Stan Rogers’ Fogarty’s Cove: Something Old, Something New

Chapter Three, The Folk Song in Nova Scotia and Stan Rogers’ Fogarty’s Cove

Stan Rogers and John Allan Cameron at a festival. stanrogers.net

A revised version of my honours thesis at Saint Francis Xavier University, accepted April 2016. I was supervised by Dr. Laurie Stanley-Blackwell (StFX), and my second reader was Dr. Ian Rocksborough-Smith (now of University of the Fraser Valley). If you have feedback you’d like to share, feel free to write me at chris.greencorn [at] mail.utoronto.ca or find me on Twitter (@chrisgreencorn).

Fogarty’s Cove (1977) was the late Canadian singer-songwriter Stan Rogers’ first album. Combining an interest in traditional music and the sensibilities of a singer-songwriter in the 1970s, Rogers was part of an emerging group of Canadian musicians who strayed from prescriptive definitions of “folk music” and took advantage of a new demand for Canadian music from broadcasters across the country. What set Fogarty’s Cove apart from the albums of his cohort was its obvious regionalism. In the span of twelve songs, Rogers covered sonic territory that corresponded to the real and imagined geographical boundaries of Nova Scotia. Many of the songs are reminiscent of the material published by Helen Creighton, using lyrical devices and thematic elements common to her heavily curated collections. The effect is substantial: musically, the songs are grounded in three hundred years of oral transmission. But Rogers also made sonic reference to country & western and Celtic music, which respectively have well documented histories in the province. His combination of traditional and contemporary Nova Scotian music resulted in a hybrid that was easily associated with existing notions of Maritime music.

In the middle of the twentieth century, and in some cases contemporaneous with the collecting activity of the folklorists outlined in the previous chapters, prescriptive definitions of folk music gave way to a transatlantic “folk music revival.” Following efforts by American folklorists, “vernacular music”, as denoted by Benjamin Filene, became an interest of the American middle class.¹ In contrast to the conservatism and romantic nationalism so thoroughly embedded in Anglo-American folk song collecting prior, the trend among American leftist songwriters and composers in the first half of the twentieth century was to seek out folk music and imbue it with a grander, socialistic ethos.² These artists included traditional songs in their repertoire or based compositions upon them. Less politically radical musicians often absorbed or selected elements of traditional forms that gave a sort of historical legitimacy to their own material. Artists like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Aaron Copland are the most luminary examples of the former, and a young Bob Dylan the archetype for the latter.³ Regardless of political affiliation, the effect was that “folk” as a genre was broadened to include material by contemporary, generally white, middle class, and urban singer-songwriters who incorporated aspects of folk music traditions into their own songwriting.

In 1966, Ellen Stekert presented a rubric for classifying folk musicians. Spectacularly uncompromising, it followed Dylan’s “electrification” in 1965 and the polarizing effect that that had on the folk music community. After three categories of traditionalists, each successively less “authentic” than the one before, her fourth and final classification was the “new aesthetic.” To this category belonged Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and their ilk. “The sound they make” she wrote, “is that which in the early [1960s] could be heard coming from the coffeehouses whose clientele scorned the Kingston Trio and felt art-singing to be too sterile and inhibited.”⁴ The term was a catch-all for the contemporary singer-songwriter who claimed to fall or was placed by critics under the banner of “folk musician.” The category would undoubtedly have included Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot, and Leonard Cohen had Stekert considered Canadian artists of the era. The animosity apparent in Stekert’s rubric spoke to tension in the folk music community between traditionalists and the emerging singer-songwriters who were redefining folk music.

In Canada, however, the situation was different. Events like the Mariposa Folk Festival, which began in 1961 and was usually held in Toronto, had little trouble reinforcing the primacy of traditional music — even if singers like Gordon Lightfoot appeared on the bill — well into the 1960s. By and large, “Bob Dylan was out, Francis James Child was in,” as Sheldon Posen wrote about his experience at Mariposa in 1969.⁵ Louise Manny’s Miramichi Folk Song Festival, which began in 1958 and continued throughout and beyond the 1960s, was even more traditionally oriented, presenting “authentic Miramichi folk songs by local, unaccompanied, non-professional singers.”⁶ In this respect, Canada’s early folk music revival did not break the ideological precedent set by folklore collectors.

As well, overtly antagonistic dialogue between traditionalists and “new aesthetes” in Canada did not emerge, at least in print, until the 1980s. This is particularly evident in publications like the Canadian Folk Music Journal, the primary organ of the Canadian Folk Music Society. Edited by folklorist Edith Fowke for its first twenty years, the Journal’s mandate was to “bring to attention Canada’s folk music, locally and internationally, as well as to create a journal that would appeal to the ‘folk music specialist and non specialist reader.’”⁷ Aside from Isabelle Mills’ 1974 article, “The Heart of the Folk Song,” which was simply a reiteration of the primacy of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ballads that devoted a single sentence to the singer-songwriters using traditional music for inspiration,⁸ there is almost no mention of contemporary folk musicians until William A.S. Sarjeant’s 1986 article, “Folk Music in Canada Today.” Twenty years after Stekert, Sarjeant took no prisoners:

[W]e have a curious situation at present. While the term “folk music” is properly understood, at least in broad terms, by most Canadians, the terms, “folk song” and “folk singer” are profoundly misused. Folk music? Why yes, that’s the jolly music on accordions we heard backing that Ukrainian dance group. Folk song? Oh, you mean Bruce Cockburn and Gordon Lightfoot…

[T]hese gentlemen and their many male and female equivalents have little indeed to do with folk music. Their material and their style derive directly, not from the popular music of past times, but from the court music. Very often their songs exhibit a considerable degree of erudition. […] Such songs are written for and by people who have both the leisure and the capacity for reflection and self-analysis.⁹

Quite unlike his opinion of Lightfoot and Cockburn, however, Sarjeant was of two minds about artists like Stan Rogers, who wrote music in both contemporary and traditional styles.¹⁰ It would not be until Neil V. Rosenberg’s article, “Omar Blondahl’s Contribution to the Newfoundland Folksong Canon,” in 1991, that folk and popular music syncretism would be evaluated on its own terms.¹¹

