Canadian Journal for Traditional Music (1985)

"Down by this Laney Side": Clarence Bloise, Farmer and Singer

Martin Lovelace

Did you ever work with Clarence Blois?
The man that had the charming voice
Makes all human hearts rejoice
To hear him sing a ditty.

Sid Parker

Clarence Blois died on February 26th, 1985. He was a fine singer, though not known for it beyond the scattered farms and hamlets around Upper Nine Mile River, Hants Co., Nova Scotia, where he had worked in the woods as a young man and then run the family farm for most of his eighty-one years. I was privileged to know him, to record his songs, and to listen to him talk about the power of songs and the role of singer. This essay is therefore a tribute to him and a chance to present some of his thoughtful commentary on songs; in particular I shall explore the visual quality in his imaginative empathy with the characters and their situations in his ballads.

THE PARLOUR AND THE BUSH

Clarence grew up in a music-loving family; it seemed natural to him that he should sing: "The whole family was singing and my old man could sing some and of course I being the youngest of the family Ijust followed suit I guess." Clarence's father, William Henry Blois, knew "more songs than'd patch hell a mile," and was the major source of Clarence's own repertory. Clarence once kept a list of his father's songs but this had been lost in a housecleaning. W.H. Blois died in 1936, when Clarence was thirty-two, but the old man had been able to "sing like a trooper" almost to his last year; he had been fortunate in being able to take singing lessons from a "singing master," Tim Dimmock, who had lived in the area for a while. W.H. Blois sang at work around the woods and farms, and in parlour settings; for a couple of years he sold organs for a Truro company with great success. Clarence's sister, Winnie, became a good organist and would play at the "sings" held at the Blois home on Sunday nights. These Sunday "sings" were, of course, far more genteel than most song sessions in the woods camps; for example, members of the church choir would practice hymns.

Clarence's father sometimes sang to his children before they were put to bed; this is a context Clarence often mentioned in his recollections of his father as a singer. These intimate, family performances no doubt took place in many homes, but the Blois children were lucky in their father's rich repertory. They could choose the song they wanted. Often they selected something deeply emotional, even gruesome, a standard ballad rather than a conventional lullaby; the horrors conjured up by the song being perhaps safely laid by the comforting presence of father and mother.1 "The Suffolk Miracle," with its returning ghost and exhumed corpse, was one they called for:

My old man used to sing it quite common at those things, we chose when we was kids in the evening, before we went to bed to get us off to bed and so forth ... it's a pitiful song and us children would be kind of feeling bad too, makes you feel kind of bad.

Another was "The Beggar's Curse," in which the weary begging woman is turned away from the rich farmer's door to die in th rain, but not before cursing the family and farms to barrenness and oblivion: "I know when we were kids I often used to get at him to sing it because I don't know why, it was just like reading a story book." In our interviews Clarence's father often seemed to me to be still a presence; it was as though Clarence had never quite emerged from the intimidating shadow of his father's excellence as a singer. It was a shame that we were thirty years too late, his father would have known that, his father had had a wonderful amount of songs; thus Clarence modestly deferred to his father's ability.

While it may have been expected locally that Clarence would be able to sing, because of his father's eminence as a singer, he was also encouraged by a partnership at work and in song with another young man of his own age, Lawrence Bowman. They learned songs together from the Victrola gramophone: "... they'd only have to play that record twice, and we would know the words and try to pretty well follow the music too." Bowman would add harmonies, in his counter-tenor, to Clarence's tenor lead on the melody. Bowman's enthusiasm for singing perhaps heightened Clarence's; Robert Bethke has mentioned a similar partnership between the Adirondack singer, Ted Ashlaw, and a boyhood companion with whom he collected and learned songs.2

Other local singers Clarence admired included Sid Parker, who became well known in the Truro area for his poems on local topics ,3 but who at that time, when Clarence was young, worked and sang in the woods. Myles Coolin's singing was also much enjoyed; he was a migrant woods worker who worked for a time in the area but Clarence had lost track of him. Another local singer, however, was Bob Barr, a burly and jovial Irishman. Barr was some thirty-five to forty years older than Clarence and would play with the Blois children when he visited the farm: "He used to take to us kids and used to have a hell of a racket with us." Barr was one source of, and model for, the comic strain in Clarence's song repertoire: "I always asked him to sing because I, I always wanted to try to be jolly, didn't want to be sad all the time." Clarence commented, "He was a pretty good singer, Bob. Good old boy. 'Course he was just in fun you know." That Barr was "just in fun" is related, I feel, to the way that, while enjoying them hugely, Clarence rated comic songs lower than serious romantic songs on his personal scale of aesthetic worth. They did not demand the same depth of concentrated empathy with the characters as did the ballads, nor the same trueness of tone and melody.

