The Canadian folklorist Edith Margaret Fulton Fowke, CM, MA, LLD, DLitt, FRSC, who was born in Lumsden, Saskatchewan, in 1913, died on March 28th in Toronto. She left behind her a huge legacy of songs and stories collected from all over Canada, and which are stored in several published volumes of books and recordings. The honours conferred on her, and the many awards she won, testify to the immense regard in which she was held in Canada and further afield.
A fellow folklorist once said that she discovered at first hand why Edith was so successful in her folksong collecting and field work. "Once she was my house guest, and even though I gave her the run of the place while I attended to my own work at the university, she was most demanding. She'd suggest that this or that class or meeting could wait so that I could look after her needs. She was a most insistent woman indeed, but I saw the qualities that enabled her to do such prodigious work in the field."
Among Edith Fowke's publications which throw valuable light on the strength of Irish traditional music in Canada are her Traditional Singers and Songs from Ontario, and The Penguin Book of Canadian Folk Songs. "Anyone who listens to Ontario's traditional songs is immediately struck by their predominantly Irish quality," she wrote. And she added that it is from the Irish settlers has come Ontario's richest folk song heritage. And this in a province long regarded, she notes, as "the most thoroughly British of our provinces".
Busy right up to the end, Edith Fowke published her last book, Legends Told in Canada, in 1994. At the time of her death, she was putting the final touches to a book on bawdy songs from Ontario and New Foundland, a collaborative effort between herself and Dr Kenneth S. Goldstein, the distinguished American folksong expert who died last November.