Special CD celebrates Newfoundland and Labrador’s broad labour history
This year’s Labour Day will be marked with a special event — the release of a double CD celebrating the history and culture of work in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Going beyond traditional industries like fishing and logging, the “Work Work Work: Work and Labour History in Song” CD is a salute to everyone from those who punch a clock to those who do subsistence and even unpaid work, said producer and Singsong Inc. president, Jim Payne, who founded his label more than 30 years ago to celebrate and record traditional music.
The launch happens Monday night at the Johnson GEO Centre.
A combined 50 musicians contributed to the CD from various parts of the province, reflecting both settler and Aboriginal labour history.
The songs are both traditional and new compositions.
Payne said one of the most important songs in the province’s labour history, “We Are Coming, Mr. Coaker,” refers to the origins of the Fisherman’s Protective Union
The selections include a song about a trapper’s wife, the “Anthem of NAPE” and a “Heave Away” reworked as “Heave Away, Me Nurses.”
A Gaelic selection from the Port au Port Peninsula about milling in the Codroy Valley is sung by the great granddaughters of Kenneth Peacock who collected them in a three-volume compilation of outport songs for the National Museum of Canada in the 1950s into the early ’60.
Other tracks delve into trapping, mining, nursing and the railway, injured works and other topics.
Some songs were written and performed especially for the project by Kevin Blackmore and Shirley Montague.
Also on the CD is Payne’s parody of Christmas songs he composed in 1985 to reflect different labour strikes at the former Q Radio, the fisheries and the telephone company. It’s performed by the Labrador Notes.
But the songs aren’t all about protest, Payne noted.
“A lot of these songs are just about the work with no politics involved,” he said.
Payne, who has always written working class songs over the span of his 40-plus years as a musician, had the project in mind for a while and said he was encouraged by Federation of Labour president Mary Shortall to approach the Ray Greening Memorial Fund at St. FX University and from there other supporters enthusiastically came on board.
Work Work Work: Work and Labour History in Song, is the result of a collaboration between the Greening Memorial Fund, The NL Federation of Labour, the Centre for Research into Music, Media and Place (MMAP) of Memorial University, and St. John’s based record label, Singsong Inc.
As he proceeded, Payne soon realized that one CD wasn’t enough to do justice to the diverse material.
“It cried out for an expanded approach,” he said.
What results is a lively, compelling and poignant, collection of tunes sung in English but also includes Indigenous language and French.
The CD package includes an essay, “Labour Relations and the Industrialization of Newfoundland and Labrador by Sean Cadigan of Memorial University, as well as a forward, “Music and Work in Newfoundland and Labrador” by MUN’S Harris M. Berger.
There are also extensive notes explaining each song.
The CD will be sold wherever Newfoundland and Labrador music is sold.