WHERE STORIES ARE TOLD: A NOVA SCOTIA STORYTELLER'S MILIEU

FOOTNOTES

• See, for example, Arthur Huff Fauset, Folklore from Nova Scotia, Memoirs of the American Folklore Society Vol. XXIV (New York: G.E. Stechert, 1931); Helen Creighton, Bluenose Ghosts (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1957); Helen Creighton, Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia (New York: Dover, 1966); Louise Manny and James R. Wilson, Songs of Miramichi (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Brunswick Press, 1968). For a useful folklore bibliography on the Atlantic provinces and New England, see Edward D. Ives and Bacil Kirtley, “Bibliography of New England-Maritimes Folklore,” Northeast Folklore, 1 (1958), 19–30; 3 (1960), 20–23.
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• See Edward D. Ives, Larry Gorman: The Man Who Made the Songs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964); Ives, Lawrence Doyle: The Farmer-Poet of Prince Edward Island (Orono: University of Maine Press, 1971); Ives, “A Man and His Song: Joe Scott and ‘The Plain Golden Band’,” in Henry Glassie, Edward D. Ives, and John F. Szwed, Folksongs and Their Makers (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1971); pp. 69–146. Both Gorman and Doyle were Prince Edward Islanders; Joe Scott was from New Brunswick.
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• For a discussion of Coffil's attitudes toward stories and storytelling and a comparison between him and his brother John, see Richard S. Tallman, “‘You Can Almost Picture It’: The Aesthetic of a Nova Scotia Storyteller,” Folklore Forum, 7 (1974), 121–130.
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• Richard Bauman, “The La Have Island General Store: Sociability and Verbal Art in a Nova Scotia Community,” Journal of American Folklore, 85 (1972), 333.
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• Kay L. Cothran, “Women's Tall Tales: A Problem in the Social Structure of Fantasy,” St. Andrews Review, 2 (1972), 21.
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• Gerald Carson, Country Stores in Early New England (Sturbridge, Mass.: Old Sturbridge Village Booklet Series NO. 3, 1955), p. 14.
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• The Story of Five Islands, Colchester County, Nova Scotia, compiled and edited by The Women's Institute, Five Islands (Sackville, New Brunswick: The Tribune Press, 1969), p. 72.
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• Tape recorded interview with Robert Coffil, January 11, 1973. Original copies of tapes and transcripts are on deposit in the Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Archive (MUNFLA), although I do not have the accession numbers for the tapes and transcripts on deposit at MUNFLA.
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• Tape recorded interview with Ernest L. Eaton, March 21, 1973. Tape on deposit at MUNFLA.
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• Parrsboro, where Bob's brothers John and Alden eventually settled, was part of Kings County until 1840, and until the late 1940's had close economic and social ties with Kings County on the opposite side of the Minas Basin, ten miles by water, one hundred fifty miles by road. Coal from Springhill was brought by boat–the Coffil brothers'–to Kings County weekly until the late forties; a car and passenger ferry passed daily between Parrsboro and Kingsport and Wolfville in Kings County across the Basin until the outbreak of World War II. See A.W.H. Eaton, The History of Kings County, Nova Scotia, Heart of the Acadian Land (Salem, Mass.: The Salem Press, 1910), pp. 115–116; and Esther Clark Wright, Blomidon Rose (Windsor, Nova Scotia: Lancelot Press, 1972), pp. 117–118.
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• Kings County is the bread basket of Nova Scotia, leading the province in the production of vegetables, fruit, livestock, and poultry. Seventy-seven per cent of the fruit orchards in Nova Scotia, for example, are in Kings County. Thus, despite its proximity to the sea, the area is land-oriented with agriculture as its principal industry. Those who do not farm find employment in the multitude of supporting or secondary industries and trades that are to be found wherever man lives by the land. In recent years, tobacco has also become an important cash crop. See Mabel G. Ferguson and Marion Schurman McLellan, A History and Geography of Kings County (Wolfville, Nova Scotia: Lancelot Press, 1968), p. 29.
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• Tape recorded interview with Robert Coffil, September 29, 1972. Tape and transcript on deposit at MUNFLA.
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• Longfellow's Evanqeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847) initiated a tone of verse for the area that has continued to the present, and includes such anthologized Canadian poets as Sir Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, and John Frederic Herbin, an Acadian descendant who worked as a jeweller in Wolfville. Longfellow, an American, never visited Grand Pre, the setting for his narrative romance, but got what he needed of the area's history and geography from histories of Acadia that were then available and got the idea for the poem from a friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne's who told him the story. Longfellow made many changes in the story he heard by word of mouth. The specific details in his description of the area are largely erroneous, and his description of Acadian life is based on his firsthand acquaintance with rural Sweden. Nonetheless, the poem did capture a mood that in many ways does typify the area even today. For a representative selection of Kings County verse, see Eaton, History of Kings County, pp. 360–398. A few poems on the cultural landscape of the Minas Basin area, by Roberts, Carman, and Herbin, are also included in Ralph Gustafson, ed., The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse (revised edition; Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1967). C. Bruce Fergusson's introduction to a souvenir edition of Longfellow's Evangeline is a valuable source on the historical and literary background of this work. See Henry W. Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie, intro. C. Bruce Fergusson (Halifax: H.H. Marshall, 1965), pp. 5–36. Esther Clark Wright, in Blomidon Rose, discusses the inaccuracies in Longfellow's work on pp. 190–196, and her book in its entirety is eloquent testimony to the effect the landscape has on its inhabitants.
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• Tape recorded interview with Lloyd Cook, May 1, 1973. Tape on deposit at MUNFLA.
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• Ibid.
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• Ibid.
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• Tape recorded interview with Robert Irving, May 9, 1970. Tape on deposit at MUNFLA.
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• This discussion is based on the fieldworker's most recent visit to Scotts Bay, August 26, 1973.
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• Personal field notes, January 13, 1973.
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• Personal field notes, September 21, 1972.
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• Ibid.
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• Personal field notes, October 1, 1971.
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• Ibid.
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• Personal field notes, August 8, 1972.
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• Personal field notes, September 21, 1972.
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• See William Hugh Jansen, “The Esoteric-Exoteric Factor in Folklore,” in Alan Dundes, ed., The Study of Folklore (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1965), pp. 43–51.
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• Tape recorded interview with Robert Coffil, January 11, 1973. Tape and transcript on deposit at MUNFLA.
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• Ibid.
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• Ibid.
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• Bauman, “The La Have Island General Store,” 333–334.
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