Folksongs and Folk Revival: The Cultural Politics of Kenneth Peacock’s Songs of the Newfoundland Outports. By Anna Kearney Guigné. (St. John’s, Institute of Social and Economic Research, 2008. Pp. x + 331, ISBN 978-1-894725-06-4) Old-Time Songs and Poetry of Newfoundland: Songs of the People From the Days of Our Forefathers. By Gerald S. Doyle. (St. John’s, Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Publications, 2008 [1940]. Pp. xxii + 82, ISBN 978-0-88901-404 6).

Three interconnected narratives run through Folksongs and Folk Revival. In addition to the central narrative, a biography of “folk music specialist” (235), Kenneth Peacock’s (1922-2000) career collecting folksongs in Newfoundland, Guigné provides detailed accounts of the evolution of folklore studies in Canada through the activities of the National Museum, as well as the political and cultural transformations of post-confederation Newfoundland and that province’s own folksong revival. As these three histories cross and inform one another, readers are offered a glimpse into the climate of folklore studies in mid-twentieth century Canada. After having published, recorded, and performed some of his own musical work, by 1949 Peacock was well on his way to establishing himself as a young, up-and-coming classical composer and pianist in Canada. During this time, however, Peacock, like many in Canada, was being pulled by nationalistic motivations away from the European flavour of most of this period’s classical music in search of something more representative of his own national culture (77). It was during this period that Peacock had an encounter with archivist Margaret Sargent, who would expose him to the activities and academic culture of the National Museum of Canada. When Sargent resigned from her position at the Museum, leaving behind some unfinished folksong collecting in Newfoundland, she provided Peacock with an entryway into the field that would define much of his career documenting Canadian folk culture. Chapter 6 outlines Peacock’s first two field trips to Newfoundland in 1951 and 1952. Picking up where Sargent left off, Peacock began his collecting on the province’s Avalon Peninsula. In her retelling of these trips (complemented with extensive quotes from her interviews with Peacock, excerpts from his notes and field recordings, and photographs he took during the visits), Guigné describes what was “a meeting of two cultures” (96). The reader witnesses Peacock’s often awkward encounters with residents as he attempts to negotiate his own expectations of a quaint, rural culture, and the appointments he attended with prosperous local interpreters of Newfoundland song in St. John’s. Feeling uneasy with his perceived outsider status in the province’s urban centre and not discovering the type of singing or singer he was searching for, Peacock would spend the rest of this and future trips exploring outport communities across the island (99-100). Rural Newfoundland reinforced Peacock’s romantic vision of a culture untouched by the modern world and, in the face of Confederation, stirred his preservationist motivations. This, along with his own preference for locally-composed songs, shaped much of his research. While the outcome of Peacock’s research has resulted in a thorough documentation of Newfoundland’s song tradition, his motivations also limited his collection and prevented him from considering the unique repertoires made up of both popular and traditional music (104). Examining these early trips, Guigné calls attention to Peacock’s inexperience as a folksong collector and his discomfort with the academic work of a folklorist. Instead Peacock approached the work as a trained musician, and was concerned primarily with documenting the songs in a manner he felt was accurate, while neglecting to record contextual notes. However, going beyond the easy and often tempting practice of criticizing past work from the privileged position of accumulated theoretical and methodological development, Guigné instead takes the opportunity to build upon and complement Peacock’s work. In Chapter 8, for instance, she draws on her own interviews with a singer from St. Paul’s, Newfoundland whom Peacock recorded in 1958. Guigné’s fieldwork, conducted forty years after Peacock’s visit, enhances our understanding of the context in which these songs were learned and performed. Further, she contextualizes Peacock’s fieldwork – including his shortcomings as a researcher …