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a little while ago. We emptied the club in the first set They all went
Oul one by one.
IP: Thal's because the songs were too long?
PM: Well, I think it was lxcause it was something new to their ears. That
particular night, we played well. we had a good sound, there was no
reason why they should all have left. We did three, four folksongs, we
also threw in some of our own originals. We also played some jigs and
reels. But the reason why, of course, is that it was stuff thai they had
never heard before and they didn't want to listen. They didn't want to
spend the kind of energy it would have taken for them to listen to these
songs. You find that more and more. It's frightening. It's particularly
true in Newfoundland; places like Toronto, or across Canada in the
larger centers, where people are a little more cosmopolitan and open and
they have the population whereby there's enough people to frequent a
bar where people want to listen to inteUigent music and the other ones
who don't, they can go somewhere else. The town is not so bad but on
the bay, it's sort of a lost cause since the older people had died and the
younger people don't really give a shit about the older songs. General
audiences, it's just going down and down and down, especially with
the young people at the bar scenes, people who listen to disco and stuff
like that, the music is so tuneless, and formless and Iyricless that they
just can't listen any more, they just don't have the power. It makes
them really uncomfortable. 1
Community concerts attended on Fogo Island in the summer of 1987 and interviews
with performers, from teenagers accompanying themselves on guitar to choir singers
singing country and western with electric band and pensioners delivering old and long
narrative songs unaccompanied, Ix>re out Cox's observation of the blending of musical
styles, under the effects of "abandonment," "hybridization" and "juxtaposition."2 While I
found ample illustration of the latter two phenomena, the first, in my experience, appeared
less obvious than assumed. The songs performed in concert by Gordon Willis, one of
Newfoundland's "last" representatives of the old singing style, were either hUlllorous or
evocative of the hard life past; none of his public perfomlances, I noticed, included any
tragic love ballads. An afternoon's visit and personal interview at his home and special
request for such songs, however, revealed that his repertoire was not lacking in them. This
suggests that the performance context determines the active repertoire more than the subject
or mood of particular songs. So, while Cox relates an audience's vehbnent rejection of
"The Ella M. Rudolph," a long shipwreck ballad sung unaccompanied by an elderly man at
a concert dominated by "acculturated music," there is reason to claim that the disaster song
tradition had been adapted rather than abandoned. Keith Donahue, one of the young starof
1MUNFLA 87.159/C7639.
2Cox, ft'l've ft
385; the full recordings of these concerts are catalogued as MUNFLA 87·
159/CI0631, CJ0632. Ct0640. Cl0641 and CI0642.