`Folksongs’ much more than music> Folklorist shares tales of years spent on PEI

DRIVE DULL CARE AWAY: Folksongs from Prince Edward Island, by Edward D. “Sandy” Ives, Institute of Island Studies, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, 269 pages, $24.95.

Ask Sandy Ives just exactly what a folklorist is, and then sit back.

“Oh boy,” he sighed professorially over the phone in his office at the Maine Folklife Center at the University of Maine.

“One could go on for some time on that,” he continued. “It’s easy to talk around it. But let’s try the approach I always use. Folklore is the songs, stories, legends, proverbs, beliefs, remedies — essentially all those things passed on through oral tradition — that’s folklore.”

Ives described how making a mud pack to relieve the sting of a bee bite was folklore. He said the recurring image of a boot on a gravestone in Bucksport, where a judge supposedly condemned a witch to death, is folklore.

So is the folklorist a thing of the past? Is it totally yesterday?

“No!” said Ives. “Not at all. What we study keeps changing.”

Ives’ own studies have tended to focus on the Canadian Maritimes and on folk music. His newest book, “Drive Dull Care Away: Folksongs from Prince Edward Island,” is a reflective personal narrative about field work Ives did in eastern and western PEI in the 1950s and 1960s, early in his career, when he was teaching English and raising a young family.

The book, which is published by the Institute of Island Studies in PEI and distributed in this country by University of Illinois Press, is based on Ives’ journals, memories and recordings. Written in a manner that is itself folksie and friendly, the book imparts more than simply the stories, legends, proverbs, beliefs and remedies of PIers, as Ives calls the locals of PEI. It also gives some insight into the twists and turns of a folklorist’s mind.

Here, Ives outdoes himself. He lets us in to the process that has underscored his work for more than half a century. We see him knocking on doors, eating at dinner tables, taking a cup of tea and sleeping on couches — all in the name of folklore posterity. He lugs around the old Webcor home recorder, which weighed more than 40 pounds, and gets people singing. When he returns another year with a smaller model, he has to hold these sessions in his car because the new machine is battery operated and he rigs it up to his car.

And it’s just like Ives to come up optimistically: “I discovered, by the way, that a car made a rather good recording studio,” he writes.

Ives confesses to having two interests: art and history. In “Drive Dull Cares Away,” he proposes that both are at work in the songs of the lumbermen and seamen whose lives are recounted in this music. These are songs rich in the imagery of hard lived lives: on schooners, in the woods, close to the land and the sea and to death. Some are also funny, such as the ballad of Michael O’Brien, a man of marrying age who has all the accouterments of husbandhood but can’t find a wife because: “The girls won’t keep my company, they say my breath is bad.”

Of course, nothing comes off looking as bad as Bangor, where young lumbermen laid over to spend their money between long stints in the woods. This is the city where the innocent “boys on the island” get poisoned by urban evil and then get into all manner of trouble.

Ives doesn’t claim to have gathered the most definitive collection of folk songs from PEI, a nation thick in the history of Celtic troubadours. This is simply Ives’ autobiographical memoir of how he met the people he met and what he learned and gleaned from them. Or in his words: how he was “very much a part of the matrix.”

The book includes a compact disc with 14 fascinating selections of his field recordings, which put the down-home folk in folksie.