Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs

by Henry Adam Svec

  282 Due to the oppressive nature of contemporary copyright law, I have been unable to preserve the sanctity of LIVINGSTON™’s “Take it Easy But Take It To the Limit.” However, having parlayed the song several times through Google Translate, we are at least able to include the gist of the composition.

  283 LIVINGSTON™ here is clearly drawn, authentically, to the universal, generalizable issues of data compression: the narrator commands us not to let the sounds of our own locomotive technologies affect us in a negative way, which is essentially the age-old requirement to minimize noise in a channel. See, again, Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964).

  284 See Henry Adam Svec, “If I Had a Hammer: An Archeology of Tactical Media,” PhD Diss (University of Western Ontario, 2014).

  285 See Sharon Parry, “Disciplinary Discourse in Doctoral Theses,” Higher Education 36, no. 3 (1998): 273–299.

  286 Irwin Hayhoe, A Heavy Time: Napoleon’s Final Days (Regina, SK: University of Regina Press, 2001).

  287 However, keep in mind that, as long as the ball carrier has not yet crossed the line of scrimmage, they still remain a potential passer. Vince Pugh, The Rules of The Game: Logistics and Protocols in Canadian Football (London, ON: Insomniac Press, 1995).

  288 See, for instance, Dale Ricks, “Computers Cannot Make Folk Music,” My Musings, Blogspot, September 15, 2015, http://mymusings.blogspot.com/2015/12/computerscannotmakefolkmusic.html.

  End Matter

  Acknowledgements

  My first encounter with phonography occurred at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, when in my sophomore year I began working at the campus/community radio station, CHMA 106.9. I thank all of the numerous enthusiasts, teachers, and artists who expanded my sensibilities during those years in Sackville. Especially WL Altman, Peter Brown, Janine Rogers, Brian Neilson, Neil Rough, Deborah Wills, Mark Blagrave, Adrian McKerracher, Christopher Cwynar, Jordan MacDonald, and Judith Weiss. CHMA and environs helped me to locate if not yet begin walking down the road of folk song collection.

  Next, I would be remiss if I did not thank my colleagues and mentors at Library and Archives Canada. Dr. Earl Spigoff and Bort Pearlman were gracious as well as generous with their time as I adjusted to my new responsibilities in the archive. And I was always able to count on my fellow intern Steven Wright for offbeat comic relief. Additional thanks must be sent to Dr. Cameron Bronnley for drawing my attention to this life-altering opportunity.

  As I began to collect folk songs in my own right, countless fellow travellers came to my aid. I thank Andy Magoffin at the House of Miracles for his studio wizardry, which enhanced in numerous ways my own comparatively amateur efforts with the microphone. Simon Larochette at Sugar Shack in London also contributed to the process on more than one occasion. Nick Dyer-Witheford, Alison Hearn, Bernd Frohmann, Keir Keightley, Amanda Grzyb, Jeff Preston, Cameron Michael Murray, David Jackson, Evan Brodie, Daniel Mancini, Elise Thorburn, Erin Brandenburg, Trent Cruz, Michael Daubs, and Derek Noon lent various forms of technical expertise as well during this period.

  As a lecturer about and public presenter of folk songs, I am again in much debt. I must thank the bars, galleries, festivals, and theatres who have invited or accepted or, at any rate, allowed me to share my findings on their stages and behind their lecterns: Rhubarb Fest, 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, FADO Performance Art Centre, Eastern Edge Gallery, Ethnograhic Terminalia, New Adventures in Sound Art, Sappyfest, Pelee Island Music Festival, Home County Folk Festival, The Apollo, Company House, Phog Lounge, The Bicycle Café, Tranzac, Raw Sugar, The Apollo, Thunder & Lightning, The Black Shire Pub, White Water Gallery, and the Grenfell Art Gallery. Not only the applause but also the questions received at these venues, not infrequently hostile, have helped me to refine my ideas and theories along the way. This book would not exist at all without the constant tribulations experienced in the live presentation context.

  Multiple forms of public and institutional support have bolstered my song-collecting habits, I must also admit. My field-recording expeditions have been aided by grants from the Ontario Arts Council (Integrated Arts); I have been hosted three times as artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre; and I have been artist-in-residence as well at the Roberts Street Social Centre (Halifax), the Klondike Institute of Art & Culture (Dawson City), and the University of New Brunswick (Fredericton). I thank these organizations for aiding and abetting my labours, and I send additional shout-outs in the directions of Imre Szeman, Eva-Lynn Jagoe, Althea Thauberger, Mark Anthony Jarman, Matthew Trafford, Matthew Sarty, and Lauren Cruickshank. I thank my parents, Mary and Henry, too, who have offered much support, including a rent-free basement in London, Ontario, in which I resided for eight consecutive years, as I have described.