Jack Turple, another local singer, was known for his satirical songs; Clarence sang his "Way Out in the Indian Road" and the "Song on the Storekeeper" but had never worked with Turple or, I think, heard him sing, so that Turple's influence came only through his song texts and, perhaps, negatively, through the example Turple set as the kind of person and singer Clarence did not wish to be. His comments on Turple strive to be fair, but reveal that mixture of admiration and censure of the satirist's effrontery which is natural in a conservative rural neighbourhood where people feel obliged to stay on good terms with their neighbours: "... he was quite a novelty, Jack Turple. He was an awful old man when he wanted to be, this Jack Turple." Clarence was extremely careful when he sang or told anything which might offend; after singing Bob Barr's "The Raffling of a Stove" — a burlesqued account of a raffle and dance which turned into a brawl — he looked round the room chuckling, "His relatives, are there any in the house? That I've insulted?" We were in the home of his neighbours, the McPhees, this time, but even while alone with me, a disinterested outsider, he was always careful of local feelings and reputations.

A singer is more likely than the average person to hunt out another singer and badger him to perform a particular song; this is sometimes done to acquire the song, but often for the pure aesthetic pleasure of hearing it. Clarence recalled his partner, Lawrence Bowman, egging on an "old feller" to sing the one song he knew, "Pat Malone Forgot that He Was Dead," which Bowman promptly learned and sang for himself:

That was the only song the old feller knew but Lawrence would get him right at that.... How that Lawrence Bowman took to that, he just laughed. Split his sides. If that old feller'd sing that song.

Clarence liked to hear Myles Coolin, a streamdriver, sing "The Lass of Mohee":

I used to love to hear him ... he was a lovely singer and he sang some lovely good songs, you know. And I used to get him at singing "The Lass of Mohee," boy, he could really sing that, it was a song favourite to him. The impression I took from the singers there and myself combined — if you could class me with that kind of good singing — why, if they liked a song they could sing it a lot better. They could seem to put a different attitude to it altogether. See. And each feller would have three or four songs which was his favourite. And we get around if we knowed that we liked this why we'd be at 'em, now, and your turn, you had to sing a song get up and step dance or play the violin or something for to entertain and Myles used to always sing for us. Because we insisted because we liked to hear him.

Clarence had his own experience of being asked for a particular song. A man named Clark had heard Clarence's father sing "Young Edmund" one rainy afternoon when work was held up; later, one night in a lumbercamp, he pressed Clarence to sing it, though Clarence did not consider it "his" to sing: "This Clark sat right there and kept me going, I, I blundered through it. And then, he insisted I sing it again because he was afraid [he'd never] hear it again." Clearly, to a singer, and to the keenest members of an audience, particular songs were not just casual entertainment but were avidly sought out, savoured, and remembered.

Like Mytes Coolin, most singers had favourite songs they could "really go to town on," and this led to an understanding among singers and audiences that certain songs belonged to certain singers, a trait widely noted in folksong studies. Sid Parker, for example, sang "The Plain Golden Band" in a way that Clarence did not feel he could better; he would sing something else rather than compete directly with Parker's version:

I wouldn't try to sing "[The Plain Golden Band]" to make it sound better or try to copy it or anything. I'd sing one that Iliked, and then you could really demonstrate on that one if you knowed how, and you [i.e. the audience] got the choice then of all the good then, because by the time you got around to the boys that, it was better than going to music lessons.

While competitiveness was not something Clarence owned to, he would not have been a singer if he had not cared about his performances. In his last years he refused to sing for me at all; he was exasperated that his shortness of breath made it impossible for him to sing as he had been able to. Songs were not a mere pastime; they were an oral, portable, art and literature which Clarence treated respectfully.

Clarence spoke of songs as having a civilizing influence on the men who performed and listened to them in the woods camps. As he said: "... they'd sing. You know, and entertain like we used to, entertain ourselves in the woods, if we didn't we'd be lost in the mighty jungle..."! asked if he really meant to set songs as something "cultivated" against the wildness of the camp life; he agreed emphatically: "We had no education, so it was a lesson in grammar, geography, it would get you better, give you more interest." While most songs have some educative function, several in his repertoire dealt with historical exploits in distant countries. "The Heights of Alma," for example, about a famous victory in the Crimean War, carried with it, for Clarence a detailed oral historical account of two local men who were involved. "Captain James," "The Flying Cloud," and "On the Banks of the Potomac," also were in a class of songs that offered interesting glimpses of possible lives beyond the safer but uneventful confines of Hants Co.