One partial explanation for the hegemony of traditionalists during the 1960s and, to an extent, into the 1970s, lies in the fact that, north of the border, there simply was not a comparably high-profile cadre of new aesthetic folk musicians. Those Canadian new aesthetes who achieved any success prior to 1970 were almost entirely integrated into the American music industry. Robert A. Wright argues that their “Canadian-ness” offered them a unique and critical distance in American culture, but until the introduction of Canadian content (“Cancon”) regulations by the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) in January 1970, the yardstick for success as a Canadian musician was still saturation in the American market. Consequently, artists like Mitchell, Young, Lightfoot, and Cohen directed their efforts towards securing audiences in the United States and, except for Lightfoot, relocated to California or New York to pursue that end.¹²

However, the CRTC’s Canadian content regulations turned the usual pattern of musicians migrating south entirely on its head. They required that Canadian broadcasters devote thirty percent of airtime to material produced in Canada and created by Canadians. This unambiguous expression of “cultural nationalism”, to use Wright’s term, meant that Canadian folk musicians — particularly the younger new aesthetic singer-songwriters who would have faced the prospect of emigration — could now entertain the notion of a domestic career. Despite grumpy comments by musicians like Lightfoot regarding the new regime — who “didn’t want it,” “didn’t need it,” and definitely didn’t like it — it was undeniably a boon to the domestic music industry in Canada.¹³

The establishment of a number of small, independent Canadian record labels in the early 1970s attests to the sea-change that Canadian content regulations represented in the folk music community. An example is Bernie Finkelstein’s True North Records, which was founded in 1970 and released Bruce Cockburn’s self-titled debut that year.¹⁴ The recording was done the October prior, before any announcement from the CRTC, and Finkelstein had signed distribution rights for Cockburn’s album and five more forthcoming to CBS Canada that winter. However, the exception here does not disprove the rule. Finkelstein wrote in his 2012 autobiography, True North, that he lobbied in favour of the regulations, despite pushback from radio stations, and that his fledgling company benefited from the market protectionism. Cockburn’s first release sold well, and by 1972, the label had fulfilled its commitment with CBS and had a national hit with Murray McLauchlan’s “Farmer’s Song.”¹⁵

At the same time, small folk music clubs in Ontario like Fiddler’s Green in Toronto and Smales Pace in London were established at the beginning of the 1970s and fostered this new milieu of singer-songwriters and traditional music enthusiasts who, though influenced by their commercially successful compatriots, would set a different tone for this next generation of Canadian folk musicians.¹⁶ Yorkville, a neighbourhood in downtown Toronto, had had a noteworthy music scene, as attested by Finkelstein, but for Canadian folk musicians it was often a stepping-stone to New York City and Southern California.¹⁷ By the end of the 1960s, Yorkville as a hub of countercultural activity was falling apart at the seams. In Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s, Stuart Henderson described how Toronto’s “hippie disease” — at one point literally an outbreak of hepatitis that had well-to-do Toronto in a veritable panic– was steadily being eradicated at the end of the decade.¹⁸ The less concentrated but ultimately more stable folk music community that emerged after 1970 would be important for the development of the new aesthetic in Canada.

Stan Rogers was one of many young musicians who developed their craft in this small but supportive emerging community. Born and raised in the vicinity of Hamilton, Ontario, Rogers, from the time he was a child, showed precocious musical ability. His brother Garnet related in his memoir, Night Drive: Travels with My Brother, a story passed down from their mother about Stan’s ability while still a toddler to complete musical scales and melodies sung by their grandfather.¹⁹ When he was five years old, his uncle Lee Bushell built him a guitar out of an assortment of the choicest luthierie materials: birch plywood, welding rods, and a toothbrush.²⁰ With a ukulele, he would play and sing for the family’s neighbours, much to the dismay of his mother. At twelve, he and his younger brother Garnet would lie in bed at night and listen to broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry, practicing their harmonies.²¹ About the same time, the two would also tune into other high-powered AM stations from Chicago, Detroit, and the Deep South, exposing them to soul, Motown, blues, and gospel, and to country & western programs like the Wheeling Jamboree broadcast out of Wheeling, West Virginia.²² At fourteen, he was playing coffeehouses in the Hamilton area, and until the formation of the Hobbits, his first folk trio, Rogers played in rock and roll bands with names like “the Predators” and “Stanley and the Living Stones.”²³

Stan Rogers (centre back), with bandmates in The Livingstones. stanrogers.net

After unsuccessful attempts at a university degree and teaching college, Rogers took up music as a serious pursuit. By 1972, he had signed, and dropped, a contract with RCA, and moved to London, Ontario. In his biography of Rogers, Northwest Passage, Chris Gudgeon wrote that “[for] one brief moment, London had become the [centre] of Canada’s folk universe.” On stage at Smales Pace, one might find Gord Lowe, David Essig, Doug MacArthur, Brent Titcomb, and/or Willie P. Bennett — all of whom were (and some still are) mainstays of the Canadian folk music community — in varying combinations.²⁴ In London, Rogers joined an informal and expansive group of musicians who performed as Cedar Lake. Garnet Rogers described the band as a “really goofy idea,” and details a number of mishaps the brothers were involved that support his assessment.²⁵ But within this burgeoning domestic folk music scene, and perhaps with Cedar Lake as a foil, Stan Rogers would make the transition from a casual “folkie” to a bona fide singer-songwriter

Rogers had written some of the tracks that would make it on Fogarty’s Cove as early as 1973, but the recording for RCA he had done prior to Fogarty’s Cove was of other material and hardly of note.²⁶ Paul Mills, another member of the comfortably small folk music scene that centred on clubs like Smales Pace and Fiddler’s Green, was a catalyst for his first full length recording. Mills was an employee of the CBC and produced a new folk music radio program called Touch the Earth. Aside from securing Rogers a feature on the show with host Sylvia Tyson,²⁷ Mills introduced Rogers to Mitch Podolak, then co-founder and artistic director of the Winnipeg Folk Festival. The latter was taken by Rogers’ Maritime material. Podolak hired Rogers for the second Winnipeg Folk Festival in 1975, and the response there was favourable. When questioned why he did not have a record, Rogers stated that he had had a record deal, but that it had fallen through. The cost to record an album, they figured, would be roughly $10,000. Podolak fronted half, borrowed the rest, and established Barn Swallow Records to release the album.²⁸ By the end of 1976, the recording of Fogarty’s Cove was complete.²⁹

