Drive Dull Care Away: Folksongs from Prince Edward Island. - book review

By Edward D. Ives. Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island: Institute of Island Studies, 1999. 331 pp. B/W illus. 14-track CD. $24.95/21.60 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-919013-34-1

In North America, mountain ranges (such as the Appalachians and the Ozarks) are well-known for being rich in folklore. Islands are another geographical feature just as capable of acting as relict areas, whether for fauna and flora or for folklore. The islands off the east coast of Canada (Cape Breton Island, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland) deserve a renown similar to those southern mountains. The recent publication of an extensive corpus of English-language folktales from Newfoundland illustrated the Galapagos-like powers of one of those islands for the preservation and independent development of a particular species of folklore. In the present work, Sandy Ives offers examples of a different genre folksongs--from a different Canadian island--Prince Edward Island.

His approach is an unusual one. He does not follow what might be called the "straightforward songbook" approach, whereby largely context-flee songs are presented, ordered by type or general theme, often together with annotations, but separate from any commentary on the singers and singing occasions. Ives does provide brief notes to the songs, their analogues and possible literary sources in an appendix, but this is not a song-based book; neither can it claim the opposite distinction of being fully singer-based and of achieving his ideal of providing "a sense of the part the songs played in the lives of the people who sang them." This would be difficult to achieve without spending sufficient time and effort in becoming an insider, while the total time Sandy Ives spent in Prince Edward Island in the 1950s and 1960s was only about two months. Instead of either of those approaches, the book has as its basis a discussion of fieldwork, with songs and singers serving as examples in this discussion.

Often in collections of folksongs (and this is, whatever else it is, such a collection), the fieldworker's own role is hardly mentioned. But here Ives offers a kind of supercharged field-journal: a personal narrative of his visits to households on Prince Edward Island, of his feelings at the time, and of the people he met there (together with black and white photographs of them). It is into this chronological narrative that he interlards verbatim dialogue, transcriptions and notations of the songs. Fourteen of the songs are also to hand on a compact disc that comes with the book and that is the key to bringing that whole time to life.

Given the limited period in which his fieldwork was conducted, it could not really be either broad or deep. Yet, what he did collect and experience is extraordinary. Some of what he must have missed is obvious too, as is clear from his admission that this "tight focus" could well explain "why I found no 'obscene' or 'dirty' songs, and it may also help to explain why I found so very few Child ballads." The autobiographical mode of the book supports a full and frank account of life in the field that brings insights for fellow fieldworkers. It is especially good in revealing some of fieldwork's own slippery negotiations, such as in the following exchange, which to Ives's credit is preserved on the accompanying CD: "He loved to sing, and we moved on to another song. 'The Hell-Bound Train,' he said, 'Did you ever hear it?' 'No, I haven't,' I lied, 'and I'd like to hear it, too.'"

Further illumination of his fieldwork is provided by his comment that "the songs were only sung because I asked for them." This admission, that the songs were sung not in the natural round, but by request, for him, is more important than it might seem. It means that the work is "simply one man's look-in:.... I come booming into town, see a few people who have written me, follow up some of their leads, and then go booming off home again after a few days." And although such a method ("more of a raid than a systematic collecting method") must surely be second-best to longer-term participation in the life of the island, we should nevertheless be grateful for his work, especially if we heed the acute remark of another collector, Herbert Halpert, that "to get folktales you must ask for them." Halpert and Ives certainly did manage to "get" the tales and songs they asked for on their various salvage expeditions. How much of such activity would now be documented if it had not been for such flying visitors?

This asking for and recording of folklore from specific people is what folklorist Bente Alver has referred as "creating the source." But we should also remember that it is not only sources that are created. Once, when visiting a certain community, I let slip to my interlocutor in the local information office that I was a folklorist. Then information of a different sort started flowing, a local schoolteacher was called over, and various interviewees were lined up for me to speak with. On this occasion it was very much a case of local people "creating the folklorist," despite my having thought that I was simply a day-tripper. And surely it is the case that the occasions of fieldwork always are mutual and reciprocal creations. That such occasions can also prove to be convivial events with their own folk-like festivity is something that various of the descriptions in this book bear witness to.