Songs, Clarence agreed, could make one morally better: "... they showed what danger a man could fall into, they taught you to follow the law, to be a citizen." The songs he may have had in mind here are those of his favourite song-maker, Joe Scott;4 "Benjamin Deane" and "The Norway Bum" both deal with promising men brought to their downfall by drink, greed, or other unruly passions in the logging towns of Maine and New Hampshire. "They came from all over Hell to those places..." he remarked, and there is an obvious contrast between his own quiet life as a farmer and those dissolute days exampled in the songs. While Clarence worked in the woods as a young man it was only locally — in Hants Co. —but the songs were real and close to him just the same. A relative had lived in Berlin Falls and knew details of the Benjamin Deane affair. Clarence broke off once, from his singing of "Benjamin Deane," after the intensely visual stanza picturing Deane's wife lying where he has shot her: "The sun shone through the window on her pale and lifeless face..." He was too moved to continue for awhile, though later, out of the singer's sense of responsibility to complete the story, he finished the song.

Clarence was well aware of the conventions and categories of folksong. He quoted another singer's characteristic way of offering to sing, in the woods camp:

he said, 'Well what do ye want me to do?' that was to do his share, entertainin', he said, 'Sing you a love song about murder?' flaughs} And I never forgot that, sound so comical, then he started in singing this song about, well it ended up in a murder case.

Clarence then sang me an example of a "love song about murder" —"James MacDonald," or "The Lantzford Murder" — a typical example of the genre in which a duplicitous lover lures his sweetheart away from home and then murders her.

The majority of songs in Clarence's repertoire dealt with the classic themes of Anglo-American folksong: love, separation, and death.5 Their reflections upon the sweetheart or family left behind were naturally attractive to men away for the winter. The songs counteracted loneliness: "That was the only reason, why we used to sing and dance in the woods — to throw our mind off it. It [music] was a great healer." "Cathartic" is not too strong a term for their effect; Clarence liked to tell of the impact of "Young Edmund" on a girl who was working as "cookee" in a camp; the girl's father came to Clarence next day and "gave me hell": "... he said: 'She heard you singing that and such a mournful song,' said, 'Don't sing any more of them in the camp because,' he said, 'she cried all night.'

The gentility and sentimentality of a number of Clarence's songs did not fit my stereotype of rambunctious woodsmen; one reason for this was the presence of women, as cooks. In such a situation, Clarence observed, "we had to cultivate ourselves," and a singer would not be likely to use songs as a medium for teasing the woman, another man might take it up as pretext for a quarrel. Clarence said, very typically, ... "It's nicer to keep peace in the family. To behave yourselves. The way Ifound it..." The other reason for the popularity of love songs — "most everybody" enjoyed them — was simply that they were "such a change from the lumberwoods." "The Lass of Mohee" was a particular favourite in the woods; perhaps in part because of its fantasy of the compliant female who unexpectedly offers all the comforts of home, in the midst of savagery, to the wandering sailor. In the love songs particularly, but also in the adventure songs and moralistic warnings, the values of the parlour were asserted in the bush.

A Public Errand

One of my lines of questioning concerned possible affinities between attitudes to work and to songs. Clarence often spoke of "straightening up" a song, getting the verses down right, for me; a failure to get through a song he likened to "falling down on the job." He was equally meticulous in seeing to the cows, sterilizing the milking apparatus, and generally keeping things in good order about the farm. I also have the impression that the parallel between singing and working extended to not doing an eccentric amount of either; what was more important was to do one's share. To be an over-achiever in either domain might have drawn unfavourable comment.Singing in the camps was done by taking turns: "We'd split them up all around, take turns." This also mixed the content: a "rugged" bawdy song might be followed by a sentimental lovesong. Perhaps most apparent, however, was his sense of civic responsibility and the way it is revealed in what he says of the role of the singer:

If you are singing it's a public errand that you're doing, same as playing violin for people to dance to. You've got to be tuned up to the public.... You have to show the body of the song so that they can get the full benefit of the song.

