The first time Clary Croft met the distinguished Nova Scotia folklorist Helen Creighton, he was a young musician looking for folk songs. She was a famous author and broadcaster who devoted her career to collecting the songs and stories of the Maritimes.
Croft and his wife visited Aunt Helen, as she was known throughout Nova Scotia, at Evergreen, the big house that's now part of the Dartmouth Museum. They had tea in the parlour and he thanked her for providing a list of songs. He was about to leave when Creighton asked him to sing.
"This was 1973 and I barely knew enough then, but I knew a traditional singer didn't have to have a guitar, so I stood up and I sang," Clary says, launching into the song over the phone. His sweet voice croons a few lines from The Cape Breton Lullaby.
"I finished the song and she took both my hands in hers, looked me in the eye and said, 'You'll do just fine.' That was the start of it."
Croft, now 59, worked with Creighton for 15 years before her death in 1989. The last two years he spent cataloguing the huge amount of material she collected for the Nova Scotia archives. Croft estimates there are more than 16,000 songs in Creighton's collection, as well as stories, superstitions and countless other examples of the region's folklore. The piece of her collection that most Canadians know is the song Farewell To Nova Scotia.
"Helen had an incredible career," Croft says. "One of the marvellous things is that she was able to be so incredibly eclectic. All these different languages and ethnicities are represented. That's why her collection is so rich and valuable."
From the 1930s to the '60s, the tiny, elegant woman travelled to fishing villages and remote outposts across Nova Scotia. During the Second World War, the U.S. Library of Congress lent her a Presto recording machine to document the war effort in Halifax, though she was also allowed to record folk songs.
The machine actually cut a lacqueur-coated disc as it was recording. Creighton described the process to Croft. "While they (the singers) were singing into this strange contraption with a microphone, she had to watch them, turn the dials and make sure everything was working," he says. "And she had to take a new paintbrush and flick the filaments that were being cut from the record off the spindle."
Keep in mind, he adds, that most fishing villages then didn't have electricity, so Creighton had to carry a battery to power her recording contraption. And to add to the multi-tasking, Creighton also asked questions about the songs. "That wasn't a work shanty, was it?" she asks a fisherman in a recent collection of her original field recordings released on CD.
Ottawa's Atlantic Voices choir is celebrating Creighton's work with a concert Sunday. As the pre-eminent interpreter of the material, Croft is a featured guest performer. He's also conducting a workshop at Carleton University today on singing the songs from her collection.
"There is no way in the world I could ever do the work that Helen Creighton did," Croft says. "My role is to keep that collection alive and to make sure it gets out there."
In 1999, Croft wrote a biography, Helen Creighton: Canada's First
Lady of Folklore. He also fields questions on her collection from around the world. Much of her material is online, presented by the province of Nova Scotia as a multimedia web page (www.gov.ns.ca/nsarm/virtual/creighton/).
"Helen became my mentor, my dear friend," Croft says. "She really took me under her wing and realized there was somebody just as passionate about her collection of material as she was. I guess one would say, she basically handed the torch to me."
Lynn Saxberg is a great-great-niece of Helen Creighton.
Helen Creighton Collection
concert
What: Hear songs and stories from the Helen Creighton Collection
Who: Atlantic Voices choir with Clary Croft and Fumblin' Fingers
When: 3 p.m. Sunday
Where: Centretown United Church, 507 Bank St.
Tickets: $15, available at the door. Free for children 12 and under.
Workshop
What: Sing songs from the Helen Creighton Collection
Who: Clary Croft
When: 7 to 8:30 p.m. today
Where: Carleton University, Loeb Building, Tower A, Room 900
Admission: Free
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen