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The latest published song collection, Come and I Will Sing You: A Newfollndland
Songbook, was published by Genevieve Lehr in 1985, twenty years after the academic
collections of Peacock and Leach. l The songs were collected by Genevieve Lehr and Anita
Best from 1975 to 1983. The collection is intended as a songbook, and so missing verses
or lines have been filled in with words from other recorded versions. The collection claims
a fairly representative value. but with an avowed emphasis on Ihe native and yet
unpublished songs.2 Of the 120 published songs, three are ballad types. This low
number, compared with the eight to twenty-three ballad types in the preceding collections,
apparently confinns that the genre is fast disappearing from the contemporary repertoire
and submerged by local compositions. More, however, needs to be said. Lehr's original
recordings include seven versions belonging to six ballad types. Only four of these
versions are published although the three others had never been recorded from the singer
before; one of these is a version of "Sweet William's Ghost" (Ch 77), the most prominenl
ballad type in the province.3 Lehr's giving priority to local compositions and lhe high
number of versions of the ballad published previously probably explain her neglect of this
ballad text.
Ballads among folklorists are like monarchs. Once living in untouchable splendour,
they were rudely dethroned and brutalised as a result of too much envied and seemingly
unjustified privilege. Once featured at the top of collections' indexes, the classical ballads
in Lehr's folksong collection are reduced to egalitarian status--or less. They are merely
referred to by their local title but with no mention of either their standard Child title or type
number, their "Iellers patent of nobility." New compositions may be more popular with
collectors today than the rarer old ballads. If so, Lehr's collection may still not represent
the aClual repertoire any better than Karpeles, who favoured traditional ballads and
broadsides.
Mercer and Quigley have wnuen concise but lucid accounts on the lenor of these four
collections and their colleclOrs' approaches. 4 Their infomlation, however, relies moslly on
lhe published collections and hardly draws on the collectors' sources, fieldnotes and
1Lehr's original tape collection, comprising much of the source material for lhc hook, is
deposilcd in MUNFLA and catalogued as MUNFLA 78-50.
2Lehr ix.
]These lhree ballad vcrsions werc recorded from Mr. Moses Harris, LClhbridge, BonaviSla
Bay on March 8, 1976; MUNFLA 78·50/C3144.
4Mcrccr, Newfoundland 1·56 and Quigley t6-7.