Clarence's forebear, Daniel Galveston Blois, composed "Meagher's Children," a lament for two children lost in the woods nearby, and he seems to have had a similar sense of public responsibility as a "poet." I had observed that old Dan'l Blois had been "quite a character" (meaning that like many satirists he enjoyed an ambivalent reputation) but this struck the wrong note with Clarence: "Well they claimed he was. But when he sat down to write 'The Lost Children' he was just as much Christian, I guess, as any of them."

Once again I find here a sense that songs are civilizing and that to be a "poet" like D.G. Blois or Joe Scott was to be elevated above the common rank of men. It also showed the potentialities latent in them all — common working men in the woods — who had had no chance for an education and picked up what they could through the medium of songs.

A Visual Memory

What do singers "see" when they sing? The idea of questioning Clarence about the possibility that images might come before his mind's eye as he sang came to me from essays on the visual memory of narrators of folktales by D.A. MacDonald and Vivian Labrie.6 Both dealt with the way that storytellers could follow the adventures of their protagonists, as they narrated, as though watching a film or set of slides projected on a wall in front of them. Other song collectors have no doubt asked the same question, but here is Clarence's response, which surprised and delighted me:

MJL: What do you think of when you see that song? Well do you see kind of a picture? In your mind when you sing a song?

CB: Well it's more like looking at a moving picture, or something like that you understand ... you'd have to have just a picture in your mind going like a film, to really, really put the right music and everything to it, to do it right.

MJL: So each verse would sort of be a separate sort of a scene?

CB: Yes, it's like a motion picture and also like when the talkies came in, you can't remember the old silent pictures. Yeah. And that's the only way that you can really remember even what you, what kind of a song you're working at. You got to have something to go by. Really. And it makes it so much easier if you can picture it. In your mind. And then that you can back it up with the music no matter how high or how low.

MJL: So would you say that you can see these people in the songs clearly?

CB: Well it's more like a, let's say a vision or something you know...

MJL: So you can't really pick out their features...

CB: No, it's kind of a brief, just like the brief outline of a flash, like a picture travelling too fast for you to get a full scope...

MJL: And is it colour?

CB: No, dark. That's what gives you just the outline because you, if you didn't, if you could see clear, why you'd have to holdup and picture the features and everything, see.

Clarence's remarks remind me of the aptness of Henry Glassie's comparison between the figures in folk paintings and in ballads:

The painted people, like the protagonists in a ballad, are minimally identified as individuals ... and are unemotional.... The artist's unmodeled figures exist flatly without a hint at the third dimension; they are quietly focused with only the amount of action and setting absolutely required for identification; they do not tell a story so much as refer to a known story.7

I suspect, however, that there is, within the stock of images held by a singer for a particular song, a combination of vaguely seen characters, places, and objects, with others which are comparatively much sharper and more detailed: iconic in their power to attract and sustain the imagination.

One example of the way an intensely visual detail, from the image stock of a song, seemed part of the process of remembering for Clarence, came when we discussed revenant ballads his father had sung. Clarence had just sung me "Young Edmund" — in which the returned sailor is murdered for his gold by his sweetheart's father, and the murdered lover appears to the girl in a dream to reveal his fate — and this song "matched up," Clarence said, with another song his father had sung —- a bedtime favourite of the children — in which a woman had had "presentations" of her murdered lover appearing to her. The song is recognizably "The Suffolk Miracle." In Clarence's retelling of the story of the song — the text of which he could not remember — we may be able to glimpse what was, for him, one of the iconic images of that song:

Yes, there are a song because I'm telling you my father used to sing it. About this woman, this girl, and her lover and he was murdered, apparently, ... apparently they clubbed, hit him in the head or something. And he was buried, and this night she had this presentation of him being come to her. And this part of it is all I can remember. How, you know it's a pitiful song and us children would be kind of feeling bad too, makes you feel kind of bad, it was well put together too. To give you all the issue. And in this verse I can remember these words was, he said, uh: 'Oh my dearest dear...' when he was talking to her and '... how my head does ache...' And she took a bandana handkerchief and folded it up and put it round the head and bound it tight, thought that in them days they'd do that if you had a headache. And she kept claiming, making a fuss in the day about her lover had been to see her that they went to please her and dug up the remains. And his head which wasn't done that when the funeral, when he was buried, here was her bandana handkerchief tied around with a hard square knot in it, see, to lie on his head.

