Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia

The author

Mary Helen Creighton (1899–1989) was a Canadian folklorist who, over a long career, collected more than four thousand traditional songs, stories and folk beliefs, chiefly in Nova Scotia. Largely self-taught as a collector, she became the leading authority on the region's folklore and a pioneering figure in Canadian cultural documentation.

The book

Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia gathers 150 songs Creighton collected in the field, each given with words and music. The contents range across Child ballads, sea songs, love songs, humorous and nursery pieces, and songs from the province's many cultural communities, including a fifteenth-century ballad preserved in Canada after vanishing from England.

How to read it

It works on two levels: as a practical songbook for singers and players, and as a scholarly record of an oral tradition captured before it faded. Read it also as a window on the diverse Gaelic, English, German, Mi'kmaq, African and Acadian roots of Nova Scotian song. Dover kept it in print through a long-running reprint.

For more context

It sits within the larger tradition of English-language ballad collecting descending from Francis James Child and Cecil Sharp.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Helen Creighton
• The Canadian Encyclopedia
• Helen Creighton Folklore Society