The cover and liner notes from Stan Rogers’ first album, Fogarty’s Cove

What distinguished it from immediate precedents — Bruce Cockburn’s early releases, or Murray McLauchlan’s Songs from the Street, or even Lightfoot’s “Canadian Railroad Trilogy”³⁰ — was its unmistakably regional quality. The title instantly signified a coastal setting. The cover photo showed Rogers, grinning ear to ear at the corner of University Avenue and Lemarchant Street in Halifax, the new Brutalist-inspired Killam Library cleverly concealed behind a now-demolished Victorian wooden verandah. The track names — “Maid on the Shore”, “Fisherman’s Wharf”, “The Wreck of the Athens Queen” among them — reinforced the album’s title and dovetailed with Helen Creighton “coast of songs” seamlessly. Once the record was spinning, the impression was no different. In the second verse of the first track, “Watching the Apples Grow,” Rogers’ farm worker laments: “Ontario you know I’ve seen the place I’d rather be / Your scummy lakes and the city of Toronto don’t do a damn thing for me / I’d rather live by the sea.”³¹

The tracks resembled, to varying degrees, songs collected by Creighton in Nova Scotia and, by extension, even older British ballads and broadsides.³² The most obvious attempt to recreate a traditional form was “Barrett’s Privateers.” Rogers wrote the song out of desire for his own sea shanty to sing in the company of the Friends of Fiddler’s Green, who were specialists in traditional British music.³³ While there is not any single song in the Creighton canon that “Barrett’s Privateers” appears to have been derived from, a number of elements common to the songs she collected are employed throughout Rogers’ nine verses.

“Oh the year was 1778”, the song’s first line, bears two such elements. Among the songs Helen Creighton collected, and especially the Child ballads, it was common for singers to begin a verse or even multiple phrases therein with “Oh” preceding one of the lines of a couplet. Examples of this are in “False Knight upon the Road [Child 3]”, “Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight [Child 4],” “Lord Randal [Child 12],” “Hind Horn [Child 17],” and “Cruel Mother [Child 20].”³⁴ Ballads also would often situate the narrative in a specific historical circumstance. Indirect references to major events — the Crimean War, the Battle of Waterloo, or the Saladin mutiny, for example — are more common than specific years, but the latter appear as well.³⁵ “Peter Rambelay” leaves his “native counteree” in “eighteen hundred and eighty one”; “Meagher’s Children” strayed into the woods on Preston Road “[i]n eighteen-hundred and forty-four, April the eleventh day”; and “[o]n the seventeenth of April, eighteen seventy-one,” some Yankee sailors deftly reversed “The Seizure of the E.J. Horton.”³⁶ Consequently, the composite temporal cue, “Oh the year was 1778”, anchors the song in a much older traditional style from the very beginning.

Thematically, “Barrett’s Privateers” also resembles a number of songs found in Helen Creighton’s publications. A substantial quantity of the ballads she collected relate stories of ships and the variety of misfortunes experienced by their crew. “Flying Cloud” is one such song, about an American slaving ship and its encounter with a Spanish man-of-war. The clipper meets a fate similar to that of the Antelope in “Barrett’s Privateers,” with the captain killed, boat “stove in”, and crew in hard shape. “Paul Jones” is another; the song features a crew of American sailors who get a good thumping from the British. “Maggie Mac”, while not disclosing the fate of the American ship and crew, is similar in that it focuses on naval combat.³⁷ Though little of privateering itself appears in Creighton’s Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia (1932) or Traditional Songs from Nova Scotia (1950), nor of bitter, swearing sailors, the song certainly feels like it could have been one of the “pirate songs” Creighton had set out looking for in 1929.³⁸

In fact, Pauline Greenhill and Anne Lederman have both written on how “Barrett’s Privateers” has actually been mistaken for a traditional folk song and been modified, in keeping with that tradition. Greenhill’s article, “‘The Folk Process’ in the Revival: ‘Barrett’s Privateers’ and ‘Barratt’s Privateers’” describes the Scottish singer-songwriters Alan Reid and Brian McNeill’s revision and rerecording of the song, a strikingly uncommon instance of oral transmission and the ‘folk process’ at work within two pieces of recently recorded music. Lederman focuses more on the role “performance and participation” play within the revival milieu and situates “Barrett’s Privateers” firmly in that context, but concludes that the folk revival “functions in many ways like an older folk group [in the folkloristic sense] united by geographic, ethnic, or historical factors,” with a “certain aesthetic sensibility of its own,” and “which feels itself to be a kind of community.”³⁹ Greenhill’s assertion that “Barrett’s Privateers” might reasonably be considered a variant of “Flying Cloud” buttresses Lederman’s argument.

Rogers used elements of traditional Nova Scotian music found in the Creighton canon in other songs as well. “Fisherman’s Wharf” begins with a reference to the season, specifically spring, which is more common variant of the temporal cue noted above.⁴⁰ The first line of the chorus, “Haul away and heave her ho,” is reminiscent of “Chantey Song [№57]”, whose refrain, “Heave me lads, heave ho,” is clearly very similar; and of the more commonly known “Haul Away Joe.”⁴¹ “The Wreck of the Athens Queen” emulates the characteristically jaunty dotted quarter/eighth note patterns (the “Scotch snap”) found throughout the Creighton ballads, as well as idiomatic dialectal elements like “me [noun]” instead of “my [noun],” archaisms like “for to [verb]” and “let us [verb],” and, notably, the verbosity common to iambic heptameter, or the “fourteener,” like in the ballads “Sir James the Ross” and “Johnny Riley.”⁴²

“Maid on the Shore”, though not Rogers’ original composition, verifies that he was incorporating elements (if not whole songs) from collections published by ballad hunters in the Atlantic Provinces into his own music. Purportedly a variant of the Child ballad “Bromfield Hill,” “Maid on the Shore” appeared in Kenneth Peacock’s Songs from the Newfoundland Outports and Maud Karpeles Folk Songs from Newfoundland.⁴³ In Songs from Fogarty’s Cove, his songbook published in 1983, Rogers mentions that he had learned the song from Peacock’s collection while living with brothers and traditional music enthusiasts Mike and Tim Curry, themselves Nova Scotians, in London, Ontario. In agreement with Greenhill’s “Flying Cloud”/”Barrett’s Privateers” comparison, and corroborating Lederman’s suggestion that the folk revival community was conducive to the folk process, Rogers’ recorded version of “Maid on the Shore” indicates the influence of collections of traditional ballads on his writing and the importance of the folk revival community of which he was a member.

