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Canada's Story in Song was a songbook containing 73 songs. It was similar in format to Edith's Folk Songs of
Canada. Each song had a melody line, lyrics, piano accompaniment and guitar chords. As well, a historical sketch
detailed the events on which the song was based. The songs were placed into 14 groups, arranged in chronological
order. Edith explained that there was a motive behind this book. She had expressly designed it to be used in teaching
history and social studies. She felt that songs composed at certain periods of history gave people a clearer
impression of what it was like then; a more vivid image than one could get from reading an historical account (Weihs
et al. 1978: 11-12).
Songs of Work and Freedom was a little controversial when it was released. Some in the Canadian folk music
community, such as Helen Creighton, felt that such songs were subversive and communist (McKay 1994: 147).
However, Edith had been raised in Saskatchewan with an interest in the political left. She was aware of social issues
and had been politically active. Songs of Work and Freedom, like the previous publications, was designed as a song
book. For each of its 100 songs, the melody and lyrics were complemented by piano accompaniment and guitar
chords. As in the previous publications, the story of the song and the events associated with it were detailed in an
accompanying historical account.
In the summer of 1960, Edith and Frank went to the United States. They visited a number of friends in the folklore and
folk music communities, including Ben Botkin, Oscar Brand, Alan Lomax, and Edith's longtime friend Ken Goldstein.
Folkways continued to press recordings based on her fieldwork. They released an album of square dance music she
had recorded as well as Irish and British Songs from the Ottawa Valley, featuring songs of O.J. Abbott (Johnson 1996:
10).
Edith travelled often and extensively, and it seemed that everywhere she went she knew people. There is little doubt
her personal friendships were of great assistance to her work. In early 1961, for example, she and her husband
made an extended trip to Mexico. Subsequent trips would find her in British Columbia, Europe, Banff, Newport, New
York City, Philadelphia, Detroit and Trinidad (Johnson 1996:11). Her ability to connect and sustain contact with people
was a key to her success as a researcher. Through the people she knew, her song and record collecting, and her
radio broadcasts, Edith was becoming a rich source of information about folklore and folk song.
By the 1960s, Edith had become a regular contributor of articles on folklore to magazines and journals in both
Canada and the United States. Such periodicals as Western Folklore, Midwest Folklore, Canadian Literature, Sing
and String, Hoot, and the Alberta Historical Review published her material. Edith continued broadcasting on a regular
basis. One of her new interests was the founding of the Canadian Folk Music Society.
Canadian Folk Music Society
The Canadian Folk Music Society was started in 1956 by Marius Barbeau, as a branch of the International Folk Music
Council. Barbeau enlisted Edith as one of the directors. The society became autonomous in 1957 and was involved
in the the organization of the 1961 IFMC meeting in Quebec City. Membership from the beginning was a mix of
academics and non-academics. An important early function was publishing its Newsletter, which had its first issue in
July, 1965.
The Newsletter evolved into the non-academic Canadian Folk Music Society Bulletin. Later, in the 1970s, the society
began a second publication, the more academically oriented Canadian Folk Music Journal, which Edith edited until
her death in 1996 (Weihs et al. 1996: 9-10; Rahn 1996: 1).
Fieldwork 1956-64
Since 1956, Edith had been recording source singers in Ontario. By 1964, she had located and recorded more than
50 Ontario singers of folk songs, as well as a large number of youngsters singing children's songs. The work done in
this nine-year period represents the bulk of her song collecting.
It was very important to Edith that many of these recordings be made available to the public as soon as possible .
University of Calgary Gazette 1997). Recordings were to take priority over books. The result was four record albums
Folkways had published by 1964. Each was compiled completely from selected field tapes. In addition to Folk Songs
of Ontario (1958) and Irish and British Songs from the Ottawa Valley, sung by 0.1. Abbott (1961), Folkways released
Lumbering Songs from the Ontario Shanties in 1961 and Songs of The Great Lakes in 1964. Each album jacket
contained a booklet of extensive notes Edith had prepared.
It is important to emphasize that Edith conducted most of her fieldwork in southern Ontario, for the most part
recording adult singers in the comfort of their own homes. Although she gathered lumbering songs, she never did so
in the lumber camps. She recorded songs of the sea, but never on the shoreline or on a ship. This, however, does
not diminish the legitimacy of her collecting, the enormous amount of work involved, nor the significance of her work
to Canadian folksong scholarship.
Her recordings began in Douro, Ontario in 1956 and expanded from there, throughout the Peterborough area and into
the Ottawa Valley. Edith also found sources much closer to her Toronto home. She recorded children in her
neighborhood and at Toronto schools. The album Songs of the Great Lakes was based on songs colleded from two
Toronto friends, C.H.J. Snider and Stanley Parker. These men met occasionally in Toronto with other former sailors
and their wives to enjoy an evening of singing. Edith sat in on these sessions and made the tape recordings that
comprised most of the album (Fowke 1964).
Often Edith did not have to go very far to find a song. One of her more interesting field recordings was made in 1957.
The recording captures the unmistakable voice of well-known CBC broadcaster and Toronto Star film critic, Clyde
Gilmour, singing "H'Emmer Jane," a shipwreck ballad Gilmour had learned from a man who had heard it in a lumber
camp on the south shore of Newfoundland sometime in 1939 or 1940 (Fowke 1974). Edith probably came to know
Gilmour through the CBC. How she found out about the song and persuaded him to sing it into a tape recorder will
forever be a mystery.
