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Louise Manny was born 1890, in Gilead, Maine. She moved to
Newcastle, New Brunswick, with her family when she was 13 years
old. She was educated in Newcastle, and at the Halifax Ladies
College (as was Helen Creighton), and the Ursuline Convent in
Quebec City. She graduated from McGill University in Montreal in
1913 with a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in French and
English. After graduation she taught briefly at the Halifax
Ladies College before returning to Newcastle.
In 1947, Manny began collecting
folksongs at the request of Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, a
wealthy British politician and newspaperman who was born in New
Brunswick. As she recalled:
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Louise
Manny |
In 1947 Lord
Beaverbrook opened up a new world for me by saying, "Why don’t
you go out and collect New Brunswick folksongs? I’ll send you
a fine recording machine.". . . . I said to Lord Beaverbrook,
"Folksongs? I don’t believe there are any-not nowadays at
least. . . ."
"Nonsense" said His Lordship,
"of course they have folksongs. Why, when I was a boy they had
a song about the Jones Boys." And here he sang:
"The Jones Boys! They built a
mill On the side of a hill, And they worked all night, And
they worked all day, But they couldn’t make that gosh-darned
sawmill pay."
". . . . Just you start
collecting, and you’ll have a lot of fun."
What a masterpiece of
understatement that was! "Little did I think what lay before
me!" as the old songs are fond of saying. Little did I think
that in the following years. . . . I would meet Wilmot
MacDonald who knows a hundred songs . . . . That the
completely bilingual Allan Kelly would sing French and English
songs, among the latter the ancient False Knight upon the Road
. . . . That William Dickson would come in from Craigville to
sing The Old Beggar Man,. . . . That we would be on the radio,
and that people in country districts would walk miles on
Sunday afternoons to hear "our own songs" and that lumber
camps would stop work to hear our Wednesday afternoon
programs.
Louise
Manny and James Wilson, Songs of the Miramichi, (Fredericton,
New Brunswick: Brunswick Press, 1968)
She found singers through
notices in the local press and radio and on the screen at the
Newcastle movie theatre. She asked those who knew traditional
songs to come to the Legion Hall, where she had set up her
recording equipment. Evidently this actually worked, and her
singers came to her, although the usual folklorist’s method was
to seek them out in their homes. The Beaverbrook Collection, as
she called these recordings, is currently housed at the New
Brunswick Provincial Archives.
Louise Manny founded the
Miramichi Folksong Festival, today one of the longest-running
festivals of its kind. Folklorist Edward D. "Sandy" Ives
describes the singers during the early years of the festival as
"elderly woodsmen, river-drivers, stevedores, farmers,
housewives and the like performing for an audience composed
almost entirely of their friends and neighbors". Manny
controlled the festival until her death in 1970, deciding who
could perform, and what they could sing. She insisted upon local
performers. Once she told Pete Seeger that, while he could come
to the festival, he could not sing. At her death in 1970, her
last thoughts were of the festival. This is reflected in the
monument to her work, erected in Newcastle in 1987. The
inscription includes her last words, "Keep the festival alive."
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