However, as much and as often as reference is made to the traditional folk songs collected by Helen Creighton, Rogers also cited other musical traditions that, despite being given a wide berth by folk song collectors in many cases, were widespread in Nova Scotia decades prior to Fogarty’s Cove — chiefly, country & western and Celtic music. Much has been written on the ubiquity of “old-time” and country music in the Nova Scotian repertoire, and its unrivalled popularity. Rogers himself reported that his awareness of this musical tradition, which Greg Marquis argues is Canada’s “truly modern folk music,”⁴⁴ was a direct result of his maternal uncles’ musical dispositions and his experience at a young age listening to them sing and play. Though less clearly documented than his introduction to country music, contemporary Celtic musicians like John Allan Cameron and the group Ryan’s Fancy were undoubtedly influential to Rogers in the early part of his career. Arguably, Rogers’ facility with drawing on these other characteristically Nova Scotian genres is what fixes Fogarty’s Cove in the province’s soundscape.⁴⁵

In 1976, the same year that Fogarty’s Cove was recorded, Neil V. Rosenberg published “Country Music in the Maritimes: Two Studies.”⁴⁶ The first study, “‘Folk’ and ‘Country’ music in the Canadian Maritimes: A Regional Model,” posited a conceptual model for approaching the study of folk and country music in the Maritime Provinces, and the second, “Studying Country Music and Contemporary Folk Music in the Maritimes: Theory, Techniques, and the Archivist,” outlined the “nuts and bolts” of collecting and archiving material within that model. Rosenberg wrote that the “intermingling of folk and country music only rarely encountered in printed collections” was a critical piece of understanding vernacular music in the Maritimes: one of the fundamental assumptions in Rosenberg’s articles was that, “if we accept change as a constant in the [Maritime provinces’] folk traditions, the continuities between folk and country music become more apparent and the continuing importance of folk music in shaping the course of country music in the Maritimes can be perceived.”⁴⁷ This was a radical break with the Child-to-Creighton folk song collecting lineage, but the step away from that essentialism was an important one.

left: Wilf Carter; right: Hank Snow

Being the first folkloristic study of country music in the Maritimes as such, Rosenberg’s “‘Folk’ and ‘Country’ Music in the Canadian Maritimes” provided a considerable amount of historical detail on the development of country music in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. It begins with two Nova Scotian musicians, Wilf Carter and Hank Snow. Particularly influential to both was the American country music star, Jimmie Rodgers.⁴⁸ Rodgers’ “stylistically and textually novel” music was broadcast from American radio stations and distributed by American phonograph record companies, whose reach stretched into the Maritimes. This relatively static format allowed musicians in other traditional contexts (like Snow and Carter) to emulate Rodgers’ African and Hispanic American-influenced style and adapt it to fit the existing musical culture in the Maritimes.⁴⁹

The introduction of the acoustic guitar into Nova Scotian music, where the fiddle had been for centuries by far the most predominant stringed instrument, was a fairly significant adaptation.⁵⁰ In contrast to Rodgers’ style, however, interplay between guitar and voice (“call and response” playing) was minimized in favour of a more strictly rhythmic and at times ham-fisted chordal technique. The focus, then, was still on the singer. Carter and Snow developed an influential singing style that was relaxed and comfortably within the baritone range, somewhere between the “parlando rubato” of traditional ballad singers and the “tense and high-pitched mountain style” of singing common to much of country music’s rural antecedents, reflective of both traditional and contemporary influences.⁵¹ Both Carter and Snow would go on to find international success in the American market and influence generations of musicians in the United States and Canada, especially in the Maritimes, with this regional variant of country music.

It is apparent on Fogarty’s Cove that Stan Rogers was influenced by this Maritime country music tradition, although, as Greg Marquis put it rather bluntly, “many ‘folkies’ would turn violent at the suggestion” that his music bears evidence of Hank Snow and Wilf Carter.⁵² Through his maternal uncles, Rogers had a direct line to the Nova Scotian country music tradition, and himself attested to their influence. In the liner notes to Fogarty’s Cove, Rogers described one of his earliest memories, augmented perhaps by additional detail in the years elapsed, but no less telling for being so. He remembered watching his uncles “sitting around [his] grandparents’ kitchen, ‘half shot’, playing guitars (some of them home-built) and singing old tear-jerkers by Wilf Carter, Hank Snow, and Hank Williams, with [his aunt] and Mum and all the rest joining in, in more-or-less harmony, while Dad looked on.”⁵³ The memory was presented as a matter of fact, an event hardly more unusual in that house than if the family had come round for tea. But the anecdote is telling, and a few factors warrant examination.

Though he was raised outside of Hamilton, Ontario, Rogers’ parents were diasporic Nova Scotians. Valerie and her husband, Al, had moved from Nova Scotia to Ontario before the birth of their first son, in search of work as so many others had done before them.⁵⁴ That Rogers’ first memory was a gathering in his grandparents’ home implies that the family had been able to travel home to Nova Scotia, and that many of Valerie’s siblings lived in fairly close proximity to Canso, where her parents Sidney and Letitia Mary Narraway (née Hart) Bushell resided. It also shows that, for such an occasion as a visit home from one of their own, the family celebrated, and in a specific way. In their parents’ kitchen, the siblings gathered to catch up, share a drink, and, importantly, to sing together. Valerie’s brothers would lead, playing country music, popular tunes, and no doubt some of their own songs, which fell somewhere between the English ballads of a lost era and “I’m Moving On,” while the sisters sang along.⁵⁵ Garnet Rogers relates that

[i]t seemed like everyone we knew [when visiting the family home in Nova Scotia] wrote songs: parodies of hits, original songs, and chronicles of local events. The concept of making sense of one’s life through music and verse was for us not a foreign one[,] right from the start.⁵⁶

This familial interaction was the foundation of the brothers’ exposure to music, and accordingly cannot be overlooked.