That "hard square knot" is, in my opinion, what Clarence "saw" when thinking of this part of the song; it is the "detail as semantic unit" which Mukarovsky describes as a feature of folk art.8 I doubt that the type of knot is specified in any text of the ballad but rather it is an aspect of the singer's imaginative contribution to the song, through the process of visualization. This is not to argue for any primacy of visual over textual cues to memory9 but simply to point out how strong the visual aspect may be as a reinforcer; to quote Clarence's remark again: ... "It makes it so much easier if you can picture it."

I am a rambling hero, by love I am ensnared
Near to the town of Derry there lived a comely maid
She is fairer than Diana, and free from earthly pride
This lovely maid her dwelling place is by this laney side
The very first time I saw my love 'twas in the month of May
As I strolled for recreation down by the riverside
The small birds sang their chorus, and the river gently glide
I stood amazed like one deranged down by this laney side
I stood amazed meditating as I gazed upon a rose
Saying"! thought you were an angel descending down so low."
"Oh no, kind sir, I'm a country girl," she modestly replied
"And I daily labour for my bread down by this laney side."
Her golden locks in ringlets fell o'er her snow white neck
The killing glances of this maid would save a ship from wreck
She had two red and rosy cheeks, her skin was ivory white
She would make a boy become her slave down by this laney side
I courted her for seven long months in love we did agree
Till at length her cruel parents did prove our overthrow
Which makes me sail far o'er the main and leave my love behind
So farewell to friends and parents, I'll bid you all adieu
I am crossing the main ocean dear Sally for the love of you
And should I ever return again I'll make you my bride
I'll roll you in my ar-ms down by this laney side.

Sung by Clarence Blois, May 20th 1981

In recording this song my error in transcription — I assumed he was singing "Down by the Slaney side"11 whereas, as he pointed out, it was the or this "laney side" — led to a further opportunity to explore just what he "saw" as the "scene" of the song. Had I not asked him to check my transcription I would have assigned this song to that class of songs about lovers' meetings by riversides brilliantly discussed by Roger Renwick in "English Folk Poetry."2 Textually, of course, it belongs there; yet I doubt that affectively to Clarence the riverbank element was important; it may not even have registered in his mental image of the scene. His reading of the text had much to do with the song's strangeness in comparison with his own experience as a Hants Co. farmer. The song was intrinsically "English" to him, a classification he made on the basis of the "sweetness" of melody and words ("Irish" songs were of a livelier, comic, variety as he found them):

Those are all English songs. That type of song that came here with the settlers. it originated from England. Just the same as that one I sang you that time I said I always thought so much of it because it's a lovely harmony anyway, where he says 'I was amazed when I seen this lady, this girl' approach to him and he asked her where she came from and so forth.... And he was surprised and found out she, said she was just a labouring girl 'down by this laney side.'

MJL: That's a lovely song.

That was a lovely song if you could, if you know, when you was able to sing it. "Down by the laney side." Apparently in them days the English and even the First Great War my brother said that they had little villages in England, like farming areas, and they'd each had these lanes out that they out and farmed, took the carts and horses and everything and then they come back to eat, and that's why, and they called it because they was so numerous, they called the place "the laney side." See. And he met this girl there and he was so surprised she was such a wonderful lookin' girl, and, what, how was it in that?

country girl
She modestly replied, and I daily labour for my bread
Down by this laney side.

And his family heard tell of it, they was made to get out of this country altogether, that's, they put him on a boat for here, or someways. Because in them days they had four different attitudes in England, you had to stay in that class, you couldn't ... step up on a higher class, you could step back, but you couldn't go ahead. Yeah. That's why that song, how it words it out to show you what was the trouble. He was stepping too low for them, see, there was each four classes. If you was a ploughman you had to marry a ploughman's daughter and all that silly stuff.

Where the significance of this song lay for Clarence, in my opinion, was that it was first of all a song about farming; his attention was caught by the strangeness of the set-up; a landscape of nucleated settlement quite foreign to his own experience of separate farmsteads enclosed in their own fields, with no lanes to ramble out upon. In bringing this reading to the song Clarence was also revealing his yearning for knowledge (I have already quoted his statement that songs were an education). Clarence was the youngest in a large family and, following a traditional pattern, it fell to him to stay at home to look after the old people, eventually to inherit what was then only a small farm, while his elder brothers and sisters went away to the glamour of the Boston States and the Great War. In his comment on this song we can see the singer using the fragment of knowledge about English farming that he had gleaned from his brother to fill out his understanding of the song's ambiguous text. The element of class distinction which he inferred in the song was nominally, like the system of country lanes, quite strange to him. Yet from various comments he dropped, I think that he sometimes felt vulnerable to charges that by staying on the farm he had missed the chances his emigrant brothers and sisters had. Thus the song might have fitted, more closely than he could admit, his own experiences of snobbery. In fact his own career fully disproved the static ideal of the English class system since by hard work and diligence he greatly increased the size and value of the farm he inherited.

