‘Farewell to Nova Scotia’ is a Maritimes anthem that has been performed by everyone from Stan Rogers to Stompin' Tom Connors; from Anne Murray to The Real Mackenzies; from Gordon Lightfoot to The Irish Rovers. What is perhaps less known is that the song was plucked from obscurity and rearranged by folklorist Helen Creighton.
“Now that I am considered a pioneer,” she later wrote in her autobiography called A Life in Folklore, “young people come to interview me, usually with a tape recorder … When I tell them that I collected folk songs long before there was any such recording device, they look at me as though I came from a different world, as indeed it was.”
While seeking out and recording traditional Maritimes songs, Helen Creighton dragged around a giant instrument called a melodeon that was so big she needed a wheelbarrow to move it.
She recorded songs from all over the Maritimes, including New Brunswick, which she published in her 1971 book Folksongs of Southern New Brunswick.
The most famous song she found, though, was ‘Farewell to Nova Scotia.’
She discovered it in the Summer of 1933, when she and her frequent collaborator, teacher Doreen Senior, went on a roadtrip to Nova Scotia’s Eastern Shore. Creighton wrote in her autobiography:
“Here we got the best-known song in my whole collection, although it was thirty years before it became famous. … [it] combines the pull of the sea with the nostalgia sailors feel towards home. The beautiful tune is in a minor key with changes from four-quarter to six-quarter rhythm and back again. … [it was introduced to us as] ‘The Nova Scotia Song’ [but today is known as] ‘Farewell to Nova Scotia.’”
They were in Petpeswick Harbour, where they stopped to eat their packed lunches in an open field where “our picnic lunch was eaten under lowering skies.”
A storm blew in swiftly, and “We sat in the pouring rain and enjoyed feeling it on our weary brows. However, a little of that was enough and we soon set off … Of course the roads were not paved then; they were all mud … [we decided to take shelter at] a home at the steep hill.”
It was the home of Annie Bell (Bayers) Greenough, a 59-year-old widow whose husband had died four years earlier. In an 1989 interview, Creighton recalled that:
“I hadn’t heard of Mrs. … Greenough before, but she had heard of me because I had been down that way before. People are so hospitable, you know. Mrs. Greenough said, ‘Why didn’t you bring your picnic in the house and have it here?’ Now, I don’t remember whether Miss Senior did or not, but I put my feet in the oven to get them warm and dry. While I was sitting there, Mrs. Greenough sang ‘The Nova Scotia Song’ for us. We liked it right away but … we didn’t know then that the song was as special as it has now become.”
Back then, traditional songs weren’t written – and certainly not credited – in the same way songs are today. They were more collaborative, with different singers adding and subtracting lyrics and melodies; our modern ideas of copyrights and songwriting credits just weren’t a thing back then. That first version Helen Creighton heard, sung to her in an old farmhouse on a hill was not the Farewell to Nova Scotia we know and love today, at least lyrically.
The melody, however, seems to be Annie Bell Greenlough’s creation.
Helen Creighton and Doreen Senior began to search around more throughout the area for different versions of the song, and she explained in her 1989 interview that:
“The song was very popular in that area. I was told that a singing-master taught it in the schools around Chezzetcook and Petpeswick. They all knew it — all the old people knew it because they would have gone to school at the turn of the century.”
The problem was, though, that there were several different versions of the song being sung by different people. This was a new problem on how to record the song that had different versions, one she had actually never faced before.
“So,” she explained, “I made a compilation — something I’d never done with any other song. You see, I’d get a verse here and a verse there. I’d write these verses down and put them in order. They all had pretty much the same tune.”
The song was only known regionally back then. It would take about thirty years before musicians began to use what Helen Creighton and Doreen Senior transcribed that day and record it.
And then it became the incredibly famous song we know today. By 1976, the song was so well known that when Queen Elizabeth visited Nova Scotia, she sought out Helen Creighton to ask her about the song.
There is another significance to her recording ‘Farewell to Nova Scotia’ in the summer of 1933, too. It was, in a way, also saying goodbye to an old version of Nova Scotia that would soon disappear.
That summer, Nova Scotia was, to put it bluntly, a very backward place. Right next door, in New Brunswick, there had been a massive push to improve roads and bring electricity to rural areas more than a full decade earlier. Meanwhile, there had been few efforts to electrify rural Nova Scotia or improve its atrocious roads.
Only a few weeks after Helen Creighton and Doreen Senior heard ‘Farewell to Nova Scotia,’ though, Angus L. MacDonald’s Liberal government was elected, promising an ambitious platform to bring sweeping modernisation to the province.
While the lives of the average person in Nova Scotia would soon vastly change for the better, those changes also caused many distinct regional cultural differences in remote communities to be swept away with increased contact with the rest of the world.
Helen Creighton would collect more than 4000 songs and countless stories from all over the Maritimes, providing us today with an invaluable record of Maritimes culture, and preserving those memories for future generations.
[Helen Creighton also travelled New Brunswick finding folk songs, too! You can read my article on that story here!]