There are a few extant records of these songs. In 1960, Stan’s mother Valerie wrote to Helen Creighton after watching a CBC broadcast that featured some of Creighton’s collected material. The experience clearly brought some nostalgic joy to the mother of two living in Stoney Creek, Ontario. She wrote:

My husband and I have enjoyed the radio programs over the years in which some of your collection have [sic] been used. We are transplanted Nova Scotians and hearing “your” folk songs has been like a breath of sea air.⁵⁷

Inspired, she included a full transcription of the lyrics of a song written by her brother Lee Bushell, called “Up in Fox Island.” Thinking Creighton might enjoy having a look at the song, Valerie also included some information on the song’s provenance and satirical context. She explained that

[the] song was written by my brother Lee Bushell about twenty years ago, poking fun at Fox Island, Guysboro Co, Nova Scotia, a small, poor fishing village. It is one of several he wrote about people and place around “home” (Hazel Hill near Canso N.S.). It was set to the “tune” of an old familiar folk tune so the music is not original.

I have three brothers living in and around Halifax, I am sure one of them would sing it for you if you were interested in hearing it sung to the tune Lee used.⁵⁸

Unfortunately, there appears to have been no further correspondence between the two, or with any of the three Bushell brothers living in Halifax. Though some years before Creighton collected a song in Queensport, Nova Scotia — about 25 kilometres from Canso — there is nothing to indicate that she collected any songs in Canso, despite Rogers’ assertion that there were “lots of fisher folk” and that “we always loved to sing down there.”⁵⁹

Stan Rogers with uncle Lee Bushell (foreground). stanrogers.net

One can speculate about the source of Creighton’s indifference based on Bushell’s lyrics. The song, though clearly bearing a great deal of regional character, is littered with references to modernity that would have instantly disqualified the song from Creighton’s “traditional” designation. Written at the end of the Great Depression, “Up in Fox Island” satirizes what, at the time, was barely a hamlet by building it up to the development of a city like Toronto or Montreal. The third verse, in Mrs. Rogers’ letter, goes:

There’s railway stations[,] hotels and cafes,
Churches[,] Cathedrals where George Rynalds [sic] prays,
Radio stations, art galleries, a few,
You come through the subway on the six-thirty two.⁶⁰

This was certainly not the work of a secluded, illiterate ballad singer. There were no references made to “Lord Randal,” nor any descriptions of ships sailing for the Spanish Main.

As it appears on Stan Rogers’ 1983 album For the Family, the song could very well have been sung by a country singer in the Maritime tradition. Though in Valerie’s letter to Helen Creighton there was no tune provided, if Rogers was as faithful to his uncle’s arrangement as he was with the lyrics, Bushell’s plucky ¾ meter and simple harmony call to mind recordings by Hank Snow and Omar Blondahl of “Squid Jiggin’ Grounds,” written by Arthur Scammell in 1928, or, significantly, Newfoundland singer songwriter Dick Nolan’s “Aunt Martha’s Sheep.”⁶¹ Given that Rogers stated that his uncles’ repertoire centred on “old tearjerkers” by Snow, Carter, and the like, the comparison requires no stretch of the imagination. “Up in Fox Island” is a strong tie between Rogers, Bushell, and the country music tradition in Nova Scotia.

This tie manifested itself clearly on Fogarty’s Cove. Bushell’s influence on Rogers’ songwriting is apparent when comparing the former’s song, “Strings and Dory Plug,” which appeared on For the Family as well, with “The Wreck of the Athens Queen,” on Fogarty’s Cove. Both are comical presentations of the foibles of rural Nova Scotians, revolving around lawlessness and an insatiable thirst for “a drop” or laughably ridiculous get-rich-quick schemes. Musically, the frailing banjo of the latter is an echo of the distinctive guitar chording on the former. Perhaps of the greatest interest, both adhere roughly to the fourteener meter that “Sir James the Ross” and “Johnny Riley,” which does much to validate Rosenberg’s argument about the adaptation of Anglo-American forms to the Maritime context.

In “‘Folk’ and ‘Country’ Music in the Maritimes,” Rosenberg also highlighted the important role that New Brunswick-born fiddler and bandleader Don Messer played at roughly the same time as Snow and Carter. Messer started performing with his band, the New Brunswick Lumberjacks, in 1929.⁶² Their repertoire was varied, but representative of the types of tunes one would find in homes throughout the Maritimes: “fiddle tunes, sentimental songs, religious numbers, older popular songs, British music hall ditties, step-dances, and the latest country hits all appeared regularly.”⁶³ Ten years later, he was hired to lead the Islanders, the house band at the powerful CFCY radio station in Charlottetown. Their show was broadcast regionally until 1944, when it was picked up by CBC Radio and broadcast across the country three times a week. The show’s popularity is attested to in a recollection from Ottawa Valley fiddler Dawson Girdwood, included in Rosenberg’s 2002 article on Messer:

[Messer’s] music was everywhere. We were able to get the Don Messer show on radio and then later of course, the television show which was on for, I think 20 years. And when I was quite small, the broadcast on Friday night; and in the summertime, in those days a car radio was quite a fad of course, you would be downtown doing your shopping on a Friday night and you would hear Don Messer music all over town, cars driving up and down.⁶⁴

Even before his popular weekly television program, Messer was a household name nationally and an ambassador for Maritime culture in the rest of Canada.

That television program, Don Messer’s Jubilee, began as a summer replacement for an existing program produced at CBC Halifax called Country Hoedown. Produced by Bill Langstroth and broadcast out of CBC Halifax starting in 1959,⁶⁵ the show was a hit: for most of 1960–63 Messer’s homely variety show shot to the top of Canadian television ratings.⁶⁶ Jen VanderBurgh explored the show’s success and abrupt demise in her article “When the Jig Was Up: What Don Messer’s Maritime Nostalgia Meant to the Nation,” and analyzed Messer’s “homespun music of the people.”⁶⁷ She wrote that Messer “personified the depoliticized ideals associated with working-class, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, whose numbers at the time represented the largest portion of the national population, particularly in rural Canada.” Indeed, the cancellation of the show fed into the contemporary Canadian discourse on the maintenance of “traditional” values, which was at best a cover for an ahistorical, romantic, and racialized ideal. But clearly it resonated with people across the country: the Jubilee, at times, had the attention of more Canadians than the Ed Sullivan Show or, perhaps most tellingly, Hockey Night in Canada.⁶⁸

Cast of Don Messer’s Jubilee. (photo Robert C. Ragsdale; Don Messer Nova Scotia Archives accession no. 1998–132 vol. 071 no. 153)

