Tracing the phrasing and language

• writing a column for the Downhomer in 1997, Hiscock argued for St. John as the place of origin, and it sparked a conversation with interested readers; these questions were raised:

-Who used butter to fry fish in? (Salt pork was the common cooking-oil)

-Would butter actually go “maggoty”? Indeed, who had butter?

-Who would put sods on a flake? (A flake is a flat, open structure for drying fish)

-Who would say “codfish”? (Newfoundlanders just refer to it as “fish”)

-Who would have codfish in the spring of the year? (in the inshore fishery, it was late June by the time cod would strike in)

• one reader, Luke Pitcher of Barrie Ontario, reported a variant, “Flat fish in the spring of the year” which took care of the last two quibbles, “codfish” and “spring of the year” (Pitcher 1998)

-this variant matched nicely the earliest known audio recording by Ken Peacock in St. John’s in 1951

• Pitcher also remembered the song being sung in his childhood in the mid-1920s without any hint of dialectic play, suggesting that I’s the b’y may not have become linguistically exaggerated until the mid 20th century
• many people in Newfoundland outports had cows and could therefore make butter
• butter can become infested with maggots, but the word “maggoty” has other meaningful uses: late 20th c and perhaps earlier, had the general meaning of “dirty” and at the same time “plentiful”

• Lloyd Soper noted in 2004 that this song was always performed as a “kind of comedy act” – possible because it incongruously calls attention to non-standard English
• in this way it is similar to “Feller from Fortune” and some versions of “Great Big Sea Hove in Long Beach” and “Harbour Grace”
• but prized songs tell stories, they do not usually draw attention to the surface of the song: perhaps this attention to the surface is a diagnostic of the revival or nativistic form
• became important because:

-way of life was changing: represents a certain view of the Newfoundland rural world that the increasingly alienated Newfoundland urbanite might have wished for in his/her appropriation of heritage

-underscore the romanticized stereotype of the “hardy, happy Newfoundlander”

• Doyle’s book was a compilation of sing-a-longs, far less common in the vernacular tradition – a product of middle-class culture
• “Hip yer partner” – reference to square-dancing, but without the actual directions used in the dance (same thing in “Feller from Fortune”, also recorded by Peacock from Soper)

-not the real thing – North American popular culture idea of square dancing

• became popular at a time when a great amount of changes were occurring – throughout North America, but more rapidly in Newfoundland

-shift from pre-war economic polyphasia to more typically modern single-source economic model of a paying job

-people moving from smaller communities to bigger ones

-reduction of economic diversity – men tied to wage jobs unable to be as independent or handy as they might have been 20 years earlier

-non-local management complained to government that at certain times of the year, local workers deserted their wage jobs at almost no notice, to return to their families in order to get meat and to cut wood for the winter

-in the first half of the century, these were the duties of any husband/father/son, but for a generation of wage-earners, these things had to be done in “spare” time

• shifted economic culture: “I’s the B’y” – a macho brag – the “manly” duties so apparent a generation earlier, were less viable options now, but the song as a distillation of them allowed the boast
• “that build the boat” – the man is handy (boat-building a carpentry seen as two different trades – boat-building valorized over the other)

-connects singer to the sea which defines Newfoundland

-economic and craft knowledge manifest in his boat

• “that sails her” – also has on-the-water skills – also a mystery to Newfoundland urbanites
• “catches the fish” – codfish, the emblematic foundation of the Newfoundland economy
• “brings it home” – family structure of the Newfoundland fishery, inter-relationships of the sexes: adult male catches, brings ashore, splits and salts the fish; adult female and children drain, dry, stack the fish, keep it clean, dry and safe from flies – fish was taken home to the woman to oversee the production of high-quality, saleable fish – again, underlines the autonomy of the fisherman and his family
• “petticoat wants a border” – often spelled “boarder” – ie. she wants a husband
• does not address the life of women – is wholly form a “manly-man’s” perspective
• article then goes through lost/“unprintable” verses, and the songs that probably preceded I’s the B’y:

-“Tidy Idy” or “Tidy I” (same tune, speaks to women’s domestic life)

-then a bunch with curse words

• related songs

-similarity of a version of “Harbour Grace” found by Creighton

• many parodied/ popularized variations (such as Dick Nolan’s funk version, 1980)
• once it got into print, it stopped evolving – revivalists feel beholden to tradition, but that tradition was created by Fowke/Johnston and Doyle
• song is a powerful esoteric symbol of a lifestyle that has passed
• symbolic of a male-oriented, economically centred life

Hiscock, Phillip. "I’s the B’y and its Sisters: Language, Symbol and Crystallization." In D. Tye, M. Lovelace and P. Narváez, eds. Bean Blossom to Bannerman, Odyssey of a Folklorist: A Festschrift for N.V. Rosenberg. St. John’s: M.U.N., 2005. 205 -242.