It has been seven years since I last worked with Lisette's Journey and the songs of the fur trade. I've been caught up in the countercurrents of midlife: the turmoil of job changes, the passing of both my parents within three months just at the start of the pandemic, two major joint replacement surgeries, and some wonderful new opportunities to launch The Mermaid's Tavern online folk club, serve five years as Program Chair and Board member of the New England Folk Festival (NEFFA), take Gudrid the Wanderer to Nova Scotia, and develop an in-depth centennial program around sailor and sea chantey collector Joanna Colcord (www.joannacolcord.com) in 2024.
The last time I presented Lisette's Journey was in 2017 in the Netherlands (see Notes on a Lifetime of Passing). It was, I determined, my last first-person appearance as Lisette Laval. With a hugely messy first draft of a book-length manuscript under my belt, I found myself facing the realities of a cross-border disconnect from a Canadian audience familiar with the fur trade, and a younger generation that might find my 35 years of pre-intersectional feminism dated and irrelevant to everyday life, especially here in Anglophone New England. I couldn't see my way forward to finding an audience for whom to finish the book. Who would care about a woman paddler in the age of GPS?
My dreams of a Lisette's Journey bicentennial tour in 2019 fell afoul of arthritis pain so bad I couldn't walk, let alone travel to British Columbia and Washington state. Lisette's Journey languished while I pursued a life after first-person living history reenactment. I was sad, but I couldn't see a path forward.
And now, in 2025, I find myself unabashedly indulging in pure intellectual escapism in the face of All The Things. The last thing in the world I care about being is relevant to the horrors of what passes for politics in this United States. I miss Canada like hell, especially now. However, I know that my emigration window has probably closed, most likely for good, since we own a US home near some of the best health care available and my mobility continues to limit my adventures as I near retirement age myself. I'm settled in Boston with a retired husband, a basement full of books and music, and a work-from-home lifestyle that leaves me a few hours a day to surf the internet for newly digitized treasures. And boy, have I got one to share.
Last weekend, I joyously rejoined my sea music peeps for the fourth annual Connecticut Sea Music Festival and its unique Symposium on the Music of the Sea, where last year I presented on Joanna Colcord. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing my colleagues Jerry Bryant, Charlie Ipcar, and Stephen Sanfilippo present for not-the-first-time, and I began to wonder how--in addition to encouraging and mentoring some of my favorite younger performers to present--I might make so bold as to submit another proposal myself. What might I do?
No one in sea music seems to know much about the voyageurs. They sang like sailors, worked together like sailors, and covered an epic landscape from Atlantic to Arctic to Pacific coasts. Surely their songs are worthy of a Symposium paper.
The moment the idea struck me, I was obsessed for a week straight. I have a massive bibliography from 35 years of research, and in the interim, both familiar and obscure sources have come online. Within three days, I had a draft PowerPoint deck on my iPhone that sketched out:
- Where and when was the fur trade era?
- Who were the voyageurs?
- Why did the voyageurs sing?
- What are some of their best-known songs?
- What do we know about these songs?
- Who sings these songs today?
Questions #4 and #6 are interacting in a very interesting way. From 1988 to 1994, I learned voyageur songs in the field, from reenactors at parks and museums and festivals. I have since learned a lot that I didn’t know then about how to work with collected material and think critically about collectors and their collections in historical context. How many voyageur songs can I now document to the period, and from what sources?
Two early sources are now online that are making me drool. Through Grace Lee Nute's seminal 1987 work The Voyageur, I knew of the work of Francophone ethnographer and folklorist Marius Barbeau, and he mentions one of his sources as the French-Canadian musicologist Ernest Gagnon. Gagnon’s Chansons populaires du Canada (1865 and 1880) is now online, with not only sheet music but MIDI files. Youpe!
I found most of what I know, plus much more, in that collection, and could listen to a snippet to check if it was the tune I knew. But the North West Company and Hudson’s Bay Company merged in 1821, and the rise of the railroad marked the end of the voyageur era as surely as steam killed sail. So what would be a primary source that would document the voyageur songs I learned in the 1990s to the 1820s or earlier?
The answer cost me $19.50 for a JSTOR subscription. Marius Barbeau himself published an article (in English) in the American Folklore Society journal in the 1950s on the Ermatinger Collection of Voyageur Songs ca, 1830. Eleven songs, with sheet music and lyrics, before 1820. I had hit pay dirt.
From 1818-1828, fur trader Edward Ermatinger collected 11 voyageur songs in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company. When it was first published in 1830, this was the first set of French folk songs of any type recorded in the New World. The next would not be published for 35 years in Gagnon's 1865 edition. Gagnon did not include the Ermatinger collection and was probably unaware of it as it was in private hands. The Ermatinger manuscript was only donated by the Ermatinger family to the Archives of Canada in 1943, where in 1954 Barbeau analyzed and transcribed the work in the Journal of American Folklore.
Back in the early days of t'internet, I discovered and adopted a search strategy known as "berrypicking." This combination of browse and search led me through a bilingual labyrinth of keywords like "voyageur songs," "chansons de voyageur," and the various authors' names mentioned above, discovered by browsing bibliographies from Nute to Barbeau to Gagnon. This journey back in time through collectors was something I learned from my Colcord research, and it stood me in good stead.
And that's how I happened to come across a JSTOR link to the Barbeau article, which is now digitized and available with a paid JSTOR subscription (for which I signed up immediately to get this article).
Wait for it. Only ONE of those songs is in the fur trade reenactors’ repertoire today, let alone that of three decades ago. I had just found the first collection of voyageur songs in North America and it appears to be untouched by modern singers—the equivalent of discovering an earlier chantey source than L.A. Smith or W.B. Whall, made during the days of sail. It’s like finding an earlier edition of Colcord published in 1850, at the height of the chantey era, with 11 songs unknown to Stan Hugill..
Several outcomes suggest themselves. First, I now have ten new songs to learn. But for whom? I must find someone who cares (beyond the Symposium, although that will be nice if they have space for me). To whom can I give these songs, which are DIFFERENT than the ones in the equivalent of Hugill? Will voyageur reenactors care that the songs they sing today are only documented to 40 or 50 years past the end of their era—and that there are a dozen more that have a primary source that no one seems to know?
Meanwhile, I cannot find anyone on the internet singing ANY traditional voyageur songs in context, 35 years after I learned them in the field. Festival du Voyageur (FdV) in Manitoba has gone commercial, doubtless for survival. Although they publish 18 French voyageur songs on their website, the only thing they have on YouTube is a bilingual modern and family-friendly 1969 composition by Daniel Lavoie called “The Song of the Voyageur" set to the air of Chevaliers de la Table Ronde.
After scouring YouTube, Spotify, and Google, I can find NO recordings of any of the songs from the Ermatinger collection, none of which overlap with the voyageur material that was so familiar to the reenactor audiences around the campfire when I played FdV three times in the 1990s. This is an extraordinary trove of material, and I do hope someone will be as excited about it as I am.
You nice people reading this blog care about heritage music and scholarship considerably more than the Average Bear. I’m aware that there are Much Bigger Things going on in the world, but I felt like that about Joanna Colcord and that project turned into sixteen gigs and included three national conferences. I feel like I have made a Big Discovery, and you folks might understand how I feel. This is me hiding under the geeky bed of independent scholarship. As the spirit moves you, please take a look at the emerging draft deck of Songs of the Voyageurs, which now contains all 11 songs from the Ermatinger collection.