"Down by this laney side" thus might have appealed to Clarence for many reasons: for its musical and poetic beauty, for its window on foreign, historical experience, and as a paradigm against which to measure his own life.

Clarence's only context for "performance" of these songs in his latter years was as an accompaniment to his chores: bringing in an armload of wood, shovelling the concrete floor of the cow barn. I do not believe, however, that he ever ceased to enjoy them or to think them significant, or to imaginatively inhabit them. He often told me that he had thought of a new song to sing for me while working in the barn. Here, reflected by the concrete and. iron surfaces of the broad barn floor, echoes came back to me of a younger, stronger voice, a tenor, high and clear. The drive and scrape of the shovel, while it clanged and grated, was not inconsistent with the whole for it spoke of the physical work, the monotonous labour, which these songs had sweetened. The songs were what they had always been to him: beautiful, educative, companionable.'3

Memorial University,
St. John's, Nfld.

Notes

1. Forfurtherthoughts on the use of ballads as lullabies see Bess Lomax Hawes, "Folksongs and Functions: Some Thoughts on the American Lullaby," Journal ofAmerican Folklore, 87 ( 1974), 66-7 1.

2. Robert D. Bethke, Adirondack Voices: Woodsmen and Woods Lore (Urbana: University of Illinois Press. l98l),p. 101.

3. SM. Parker. born in 1890 in the Nine Mile River area, wrote several books of verse on local people and events; representative is Dying Embers (Truro, N.S.: Truro Printing & PublishingCo., 1965).

4. For Joe Scott see Edward D. Ives, Joe Scoff: The Woodsman-S ongmaker (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978.

5. For this assessment see Roger D. Abrahams and George Foss, Anglo-American Folksong Style (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), ch.6.

6. D.A. MacDonald, "A Visual Memory," Scottish Studies, 22(1978), 1-26; D.A. MacDonald, "Some Aspects of Visual and Verbal Memory in Gaelic Storytelling," Arc: Scandinavia Yearbook of Folklore, 37(1981), 117-124; Vivian Labrie, "The Itinerary as a Possible Memorized Form of the Folktale," ibid.. 89-102.

7. Henry Glassie, "Folk Art." in Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction, ed. Richard M. Dorson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 263-4.

8. Jan Mukarovsky, "Detail as the Basic Semantic Unit in Folk Art," in his The Word and VerbalArt: Selected Essays. Ed., trans., John Burbank and Peter Steiner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). pp. 180-204.

9. The phrase "how my head does ache" stuck, as memorable and emotive, with at least one other singer who, like Clarence, could not remember the entire song but narrated it as a story; see Phillips Barry, British Ballads from Maine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929), p.142.

10. I am indebted to Julia Bishop for the musical transcription and the following note: "This is merely a skeletal transcription intended to give some idea of the song's melodic and rhythmic outline. The transcription in no way doesjustice to the artistry and sensitivity of Clarence's rendition which, with quiet command, introduces subtle variations of rhythm, melody, phrasing, and dynamic intensity into every stanza. The delicacy of this stylistic shading suggests its importance to Clarence as a means of enhancing the words and underlining the meanings they embodied for him."

11. The song is a version of "The Tan-Yard Side," Laws M28. For a text in the "Slaney Side" form, see Kenneth Peacock, Songs qf the Newftnmdland Outports (Ottawa: National Museum of Canada, 1965), Ii, 592-3.

12. Roger de V. Renwick, English Folk Poetry: Structure and Meaning (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980).

13. This is an extended version of a paper presented at the Folklore Studies Association of Canada meeting in Guelph, June 1984. I would like to thank Mrs. Shirley MacPhee for introducing me to Clarence, and the Blois family for their kind hospitality.

Resumé: L'article de Martin J. Lovelace porte sur unfermier-chanteur de la Nouvelle-Ecosse, Clarence Blois. L'auteur discute de la relation qui existe entre la personnalité du chanteur et son repertoire. Il cite quelques-uns des commentaires que le chanteurfait sur les chansons qu 'il chante dé montrant leur influence civilisante sur les forestiers dans les chantiers, leur véracité et leur habileté a dépeindre les caractéres.