To write off the significance of the Don Messer Jubilee for its conservatism would be a misstep. Messer, and perhaps just as importantly, his producer, Bill Langstroth, set a precedent for Maritime musicians on national television. The value of this pioneering work, especially to the context of the present thesis, can hardly be understated. Langstroth, specifically, produced the first season of the Don Messer’s Jubilee’s summer replacement, the Singalong Jubilee, which began in 1961. After the first season, Langstroth filled the role of host and traded places with Manny Pittson, who assumed the production of the show.⁶⁹ Under Pittson’s direction, the Singalong Jubilee was an incubator for young Maritime talent. Fred McKenna, a blind multi-instrumentalist and singer, among the older members in the cast (at 27 in 1961), became an integral component of the regular cast and incorporated traditional songs, country music, contemporary folk, and his own songs into his considerable repertoire.⁷⁰ Singalong Jubilee casted or featured young singers and musicians like Anne Murray, Shirley Eikhard, Gene MacLellan, Brent Titcomb, John Allan Cameron, and Ryan’s Fancy, all of whom would go on to have successful careers in Canada and the United States.⁷¹

John Allan Cameron and cast on Singalong Jubilee’s 1967 Christmas Special (contrib. Manny Pittson; photographer unknown. In Dick, Remembering Singalong Jubilee (Halifax: Formac, 2004), 37).

Its success led to the proliferation of similar programs. Riding on the success of a legendary Grand Ole Opry performance in 1970, and a number of successful albums, Langstroth also produced Cape Breton-born singer and guitarist John Allan Cameron’s eponymous CTV musical variety series in Montreal in 1975 and 1976, sending Cameron’s innovative Cape Breton Celtic-style twelve-string guitar-playing into homes across Canada.⁷² Pittson moved on to CHCH Hamilton and, with Fred McKenna as Musical Director, produced Tommy Makem with Ryan’s Fancy from 1973–76.⁷³ Filmed in the premises of Hamilton’s Irish Canadian Club, Pittson’s show brought together Makem, a pillar of the Irish traditional music revitalization, and Denis Ryan, Dermot O’Reilly, and Fergus O’Byrne, a group of Irish expatriates to Newfoundland collectively known as Ryan’s Fancy in a similar format. Makem’s Seeger-esque, long neck banjo-accompanied Irish songs fit Ryan’s Fancy’s mixed repertoire of Newfoundland songs (“The Ryans and the Pittmans”), Mackenzie ballads (“The Boston Burglar”) and traditional Irish music (“Tim Finnegan’s Wake,” “The Rocky Road to Dublin”) seamlessly.⁷⁴ Within fifteen years of the Don Messer Jubilee’s debut, Celtic music from the Maritimes was reaching audiences across Canada in the comfort of their living rooms.

Ryan’s Fancy: l-r Fergus O’Byrne, Denis Ryan, Dermot O’Reilly.

The friendships and working relationships between Rogers and John Allan Cameron, as well as with Ryan’s Fancy, later in his career are well attested,⁷⁵ but it is likely that both played a large part in exposing him to contemporary Celtic music prior to the release of Fogarty’s Cove in a format — both singing and playing an instrument, where the two were traditionally separated — that allowed him to integrate elements thereof into his own music. Cameron was introduced to Rogers’ music through CBC producer Paul Mills in 1972.⁷⁶ Presumably the two met between that time and 1975, when Rogers and Mills appeared on Cameron’s CTV television special; during the episode, Cameron introduced Rogers as an “old friend” and recalled that they’d “swapped songs and stories all night” after a show he’d caught in Peterborough, Ontario, not long before.⁷⁷ A year later, Cameron played twelve-string acoustic guitar and fiddle for the Fogarty’s Cove sessions.⁷⁸ Cameron’s wholly idiosyncratic method of guitar playing obviously left an impression on Rogers: between Fogarty’s Cove and Between the Breaks… Live! (1979), he adopted the twelve-string guitar as a signature instrument, and incorporated Cameron’s melodic playing into songs like “The Witch of the Westmorland” and “The Mary Ellen Carter.”⁷⁹ Later, it seems the influence went both ways. Cameron recorded “Make and Break Harbour” from Fogarty’s Cove on his album Freeborn Man, produced by Paul Mills.⁸⁰ Rogers met the members of Ryan’s Fancy at least by the summer of 1977, well after the release of Fogarty’s Cove. However, by 1976, they had been broadcasting with Tommy Makem from CHCH Hamilton for three years and, given the overlap in their repertoire, it is more than likely that Rogers — then residing in Dundas, proximate to Hamilton — was familiar with their music well before meeting them.⁸¹

Fogarty’s Cove was thus influenced by a number of musical traditions found in the Maritimes, and in Nova Scotia particularly. While the album did bear some resemblance to the ballads collected in Nova Scotia by Helen Creighton, it was a much broader representation of the musical traditions present in the province during the middle of the twentieth century. Songs like “The Wreck of the Athens Queen” tied Fogarty’s Cove to the region’s well documented history of country music, as did “Make and Break Harbour” with its juxtaposed steel guitar accompaniment and lilting ¾ time signature. “Giant” and “Fogarty’s Cove” emulated the Celtic traditional music that, even then, was readily associated with Cape Breton. Rogers, as an Ontarian, was influenced musically by two important groups of people, who in different ways shaped his impression of “the sound of the Maritimes.” His uncles, who played and sang in much the same way as Hank Snow and Wilf Carter before them, but also wrote songs in that style about the place they called home — Canso, Nova Scotia — were the first. Contemporary Celtic musicians like John Allan Cameron, especially, but also Ryan’s Fancy, both of whom were broadcasting Maritime music to viewers in Ontario and across Canada in a similar fashion to Don Messer and the Singalong Jubilee, were the second. Ultimately, the small but supportive folk music community that emerged in Canada after 1970 would be the environment in which Rogers was able to work with these influences and produce an album that, more successfully than any other before it, constructed a musical representation of a region of Canada by interpreting its local traditions.

