Folksongs and Folk Revival: The Cultural Politics of Kenneth Peacock’s Songs of the Newfoundland Outports (review)

I first ran across Kenneth Peacock’s name when I was reading a collection of Ukrainian Canadian ballads. The collector was Robert Klymasz, a Ukrainian folklorist then employed by the Museum of Civilization (then the Museum of Man), but all of the music was transcribed by a man with a funny name about whom I knew nothing—Kenneth Peacock. I was intrigued. Anna Kearney Guigne was similarly intrigued when she started working with Peacock’s most famous publication, Songs of the Newfoundland Outports, a three-volume study for which Peacock did the fieldwork, the musical transcription, and the transcription of the texts. To her, this had seemed like the Bible of Newfoundland folk music. Then, in graduate school, she heard people criticize some of Peacock’s methods. She set about investigating, and the result is this book.

What Guigne concludes is that Peacock was a man of his time. He valued songs that seemed the most ancient, the ones most like the songs brought to Canada from England, something that is just not done today. Furthermore, he gave little performance context. He did not describe when and where the songs he recorded were normally performed. When publishing the material he collected, he sometimes blended several recordings together to produce a more perfect piece, another practice that goes against current norms. Not surprisingly, what Peacock did was in keeping with the norms of his day. This leads Guigne to investigate the times in which Peacock lived, and the result is a marvelous picture of the folksong revival days of the 1950s and 60s. We learn about the atmosphere of the times and the reasons for interest in things folk in general and song in particular. We learn about collectors, both Canadian and other, and quite a few of the people who recorded songs in the Canadian Maritimes, it turns out, were not Canadian. We learn about the Museum of Man which employed Ken Peacock as a contract worker and sent him to Newfoundland, across the Canadian Prairies, and elsewhere.

Information about Peacock’s times is interspersed with the biography of the man himself. He was an only child and began to study music early. He was trained as a pianist and was a very good one, performing in concerts and offering music lessons. He was also a composer of considerable talent and some renown, with some of his compositions performed widely and sold as sheet music. He was also a singer and made several records where he sang the songs that he had collected. Unfortunately, he could not make a living as a musician and, because he was interested in folk music as source material for his compositions, he began taking jobs as a transcriber of material collected by others and as a collector himself. Newfoundland was only one of the places where he worked, but it was the place where he spent most of his collecting energies, and his Songs of the Newfoundland Outports is his major work.

Kenneth Peacock was also a very private man. Guigne had access to his papers and was able to interview Peacock himself, both over the telephone and in person. Yet we get little biographical detail and not much sense of this man, other than that he was very generous, letting others use his material. He was cooperative and helpful, perhaps advancing the careers of others at the expense of his own—he never held a regular salaried position at the Museum of Man. He avoided conflicts and managed to steer clear of disputes among others, whether at the Museum or between various collectors and publishers of folksongs.

Peacock seems to have thoroughly enjoyed his fieldwork. He may have romanticized the people in the Newfoundland Outports and overlooked the harsh conditions of their life. Yet he lived with them and among...