MacEdward Leach and the Songs of Atlantic Canada

Abstract

This essay describes a website that brought the earliest audio recordings made in Atlantic Canada to the attention of scholars, singers, and cultural historians: MacEdward Leach and the Songs of Atlantic Canada (http://www.mun.ca/folklore/leach). Among the many collections of traditional song that have been made in Newfoundland and Labrador, there was until 2004 a noticeable gap in their accessibility. Collections by Karpeles (1970), Greenleaf andMansfield (1965 [1933]), Peacock (1965), and Lehr (1985)-as well as Leach's Labrador collection (1966) -were published in print editions, and selections from Peacock (1956) were released on LP, but the earliest audio recordings made on the islands of Cape Breton and Newfoundland by American folklorist MacEdward Leach were largely unknown. 1 His collections are important not only for their size but also for their geographic and generic range. Unlike the earlier collectors, Leach was open to local compositions, as well as songs of American, English, Scottish, or Irish origin. In the late 1940s Leach had traveled with his first wife, Alice May (Maria) Doane, to her native Cape Breton, where they recorded over 80 songs in Gaelic. In 1950 and 1951, he and his second wife, Nancy Rafetto, made two trips to Newfoundland, where they amassed a collection of more than 600 English-language songs largely from English and Irish communities on the Avalon Peninsula. 2 The original reel-to-reel recordings were in the custody of the Memorial University Folklore and Language Archive. When the Research Centre for Music, Media and Place was established in 2003 with a mandate to undertake "applied" projects that would respond to requests and needs in the province's communities, it became clear that local singers-both amateur and professional-sought greater access to archival holdings in order to enrich their repertoires and enhance their knowledge of local culture and tradition. Hence, a website project was developed to seek permission from the Leach estate holder to digitize and present the Leach collection online. We hoped that the project would prove to be a stimulant to the still vibrant oral 2 There is no connection between the Cape Breton and Newfoundland collections other than the fact that Leach made both of them and that they constitute the earliest audio-recorded collections in Atlantic Canada. The two Newfoundland collections are related in that Leach returned to some families he visited on the earlier trip, but he also traveled to new communities, including Fermuse, Renews,