Notes

1. Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 4.
2. Discussed at length in R. Serge Denisoff, Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971).
3. Guthrie, Seeger, Copland, Dylan and others in Sean Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America (New York: Doubleday, 2010).
4. Ellen Stekert, “Cents and Nonsense in the Urban Folksong Movement: 1930–66,” Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, ed. Neil V. Rosenberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 99.
5. I. Sheldon Posen, “On Folk Festivals and Kitchens: Questions of Authenticity in the Folksong revival,” in Transforming Tradition, 132.
6. Henderson Carpenter, Many Voices, 43.
7. Gordon E. Smith, “The Canadian Folk Music Journal/The Canadian Journal for Traditional Music — La Revue de musique folklorique canadienne: Reflections on Thirty Years of Writing about Folk and Traditional Music in Canada,” Musicultures vol. 32 (2005), 1–11. Smith is quoting Edith Fowke (editor of CFMJ), from her editorial in the first issue (1973:2).
8. Isabelle Mills, “The Heart of the Folk Song,” Canadian Folk Music Journal vol. 2, (1974), 29–35.
9. William A. S. Sarjeant, “Folk Music in Canada Today,” Canadian Folk Music Journal vol. 14 (1986), 30.
10. Ibid., 30, 31.
11. Neil V. Rosenberg, “Omar Blondahl’s Contribution to the Newfoundland Folk Song Canon,” Canadian Folk Music Journal vol. 19 (1991), 20–27.
12. Robert A Wright, “‘Dream, Comfort, Memory, Despair’: Canadian Popular Musicians and the Dilemma of Nationalism, 1968–1972,” Journal of Canadian Studies vol. 22, no. 4 (Winter 1987–88), 27.
13. Lightfoot, in ibid., 30.
14. Ibid., 31.
15. Bernie Finkelstein, True North (Toronto: McLelland & Stewart, 2012) 134–138; 143–44; 150–151; 154.
16. Mark Miller, Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, 2nd ed, s.v. “Coffeehouses.” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 281.
17. Finkelstein, ibid. A significant number of the anecdotes written by Finkelstein focus on the Yorkville and Kensington Market neighbourhoods; he also suggested McLauchlan move to New York to better his chances, before signing him to True North a year later (1970), 141.
18. Chapter 8, “Toronto’s Hippie Disease”, in Stuart Henderson, Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 242–270.
19. Garnet Rogers, Night Drive: Travels with My Brother (Brantford, ON: Tickle Shore Publishing/Ball Media, 2016), 31.
20. Gudgeon, Northwest Passage, 36; Garnet Rogers, Night Drive, 49.
21. Garnet Rogers, “Biography,” http://garnetrogers.com
22. Garnet Rogers, Night Drive, 51–58.
23. Gudgeon, Northwest Passage, 35–36, 42–25; Garnet Rogers, Night Drive, 62–67.
24. Gudgeon, Northwest Passage, 47–51, 53.
25. Garnet Rogers, Night Drive, 111–33.
26. A portion of which can be heard on Michael Enright, “Stan Rogers: Folk Singer, Storyteller, Proud Canadian, Part 1,” Rewind, (Toronto: CBC Radio, September 25, 2015).
27. Gudgeon, Northwest Passage, 87.
28. Mitch Podolak in conversation with the author, February 11, 2016.
29. Garnet Rogers, Night Drive, 198–202
30. Bruce Cockburn (Toronto: True North TN-1, 1970) through to In the Falling Dark (Toronto: True North TN-26, 1976); Murray McLauchlan, Songs From the Street (Toronto: True North TN-4, 1971); Gordon Lightfoot, The Way I Feel (United Artists UAS 6587, 1967).
31. Description of the record and all subsequent song lyrics from Fogarty’s Cove (Barn Swallow Records BS1001) LP and liner notes.
32. Roy Palmer’s The Sound of History: Songs and Social Comment (London Pimlico, 1996) is an excellent social history of British broadsides; he describes a number of common characteristics, which can also be found in Creighton collection. Interestingly, those original songs which resemble the Creighton collection most (“Barrett’s Privateers,” “Wreck of the Athens Queen,” — and excluding “Maid on the Shore,” specifically) are the ones Garnet Rogers describes as “filler” — songs written as a sort of reflex and out of a necessity to fill the sides of an album once the more meritorious tracks (“Make and Break Harbour” for instance) had been recorded. Rogers, Night Drive, 201.
33. Rogers, on Alan Collins and Robert Lang, One Warm Line: The Legacy of Stan Rogers (Toronto: Kensington Communications, 2013 [1989]) 30:13–30:33. Corroborated in Garnet Rogers, Night Drive, 202.
34. Helen Creighton and Doreen Senior, Traditional Songs of Nova Scotia (Toronto: Ryerson, 1950), 1–20.
35. Helen Creighton, Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia (Toronto: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1932); “Battle of Alma”, 138; “Drummer Boy”, 145; “Charles G. Anderson”, 235–37.
36. Ibid., 301; 292; 314.
37. Helen Creighton, Songs and Ballads, 126–130; Pauline Greenhill highlights the similarity to “Flying Cloud” in “‘The Folk Process’ in the Revival: ‘Barrett’s Privateers’ and ‘Barratt’s Privateers,’” in Transforming Tradition, ed. Rosenberg, 153; Helen Creigton, Traditional Songs of Nova Scotia 226; Ibid., 282.
38. It is worth mentioning in addition that many of the descriptive details in “Barrett’s Privateers” resemble very much Archibald MacMechan’s retelling of the story of Captain Godfrey and the Rover, and especially its outfitting and recruits, even if the the Rover faired out much better than the Antelope. MacMechan, Old Province Tales (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1924), 165–84.Creighton, A Life in Folklore, 50; McKay, Quest of the Folk, 5.
39. Greenhill, “Folk Process,” 146–49; Anne Lederman “’Barrett’s Privateers’: Performance and Participation in the Folk Revival”, 175; both in Transforming Tradition, ed. Rosenberg.
40. Helen Creighton would often broach the topic of Child ballads by asking singers if they knew one that started with “As I walked out one May morning” (comparable to “It was in the Spring this year of Grace,” from “Fisherman’s Wharf”). Creighton, A Life in Folklore, 126.
