I's the B'y

• the most recorded Newfoundland song
• near-universal recognition shown by referential value: like in magazine articles, “I’se the b’y who gets the grants” (Canadian Business), “I’se the b’y that does the books” (Eastern Provincial In-Flight)
• many parodies on it
• extremely well-known in Hiscock’s childhood (b. St. John’s, 1952)
• earliest known audio recording by Kenneth Peacock in 1951
• first commercial recordings by Alan Mills (our version) and the Leslie-Bell Singers in 1953
• first publication in 1954 national best-seller Folk Songs of Canada by Edith Fowke and Richard Johnston
• mid-1960’s, another flurry of attention, associated with the rise of self-consciousness of Newfoundland culture in the Toronto region, with the Come Home Year celebrations of 1965, and their interaction with Canadian Centennial Year interest around 1967
• Fowke/Johnston most highly influential version outside of Newfoundland
• most widely circulated version within the province was the version published by Gerald S. Doyle in 1955 in his third edition of Old-Time Songs of Newfoundland

-this version was relatively short, however

• Hiscock learned from a singer with roots in Notre Dame Bay that the song was widely sung there with plenty of variant verses: “hundreds of them”
• Hiscock learned the songs at schook in the late 1950’s, and these were the words published by Fowke and Johnston
• Fowke in her published version comments that there were more traditional but unpublished stanzas because some were “hardly suitable for publication” (1954:117)
• Hiscock subsequently confirmed that many of the suppressed verses from Notre Dame Bay has sexual content – even Doyle’s text suggests scandal, but it is easily brushed off
• today it is an active piece for some local performers, while others shun it as hackneyed and perhaps even offensive
• Hiscock has put together over 80 commercial recordings of the song