Drive Dull Care Away: Folksongs from Prince Edward Island (review)

To call Sandy Ives's Drive Dull Care Away a folksong collection would misrepresent the book. True enough, it contains over 60 ballads, almost all with musical notation, and almost all collected by Ives during seven field trips to Prince Edward Island. Ives annotates these songs in the standard academic fashion, giving names of composer (where known) and singer, place and date of performance, printed sources, Child or Laws numbers when appropriate, and archival location of the field tapes from which he transcribed the songs. But the value of this book lies in the contexts that surround these ballads: Ives's publication history, his personal history, and the history of 20th-century folklore scholarship. In fact, it is difficult to separate Drive Dull Care Away from Ives's other work, since it forms part of the story that he has been telling for over 40 years. His books on Gorman, Scott, and Doyle, in particular, are personal accounts of discovery, as much as studies of regional and occupational singing traditions. Ives's focus on the singers who gave him texts and on his own adventures in the field have made his studies models of contextual and reflexive scholarship.

Each chapter represents one of Ives's field trips, beginning with his discovery of Prince Edward Islanders in Maine who knew songs and ballads from Canada's island province, and progressing through six field trips to the island in the 1950s and 1960s in search of songs by Gorman and Scott. Ives found songs by these two lumberwoods poets but also collected many traditional Anglo-American songs, as well as songs by other island composers. One of these composers became the subject of Ives's second biographical work, Lawrence Doyle: The Farmer-Poet of Prince Edward Island (University of Maine Press, 1971). The penultimate chapter describes his visit to the island in 1982. By then an established scholar of Maine-Maritimes traditions, Ives was invited to take part in the Island Folk Festival. Ives includes four songs from that festival, showing how island singing traditions continue to thrive. The final chapter presents three songs of particular significance to the island- "Prince Edward Island, Adieu," "Peter Emberly," and "The O'Halloran Road." Ives never collected entirely satisfactory versions of these songs and must reconstruct them from a combination of his fieldwork and other sources, showing that sometimes the most popular and obvious texts are also the most elusive.

The middle six chapters, however, are the most instructive, showing how Ives progressed from a somewhat romantic collector of ballads to a keen observer of songs in society-a kind of folklorist's bildungsroman that charts the intellectual growth of its protagonist. When Ives began his folklore journey in 1957, he was a young professor of English with a sideline as folksong revival singer. His Maine audience asked for lumberwoods songs, which sparked Ives's interest in local, occupational ballads. In search of the legendary Larry Gorman, he set off for Prince Edward Island on the first of several visits. These visits to the island over the next 25 years ranged from a few days to a few weeks and represent the kind of fieldwork all too common to folklorists over the last 100 years-intensive, short-term fieldwork for the purpose of gathering as much information and as many appropriate texts as possible.

Ives was a master of this approach, partly out of necessity but also because of his increasingly detailed knowledge of the culture of Maine and Maritime Canada, his almost immediate rapport with his informants, and his open-minded approach to the material that he was collecting. But he had a lot to learn, and it is to Ives's credit that he has included his errors and missed opportunities in his account. He recalls, for example, recording a...