1965-1974
1965 was one of the more significant years in Edith's career. Since 1956, she had been recording Ontario folk songs
and singers. Edith's field work began to slow down in 1964 as she finally began to compile a book based on her
collection of tape recordings. To work with her as the music editor, Edith enlisted the assistance of the well-known
folksinger, song collector, and composer, Peggy Seeger, whom she had met on one of her trips to England (Fowke
1990: 297).
Her longtime American friend Kenneth Goldstein also acted as General Editor on the project. Goldstein was no
longer the hobbyist Edith had met in a Greenwich Village record shop in 1954. It was now 1964, and he had just
completed his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation was to be published as . Guide for Field
Workers in Folklore, and he was teaching in the University of Pennsylvania's Folklore Department (Fowke 1996: 22).
As well, Goldstein was involved in publishing through Folklore Associates.
Traditional Singers and Songs From Ontario.
Early in 1965, Folklore Associates released Edith's Traditional Singers and Songs from Ontario. Not a song book, the
volume documented songs exactly the way informants had recorded them. The songs were grouped by singer along
with the singer's biography, repertoire, and, in most cases, photograph. Philip Thomas later assessed the book as
follows (1978: 13):
With its introduction, scholarly notes, bibliography, discography, and singers' biographies, the book
established Dr. Fowke as a major song collector and scholar; this is in addition to her role as a popularizer.
Folklorist Carole Carpenter wrote (1979: 51):
Traditional Singers and Songs from Ontario is of particular note since it involves a means, innovative for
Canada, of presenting traditional songs . . . grouped by the persons who sing them.
There is little doubt this publication brought Edith Fowke to prominence as a major folksong collector in Canada.
Later in 1965, the book was published in Canada, by Burns and MacEachern of Toronto. The same year, Folklore
Associates of Pennsylvania released Edith's edition of Sea Songs and Ballads from Nineteenth-Century Nova Scotia.
Also in 1965, the Saskatchewan Diamond Jubilee and Centennial Corporation published the less well known, yet
interesting, volume Saskatchewan : The Sixtieth Year—Historical Pageant.
Saskatchewan: The Sixtieth Year
Telling the history of her native province, Edith wrote the work for performance by schools, theatre groups, and
community organizations. Each of its two parts was intended to last 30 to 35 minutes, with an intermission. The piece
contains songs, narrations, and stage directions. Most of the songs were taken from Edith's previous publications. It
is difficult to know how often, and where the pageant was performed, but copies of it remain as examples of Edith's
creative writing and her respect for her roots.
In 1965, Edith produced a radio series based on the publication she had co-authored with Joe Glazer, Songs of Work
and Freedom. The series was aired on the CBC FM program Learning Stage. Edith also found time in 1965 to begin
work on another songster with Richard Johnston. And in late November, she travelled to Denver Colorado to
represent the Canadian Folk Music Society at the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society (Fowke 1965d: 11).
Bawdy Songs
Because of her strict approach to field work, Edith did not censor the language of her informants' songs. She
transcribed the lyrics exactly as she heard them and did not attempt to mask the meaning of any of the material.
Although she made no particular effort to find bawdy songs, she taped several in the course of her general collecting.
She mentioned four singers were her main sources of this material, and reasoned that since they were varied in age
and background, their songs were quite representative of the different types of bawdy ballads (Fowke 1966:45).
Edith's essay on the topic, "A Sampling of Bawdy Ballads From Ontario" was published by Folklore Associates in a
1966 Festschrift honouring Benjamin Botkin: Folklore and Society. Edith was definitely establishing herself as a
folksong collector and scholar with a very liberal and objective outlook.
In 1966, Edith also produced a seven-week series of radio shows for the CBC-FM program The Best Ideas You 'll
Hear Tonight. The title of Edith's series was The Travelling Folk of the British Isles. During this period, Topic Records
of London, England, released the album . Canadian Garland: Folk Songs from the Province of Ontario, based on field
recordings Edith had made of LaRena Clark (Fowke 1966b: 13.).
Edith continued to be a popularizer of folk song as well as a collector and maintained her national perspective on
Canada's folk song . 1967 was Centen-nial Year in Canada and many books were produced to mark the event. More
Folk Songs of Canada was the third and final work Edith published with Richard Johnston, again through Waterloo
Music. To indicate the book was to be considered part of the Canadian celebrations, the official Centennial logo was
printed on the face page. More Folk Songs of Canada was designed as a song book, its format identical to the earlier
two books'. The songs were selected to represent all regions of Canada and included some First Nations songs
collected by Marius Barbeau. Edith much admired the great French Canadian song collector and a portrait of him
hung in her study (Rahn 1998).
Sally Go Round the Sun
Edith's next project was one of her most successful publications: Sally Go Round the Sun, a book containing 300
children's songs, rhymes and games, all collected in Canada. Quite possibly this publication is the best known of all
Edith's books. Yet, Edith did not have any publication in mind when she first began recording songs in her East York,
Toronto neighborhood in 1959. She just invited children between the ages of six and nine into her home and asked
them to sing songs they used for clapping, ball bouncing, and skipping. The children simply gathered around the
tape recorder and sang.
Edith then took her fieldwork into schools. She would contact a school principal and explain what she wanted to do.
She asked specifically to work with Grade 3 classes where the children were 8 or 9 years old, a group she felt knew
the most songs. Edith decided to visit a cross section of schools for her fieldwork in order to get recordings of
children from different backgrounds. Once a recording date had been arranged, she would set the tape recorder at
the front of the classroom and ask the children to gather around her and sing the songs they used during play. She
wanted them to be spontaneous and unpromp'ted, and would always get clarification as to what activity the song was
meant to accompany. Between 1959 and 1964, Edith conducted such recording sessions in eight Toronto
elementary schools (Caputo 1989: 36-38).
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