Bringing Carrie Grover’s musical story back to life
Later this month, the Wolfville Historical Society is aiming to make that woman, Carrie Spinney Grover, better known. And deservedly so.
Way back before radio and before television, much less computers streaming entertainment, people amused themselves with live music and song.
Once upon a time there was a woman from Kings County who knew 400 songs.
Later this month, the Wolfville Historical Society is aiming to make that woman, Carrie Spinney Grover, better known. And deservedly so.
Grover came from a family with broad British roots, who arrived in Nova Scotia before the American Revolution. She was born in 1879.
Grover grew up in a home in the Black River area that was full of the songs of her ancestors. The youngest of nine children, she took up the fiddle. When she was 12 years old, a lack of mill work for her father propelled the family to a new home in Maine.
On the request of her parents, Grover set about preserving the ballads and songs of her youth for her children and grandchildren. She created a songbook, A Heritage of Songs, with more than
100 traditional tunes, along with a memoir before her death in 1959. Her collection was largely lost, except for being stored in the Smithsonian Museum.
Back in 1999, an American teacher came across Grover’s songbook in the Seattle Public Library. Julie Mainstone Savas was captivated by the musical history she discovered.
In 2020, folks at Randall House were gearing up to recognize Grover with a concert. The pandemic made sure that didn’t happen, but the idea is ramping up again.
So few people know about Carrie Grover, or know that her song collection is lodged in a Washington D.C. museum.
In essence, her work made her the peer of another Nova Scotian preserver of folksongs, Helen Creighton. Both will be recognized on Aug. 24 at the Al
Whittle Theatre.
In her memoir, Grover noted that the only genre of music she ever heard were traditional songs carried here by the frequent immigrants from the British Isles and Europe. Folksongs were the popular sound of the era.
Looking back on her youth, Grover recalled a self-sufficient life where the family grew or caught what they ate. Clothes were made of wool from their own sheep and dyed with natural plants. She described the day ending in soft fire light and the sound of her parents singing.
Grover was married at the age of 17 in 1896. She and her husband had three children. She continued singing throughout her life.
During the 1940s she sang at folk festivals in Boston and Washington D.C., coming to the attention of well-known song collectors like Alan Lomax.
It was Lomax who gave her the idea of publishing a book of her songs. Returning to her old high school, Gould Academy, Grover got help from music instructor Ann Griggs, who transcribed all 140 songs. It was actually the school that published A Heritage of Songs when she was 75 years old.
In the end she sat in front of the clunky recording equipment of that time and left behind a collection of 242 songs and nearly 50 fiddle tunes.
Her writing was significant too. There were dozens of letters to
Lomax and Creighton. Grover also wrote cousins in Nova Scotia imploring them to help her remember the words to forgotten verses.
Daughter Ethel typed her mother’s handwritten stories into a 67-page booklet. There were stories about crafts and school games and her brother’s tragic drowning one Christmas Eve.
Due to her fascination, Mainstone Savas went on to create a website with music and recordings. There are lists of songs that Grover’s father and her mother loved. This terrific online resource shares the traditional folk songs that Grover either sang or preserved.
While working on what she called the Carrie Grover Project, Savas Mainstone visited the Valley a decade ago and met with local families that might have called Carrie a relation. She heard about quilting get-togethers and barn raisings.
“I felt such a responsibility for the music that it not be lost and not be forgotten,” she told CBC.
“The accumulation of her words is our window to the world she knew in an era of songsinging that has slipped through the fingers of modern times.”
The Carrie Grover Project is a 21st century attempt to ensure the preservation of a world we lost sight of. Surely Grover deserves to be remembered, especially in this place. Come hear her songs in concert on Aug. 24.