41. Creighton, Songs and Ballads, 115; Stan Hugill, Sea Shanties (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1977), 122–24.
42. “Sir James the Ross,” Traditional Songs and Ballads of Nova Scotia, 75; “Johnny Riley,” ibid., 171; iambic heptameter is a form where, generally, two verses of common or ballad meter in ABAB form are concatenated into one verse of two pairs of rhyming couplets, each with the caesura after the fourth stressed syllable.
43. Kenneth Peacock, Songs from the Newfoundland Outports, vol. 1 (Ottawa: National Museum of Canada, 1965), 296–97; Maud Karpeles, Folk Songs from Newfoundland (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), 117, 321. As in note 36, Creighton would often coax child ballads out of singers by asking for ones that mentioned “broadswords.” “Maid on the Shore” is one such song.
44. Greg Marquis, “Country Music: The Folk Music of Canada,” Queen’s Quarterly 95/2 (Summer 1988), 308.
45. Rogers’ combination was not without precedent. Cape Breton’s Charlie MacKinnon played a hybrid of country & western and Celtic music in the late 1940s and into 1950s, as heard in “The Ghost of Bras d’Or” (Halifax: Rodeo RO-197, 1958).
46. Neil V. Rosenberg, Country Music in the Maritimes: Two Studies, Department of Folklore Reprint Series, no. 2 (St. John’s: Memorial University, 1976). Later, Greg Marquis would cover the topic comprehensively from a New Brunswick perspective in “The Folk Music of Anglophone New Brunswick: Old Time and Country Music in the Twentieth Century,” Journal of New Brunswick Studies, vol. 3 (2012), 57–74.
47. Ibid., 3.
48. Ibid.; Marquis, “Country Music,” 295.
49. Rosenberg, “Country Music in the Maritimes,” 3–4.
50. Helen Creighton, “2. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick,” Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, 2nd edition, s.v. “Folk Music, Anglo-Canadian.” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992) 474.
51. Rosenberg, Country Music in the Maritimes, 4.
52. Marquis, “Country Music,” 297–98. William Sarjeant, cited above, was one.
53. Rogers, Fogarty’s Cove.
54. Gudgeon, Northwest Passage, 34; Garnet Rogers, Night Drive, 38.
55. Hank Snow, “I’m Moving On,” (RCA Victor, 1950), single.
56. Garnet Rogers, Night Drive, 50.
57. Valerie Rogers to Helen Creighton, Aug. 16, 1960, MG1 vol. 2817 no. 76, Helen Creighton fonds, Nova Scotia Archives. Mrs. Rogers’ quotation marks are telling.
58. Ibid.
59. Helen Creighton, in field journal marked “Guysborough,” n.d. (pre-1947), MG 1 Vol. 2820 no. 6, Helen Creighton fonds, PANS; Valerie Rogers to Helen Creighton, August 16, 1960.
60. Ibid.
61. Omar Blondahl, Tradewinds: Newfoundland in Song (Montreal: Rodeo RLP-5, 1955); Hank Snow, My Nova Scotia Home (Camden, NJ: RCA Camden CAL 2186, 1967); Dick Nolan, Fisherman’s Boy (Camden, NJ: RCA Camden CAS 2576, 1972).
62. Neil V. Rosenberg, “Repetition, Innovation, and Representation in Don Messer’s Media Repertoire,” Journal of American Folklore, vol. 115, no. 456 (Springs 2002), 191.
63. Rosenberg, Country Music in the Maritimes, 5.
64. Dawson Girdwood, as cited in Neil Rosenberg, “Don Messer,” 191.
65. Ernest J. Dick, Remembering Singalong Jubilee (Halifax: Formac, 2004), 88; Virginia Beaton and Stephen Pedersen, Maritime Music Greats: Fifty Years of Hits and Heartbreak (Halifax: Nimbus Publishing, 1992), ibid.
66. Jen VanderBurgh, “When the Jig was Up: What Don’s Messer’s Maritime Nostalgia Meant to the Nation,” in Rain/Drizzle/Fog: Film and Television in Atlantic Canada (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2009), 136.
67. John Fisher, in Ibid., 134.
68. Ibid., 134–36.
69. Dick, Remembering Singalong Jubilee, 88–89.
70. His recordings attest to the diversity of his repertoire: The gospel standard (and Hank Williams song) “I Saw the Light” on Singalong Jubilee (Arc A608, 1964); comical songs like “Foolish Questions” on Fred McKenna Of CBC-TV Sing Along Jubilee (Arc A612, n.d.); classic country on Hank Williams’ Songbook, featuring Singalong Jubilee’s own Freddie McKenna (Arc A711, n.d.); and contemporary folk with Gordon Lightfoot’s title track on Steel Rail Blues (Arc A792, 1968).
71. Dick, Remembering Singalong Jubilee, 85–94.
72. Anne Murray, All of Me (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2009), 278; Richard Green, Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, 2nd edition, s.v. “John Allan Cameron.” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 188.
73. “Tommy Makem and Ryan’s Fancy,” TVarchive.ca, web, accessed March 10, 2016.
74. A selection of their repertoire and a number of humorous anecdotes can be found in The Ryan’s Fancy Song (and other stuff) Book, ed. Pat Byrne (Portugal Cove, NL: Breakwater Books, 1977).
75. Beaton and Pederson, Maritime Music Greats, 102–103; Ryan’s Fancy with Stan Rogers, “Songs of the Sea,” Canadian Express, (CBC, January 11, 1979), television episode.
76. Beaton and Pederson, Maritime Music Greats, 102.
77. John Allan Cameron with Stan Rogers, John Allan Cameron, October 15, 1975 (Montreal: CTV), television episode.
78. Cameron is credited on Rogers, Fogarty’s Cove, but not for any specific songs. Since production logs are not available, one can only listen to determine which songs Cameron played on. The author’s best guess is “Giant,” and perhaps “Fogarty’s Cove.”
79. Stan Rogers, Between the Breaks… Live! (Hannon, ON: Fogarty’s Cove Music FCM-002, 1979).
80. John Allan Cameron, Freeborn Man (Markham, ON: Glencoe Music CSPS 1432, 1979).
81. Ryan’s Fancy with Stan Rogers, “Songs of the Sea,” Canadian Express (CBC: January 11, 1979), television episode; Garnet Rogers, Night Drive, 313; “The Week Ahead,” The Ottawa Journal, July 29, 1977. Rogers would record “Let Me Fish Off Cape St. Mary’s” (For the Family) and “Leave Her Johnny Leave Her” (From Coffeehouse to Concert Hall), both in their repertoire according to Byrne, Ryan’s Fancy; it is also quite possible that he based the refrain for his song, “The Jeannie C.” (Turnaround), on their “Go to Sea No More.”