, she found time to pursue her
interest in folklore by editing a book of stories by Dr. John Robins. Robins, an English professor at the University of
Toronto, had learned Paul Bunyan folk tales as a young man working in Ontario lumbering camps. Edith became
acquainted with Dr. Robins when he was broadcasting a series based on the legendary lumberjack for CBC radio in
1951.
Upon his death in late 1952, Robins' widow turned all his Paul Bunyan writings over to Edith. Edith edited the material
and prepared the final text for ten of the stories that were specifically set in Canada (Fowke 1957: Foreword). These
stories were published by the Ryerson Press in February of 1957 under the title Logging with Paul Bunyan. Robins
was a major influence on Edith's career in collecting folk song and folklore. Edith had thought highly enough of him to
have the 1954 publication Folk Songs of Canada dedicated to his memory: "Dr. John Robins, whose love of folk
songs was contagious." (Fowke and Johnston 1954: 5).
Apart from the Paul Bunyan stories, Dr. Robins had collected other pieces of folklore. In the summer of 1945 he
notated some square dances and calls by hand in Goulais Bay, Ontario, on the eastern tip of Lake Superior. He also
made a list of some of the fiddle tunes played in the area at the time (Fowke 1976: 215-16).
Edith probably became aware of this work when she came into possession of his writings. She would use the
material much later, in her 1976 book Folklore of Canada. It is quite likely that Dr. John Robins and his work were
among the significant influences in the 1950s that led to Edith Fowke to begin collecting folk song and story in
Ontario. In Many Voices: A Study of Folklore Activities in Canada and Their Role in Canadian Culture, Carole
Carpenter emphasizes that "Robins was instrumental in Edith Fowke's involvement in folklore" (1976: 50).
O.J. Abbott
Early in 1957, Edith was interviewed on the television program Tabloid, a very popular CBC early evening news and
talk show which originated in Toronto. During the interview, Edith spoke about the hundreds of folk songs she had
found and recorded in the Peterborough area. One of the interested viewers of that show was Mrs. Ida Dagenais. She
wrote Edith and told her that her father O.J. Abbott knew a lot of old Ontario lumbering songs. Edith wrote back and
asked Mrs. Dagenais to send the titles of some of the songs Mr. Abbott sang (Weihs et a!. 1978: 6). When Edith
received the list of songs, she became very interested and decided to spend part of the summer of 1957 in the
Ottawa Valley recording Abbott.
Although he lived in Hull, Quebec, O.J. Abbott had learned the songs he sang when he was a young man working on
farms and in lumber camps on the Ontario side of the Ottawa River in the 1880s and 1890s. He was 85 years old
when he was first recorded, yet he sang with good intonation in a clear, strong voice. His songs were of high quality
and complete, but most importantly, he knew a very large number of them. In the first week alone, Edith recorded 84
songs (Fowke 1965: 11-12). O.J. Abbott had become one of her most prolific informants.
Edith spent most of her time in 1957 recording Ontario folk songs. That year Edith also was involved in a second
Folkways recording. Songs of the Sea was based on the radio programs she and Alan Mills had produced. As the
first recording, . Canada: A History in Song had done in 1956, the second one also made the New York Times list of
top recordings. Edith then collaborated with Alan Mills on a third series of CBC radio programs, based on legends of
Indonesia. Edith continued her script writing as she worked on a number of radio programs about Australian bush
ballads, with Merrick Jarrett as the singer and narrator (Johnson 1996: 9; Fowke 1996: 17).
Collecting, Publishing, Travels and Friends
Edith continued her Ontario song collecting into 1958. She had, by then, developed her own approach to collecting
and publishing. Most importantly, she recorded and noted the text of every song as it was performed, and carefully
analyzed the results (Fowke 1996: 45; Thomas 1996: 23).
The field recordings Edith produced were, in themselves, superb. She used a very high quality tape recorder and
microphone, and the performances of many singers were outstanding. The result was studio quality recordings, a
number of which were selected in 1958 to compile an album titled Folk Songs of Ontario. Released by Folkways
Records of New York City, it was the first of several record . albums made exclusively from her field recordings. Edith
wrote the extensive liner notes for the album. These included the text and history of each song and a photograph of
each singer (Fowke 1958).
Later in 1958, Edith took a holiday in the British Isles with her husband Frank. This was one of many trips to Britain
that enabled her to become acquainted with many of the folklorists and singers living there, such as Peggy Seeger,
Ewan MacColl, Hamish Henderson, and Albert Lloyd (Fowke 1990:297).
Back in North America, Edith started work with Joe Glazer on Songs of Work and Freedom, a book of protest songs .
As well, she was working with Alan Mills on a book version of their collaborative 1956 radio series, to be titled
Canada's Story in Song. Edith was also considering a publication based on songs sung by Canadian children
(Johnson 1996: 9-10).
In 1959, Edith started to record songs sung by children in her own East York, Toronto neighbour-hood. Edith's
recording of children's material parallelled her continuing fieldwork in the Peterborough and Ottawa areas (Caputo
1989: 36). Along with her radio broadcasts and field work in 1959, Edith also completed the publications she had
been working on with Joe Glazer and Alan Mills. In the summer, she took some time off to go to visit some relatives
and old friends in British Columbia, including song collector Philip Thomas and folksinger Vera Johnson (Johnson
1996: 10). In early 1960, her new publications were released: Canada's Story in Song was published in Canada,
while Songs of Work and Freedom was published by the Labour Education Division of Roosevelt University in
Chicago.
[Next]