Canadian Journal for Traditional Music (1984)
Editorial Notes
This issue of the Journal features a special section in honour of Dr. Marius Barbeau, Canada's most famous folklorist and the founder of the Canadian Folk Music Society. The section includes a brief account of Dr. Barbeau's career, reminiscences about him by a number of his colleagues, both French and English, and an article about his theories by a recent graduate student.
Dr. Helen Creighton, the well-known collector of Maritime folklore, and Dr. Graham George, for many years the Secretary-Treasurer of the International Folk Music Council, were both participants with Dr. Barbeau in the founding of the Folk Music Society, and share their memories of its early days. Kenneth Peacock, who knew him during the years when he worked for the folklore section of the National Museum, describes some conversations with him and his thoughts about their meaning. Father Anselme Chiasson, a leading Acadian folklorist, is active in collecting folklore for the University of New Brunswick in Moncton. He describes how Dr. Barbeau inspired him to publish and collect the folklore of his people. Father Germain Lemieux, the foremost collector of Franco-Ontario folklore and the founder of the folklore archives at Laurentian University, Sudbury, tells how he began his folklore career as the result of an encounter with one of the Barbeau's early books.
Janet McNaughton, a graduate student in the Folklore Department of the Memorial University of Newfoundland, had no personal contact with Dr. Barbeau, but she has studied his publications and writes an interesting piece on his relationship to the controversy about the origin of folk songs — a subject that was a lively issue among folkiorists during the early part of the century.
Janet McNaughton has also contributed a major article to the general section of this issue. Her detailed study of two Newfoundland murder ballads serves to demonstrate a number of valuable points about the creation and transmission of folk songs. In a second article, Françoise Grenier provides a detailed study of the five volumes of Chansons d'Acadie, showing their importance as educational source material. John C. O'Donnell discusses and classifies coal-mining songs in Canada, and reviews of two books, one French and one English, complete the issue.
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Once again we express our gratitude to the Ontario Arts Council for the grant that makes this publication possible.
© Canadian Journal for Traditional Music