Philip J. Thomas (1921–2007)

Phil Thomas was the foremost collector of English-language folksongs in British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province. He was also well-known as a singer and banjo player, and his repertoire was rooted in the songs of his native land, many of which would have disappeared but for his pioneering work.

Thomas was born on March 26, 1921, and was raised and educated in Victoria, British Columbia. He served in the Canadian armed forces in England and in India during World War II , and, after returning to Canada, he attended the University of British Columbia (UBC ) in Vancouver, graduating with a B.A. in 1948 and a B.Ed. the next year. He then embarked on a career in education, working as an elementary school teacher and as an art teacher. His interest in children’s art led to weekend work with the Vancouver School of Art, the Canadian Federation of Artists, and the Child Art Centre at UBC . He was the founding president of the British Columbia Art Teachers’ Association and the recipient of the G. A. Fergusson Award, the highest honor of the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation. He retired from teaching in 1981.

Thomas’s interest in folksong began in the early 1950s. Inspired by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, he learned the banjo and began singing a repertoire that initially was mainly American. The impressive work of such Canadian collectors as Helen Creighton in Nova Scotia and Edith Fowke in Ontario underlined the apparent lack of Western Canadian folksongs. Thomas was moved to discover for himself whether his native province also possessed a wealth of uncollected vernacular song. For nearly thirty years he spent his summers traversing British Columbia, tracking down its oral song traditions. He also explored the province’s archival collections to find printed material, such as broadsides. The result of this collecting and research is the Phil Thomas Collection, now deposited in the British Columbia Archives, in Victoria.

Thomas contributed songs to several of Edith Fowke’s books, including More Folk Songs of Canada (Waterloo, 1967), The Penguin Book of Canadian Folk Song (Penguin, 1973), and Singing Our History: Canada’s Story in Song (Doubleday, 1984), and he published many articles on British Columbia folksong in a variety of journals, bulletins, and magazines. His seminal work was Songs of the Pacific Northwest (rev. ed., Hancock House, [1979] 2007). The book is both a unique collection of vernacular songs (with tunes) and a social history of British Columbia through those songs.

Thomas made a number of recordings in which he performed songs that he had collected. His LP Where the Fraser River Flows (1980) was reissued as a CD in 2004. Also available from Cariboo Road Music is Phil Thomas and Friends: Live at Folklife Expo 86 (2004). A video clip of Phil and his wife Hilda performing “Are You from Bevan?” (a song about a miners’ strike on Vancouver Island) is included in the CD-ROM Folklore Heritage in the Pacific Northwest, issued by the British Columbia Folklore Society in 2006.

Thomas’s collection of British Columbia songs has been disseminated by radio and through recordings made by his disciples. In the 1980s, a sixteen-part radio series titled Songs and Stories of Canada was broadcast in Western Canada; thirteen programs in the series included items from the Thomas Collection. The series became the basis of an educational kit distributed to all British Columbia teachers, and it is now available as a CD-ROM . Before he passed away on January 26, 2007, Phil Thomas thus had the satisfaction of hearing British Columbia schoolchildren singing songs from his collection, as well as seeing Songs of the Pacific Northwest back in print. Issue 41.1 (Spring 2007) of Canadian Folk Music/Musique folklorique canadienne is devoted to Thomas’s life work and to his memory. It includes an obituary by Jon Bartlett, reminiscences by Phil’s friends and disciples, reviews of his CDs and of his book Songs of the Pacific Northwest, and an overview of the Thomas Collection, including examples of the different kinds of songs Phil obtained from his informants. [End Page 221...