  Others have lent a hand by reading and commenting on early drafts of the present volume. For this help I thank Kate Kennedy, Matthew Trafford, Penny Smart, Liam Cole Young, Warren Steele, and Eleanor King. I am beholden to Andrew Faulkner for having noticed several typographical and factual errors, which have been corrected. And this book would certainly not be what it is without the encouragement and productive feedback from my editor, Leigh Nash. I am thrilled and honoured that Invisible Publishing has taken a chance on the genre of folk song anthology.

  Some ideas and even language in the present volume was first articulated in essay form. I am therefore grateful to the editors at the journal Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, who published my essay “From the Turing Test to a Wired Carnivalesque: On the Durability of LIVINGSTON™’s Artificially Intelligent Folk Songs of Canada,” bits of which I have drawn on in Part III.289 I also had an early opportunity to flesh out my thoughts on folk song collecting and Marshall McLuhan in my essay “L(a)ying with Marshall McLuhan: Media Theory as Hoax Art,” which was published in a special issue of Imaginations co-edited by Adam Lauder and Jaqueline McLeod Rogers.290

  From 2015–2018 I lived and worked in Jackson, Mississippi, where I learned much from my generous colleagues in the Department of English at Millsaps College: Anne MacMaster, Michael Pickard, Eric Griffin, Laura Franey, and Ralph Eubanks. My experience in the cradle of North American musical civilization was life-altering in numerous ways. In fact, it was in muggy, magnolia-covered Jackson that I began to sketch out initial plans for the present volume.

  I would also like to send out special thanks to Julián Higuerey Núñez for constant creative competition. My brothers, Jonathon and Joshua, for lots of laughs. And I owe much to Dr. Monica Jovanovich for her kindness, companionship, and encouragement.

  Of course, it is impossible to imagine this work coming to completion without the folk themselves: Andrew Penner, Mathias Kom, Chris Eaton, Olenka Krakus, Tara Beagan, Bryan Pole, Ajay Mehra, Michael Duguay, Ron Leary, Laura Barrett, Wax Mannequin, Jenny Omnichord, Andrew Vincent, Geoff Berner, Al Tuck, El Ron Maltan, Steph Yates, and Andrew Sisk; plus musicians Misha Bower, Nathan Pilon, Marshall Bureau, J.J. Ipsen, Sara Froese, and Kelly Wallraff. My comrade Dr. Mathias Kom deserves special recognition for having built, after my story here ends, new versions and variations of LIVINGSTON™.291 And the Folk MVP for me throughout my career has been the great Canadian musician and composer WL Altman, on whom I have often relied in the live performance context, and in the studio, and as a friend.

  And where would any of us be without Staunton R. Livingston and his epic, poetic CFL players? Indeed, I have stood on the shoulders of giants. To be more precise, although the mistakes and omissions are my own, we stand together.

  * * *

  Lyrical Credits

  I am grateful to the following songwriters for allowing me permission to include their work in this book:

  Laura Barrett, “Save Your Money While You’re Young”

  Jeseka Hickey, “Madonna with No Divinity”

  Mathias Kom, “Nellie”

  Olenka
Krakus, “Maggie Howie”

  Ron Leary, “The Hobo’s Grave”

  El Ron Maltan, “Cruiskeen Lawn”

  Jenny Mitchell, “When the Ice Worms Nest Again”

  Andrew Sisk, “Is the Life of a Man Any More Than the Leaves?”

  Andrew Vincent, “How We Got Back to the Woods This Year”

  * * *

  Notes

  289 Henry Adam Svec, “From the Turing Test to a Wired Carnivalesque: On the Durability of LIVINGSTON™’s Artificially Intelligent Folk Songs of Canada,” Liminalities 12, no. 4 (2016): n.p.

  290 Henry Adam Svec, “L(a)ying with Marshall McLuhan: Media Theory as Hoax Art,” Imaginations 8, no. 3 (2017).

  291 See Mathias Kom, Artificially Intelligent Folk Songs of Canada, Vol. 2, http://folksingularity.com/download.html.

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