Newfoundland Traditional Song: The Legacy from the English West Country

Abstract: Writing about the history of Newfoundland popular song before the twentieth century is difficult because of the paucity of primary sources. Little song collecting appears to have taken place there before the 1920s. Focusing on the legacy from Victorian England, this paper examines traditional song as an aspect of the cultural connection between Newfoundland and the four counties of the English West Country. It offers a methodology for determining which songs were likely to have been sung in Newfoundland outports during the latter half of the nineteenth century._________________________________________________________ Were the same songs sung in the outports of Victorian Newfoundland as in the villages and small towns of Victorian England? On the surface, that question is difficult to answer with any degree of certainty. The problem is an apparent lack of reliable evidence with which to verify such hunches. Outside of the city of St. John’s, nineteenth-century Newfoundland suffered from poor, sometimes non-existent, internal communications, and the population was dispersed among a large number of isolated and usually tiny outports. Because of this high degree of geographical decentralization, direct evidence on Newfoundland song before the 1920s is scarce. Potential sources such as diaries, letters and even newspapers may eventually provide some of the needed clues, but in the meantime we have to look elsewhere. The aim of this article is to consider various indirect sources that, taken together, provide a