History and Tradition
From CCE wiki archived
- no established history, author unknown, although there are a few claims to authorship and town of origin
- evidence suggests that several songs coalesced into the version we know today
- early on, Hiscock understood that it was made up by the St. John’s businessman Bob Macleod, a musical entertainer popular with servicemen and local audiences during WWII
- however, in the late 1990’s, he started hearing fragmentary oral history that Markie Gatehouse or Gates of Moreton’s Harbour was the author about 100 years ago (West 1998)
- another, fuller oral history: suggested that Joseph Deering of Pearce’s Harbour, which is adjacent to Moreton’s Habour, penner at least some of the verses. (Jones, 1998)
- -descendants say he was a young widower in the 1870s, when he courted and married Eliza (Liza) Brown, who was known locally as Sally Brown, and made up the song about their relationship
- -between Pearce’s Harbour and Moreton’s Harbour was a muddy (‘gravelly’) path that was never improved into a proper road
- Fogo and Twillingate are large centres, while Moreton’s Harbour is not; but to someone who lived in the region of Moreton’s Harbour, it would loom as large as Fogo and Twillingate in importance – this argument favours the Pearce’s Harbour and Joe Deering story
- I’s the B’y came into the public eye through a series of steps outside of Newfoundland, largely associated with the folksong revival of the middle 20th c.
- June 1951, Kenneth Peacock recorded Lloyd Soper (businessman/lawyer?) at St. John’s singing I’s the B’y
- -Peacock’s very first tape recording in what became a decade-long collection project
- -Soper sang two verses:
- -Sods and rinds to cover the stage/ Tea and cake for supper/ Flat fish in the spring of the year/ Fried in maggoty butter
- -I don’t want your maggoty fish/ That’s no good for the winter/ I could buy as good as that/ Down in Bonavista
- -here we have flat fish instead of codfish, and sods covering a stage, not a flake – sods were widely use in Newfoundland to cover storage buildings both for gear and root crops
- -Peacock later transcribed Soper’s version , but later took down by hand a version sung by Bob Macleod
- -Peacock published the song in 1965, using mainly Macleod’s version – this was passed around toe various people in central Canada
- -Macleod’s version, recorded by Peacock, was probably not the first version; Macleod had accompanied Gerald Doyle on his collecting trips three times in 1936-1939 and gathered many of the songs Doyle used in the 1940 and 1955 editions of his songbooks
- for the wider Canadian audience, the song crystallized after its publication by Fowke and Johnston
- -this book was hugely influential in establishing a canon of Newfoundland-songs-in-Canada
- -still in print today in its choral edition
- for Newfoundlanders, the song was crystallized by Gerald S. Doyle’s publication of it in 1955; until this book was out and concurrently audiences heard performances of it by Omar Blondahl, the song was not that widely known in the province