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Index of songs in Come And I Will Sing You collected by
Anita Best and Genevieve Lehr and published by
University of Toronto Press © 1985/2003
All Rights Reserved.
(Titles in parentheses are alternate titles from other sources.)
Genevieve Lehr was born in Bonavista Bay, Newfoundland. During the 1970s and 1980s, she developed an interest in folk music, regional language differences and dialect literature. In the early 'eighties, she travelled around Newfoundland collecting songs and stories in the more remote communities where the old song making and singing tradition, which had been brought to Newfoundland by early settlers from the British Isles and Ireland, continued to thrive. She eventually graduated from Memorial University of Newfoundland with a B.A. in Linguistics and a partially completed M.A. in the area of dialect literature. Several years later she completed a B.Ed. and an M.Ed. from the University of Ottawa. Over the years, she has held jobs ranging from fish plant worker to research assistant to writing for the Encyclopaedia of Newfoundland under the hawkish eye of Joey Smallwood. She teaches part time in the public schools in Halifax, and is working on a second manuscript, as well as on a collaboration of poetry and song. She has published poems in a variety of literary journals including TickleAce, ARC, and the Fiddlehead. In 2004, a chapbook, Design of Wings, was published by Running the Goat Press, St. John's. Her first collection of poems, The Sorrowing House was published in the same year by Brick Books. ~ Courtesy of the League of Canadian Poets.
Anita Best was born in the small fishing village of Merasheen, in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. Her ancestors came from Somerset, England, in the late 1700s and were engaged in the inshore and bank fishery until Merasheen was depopulated by government in 1968. On both sides of the family there were wonderful singers of old ballads, tragic sea songs and comical ditties, as well as the occasional storyteller who gathered everyone around on the long winter nights. Anita married Young Pius Power in 1977 and went back to a small fishing village not too far away from where she was born — Southeast Bight. Pius's father, Old Pius, was a great singer and storyteller. So she added his songs and stories to her family repertoire whilst fishing with the Power family from a small schooner in Placentia Bay. In that repertoire were also a number of songs from Bonavista Bay and the French west coast of Newfoundland which she came upon while teaching school around the island. Influenced as a teenager by the folk revivals in England and Ireland, she was one of the founding members of what was likely the first "traditional-rock" band in Canada, Figgy Duff. She left the band after a short time to continue teaching and other cultural pursuits. She has followed careers in broadcasting, university lecturing and archiving around Newfoundland and Labrador, always returning to singing and storytelling when Fortune allows. After leaving The Bight in the 1980s, Anita studied folklore at Memorial University and settled in St. John's again with her daughter Kate. She works from St. John's as a university lecturer, ballad singer and storyteller, and also a heritage consultant with a specialty in cultural policy. She travels around Canada, in the USA and Europe in her storytelling and singing career. Currently she is working with bookmaker Marnie Parsons on a small hand-printed collection of songs by Placentia Bay songmaker Peter Leonard, as well as a collection of five fairytales as told by her late father-in-law.
