AT the clear fountain, The White Rose, The raftmen. In a few centuries of history, a rich repertoire of songs has slowly formed which still say today who we are, who we have been. Coureurs des bois, voyageurs and lumberjacks have thus left behind them songs to respond to and laments that show that song has played an essential cultural role throughout the history of Franco-America.
In Up the rivera book which is intended as an ode to traditional music, singers, storytellers and Quebec poets who traveled across America, Sébastien Langlois and Jean-François Létourneau postulate that the “Canayenne” oral tradition has the ability to put us in contact “with the sorrows and joys of these men and women who made us, singing the course of the days, the passing of the seasons”.
Born into a family of musicians fond of folkloric evenings, Sébastien Langlois, professor of engineering at the University of Sherbrooke, is not himself a musician, but says he has always been immersed in this environment. “It comes from my father, above all, in the context of the revival of traditional music at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, under the influence in particular of the Veillées d’automne [un festival de musique traditionnelle présenté à Montréal en 1975]which gave rise to Bernard Gosselin’s film, The Vigil of Vigils. »
At the time, he explains, it was a question of reclaiming traditional culture in a certain nationalist spirit, of course, but also in reaction to the commercialization of culture. “There was also in these evenings a desire to make traditional song an opportunity to meet or to enter world music. »
Tradition, beyond prejudice
“For me, it was quite the opposite,” continues Jean-François Létourneau, college literature teacher and author of an essay that proposed a way of inhabiting America based on certain works of the First Nations, The territory in the veins (Mémoire d’encrier, 2017), as well as a novel, The wild territory of the soul (Boreal, 2021).
“I discovered this music through friends at CEGEP,” he says. Like many people, the first contact was rather cold. I had the prejudices of many Quebecers, the songs to answer ended up getting on my nerves, I found that it was going around in circles, he remembers smiling. But by dint of hanging out with musician friends, going to evenings, to shows and festivals, I gradually tamed the environment. Until it becomes a passion. »
The two friends took the measure of their common interest in traditional song over the course of their conversations, between the hockey locker room and post-game beers. They lay a first version of what will become their book in the form of an article intended for a magazine in France. The basic idea: to counter certain prejudices and provide ideas and material to the group Marchands de mémoire, an Estrie collective mixing folk song, storytelling and poetry, of which Jean-François Létourneau is a member.
In-depth study, overview of the literature on the question and anthology, Up the river recalls the importance of song in defining French-Canadian culture over the centuries. Even until today, since the trad community, which the two authors know well, is very much alive today and continues to renew itself.
Up the river wants to be, they write, “a call to listen to what the old songs tell us”. It is the living word of quiet ancestors, who have slipped under the radar of great history. But it is also, according to them, a dialogue with the rest of the world.
“It’s our relationship to what we call world music. It’s something that other cultures seem to accept much more naturally than we do, points out Jean-François Létourneau, who previously worked in francization. New Quebecers, for example, are often surprised at how little we know about our own traditional culture. They are always asking us: what are your songs, what are your dances? Now, I would know what to answer them, but twenty years ago, I only spoke to them about Gilles Vigneault. »
He continues: “Traditional song was part of life. It has always been there and it continues to be so in a different way. There are several songs in the repertoire that address universal themes. Who said something about the human being in the XIXe century and who continue to do so. The context has changed, but we have remained essentially the same animals. There are songs that have passed through the generations because they say something important about who we were and what we have become. There is something timeless and universal about these songs.
Franco-America and First Peoples
Quebecers, they insist on recalling in the wake of Jean Morisset, Éric Waddell, Serge Bouchard and Marie-Christine Lévesque, are not the only repositories of the Francophone experience in America. “We in Quebec tend to forget that too easily. We often forget, moreover, our own Acadian and Franco-Ontarian neighbors, emphasizes Jean-François Létourneau. A few years ago, the documentary an american dream, with singer Damien Robitaille, woke me up there. Franco-America is different, but it is still alive. And when we started working on the project, it was clear that we also wanted to go towards that. »
In this sense, according to them, the traditional song makes it possible to make a link with the territory and to circumvent the pitfall of ethnic nationalism. Up the river is also an opportunity to question our ambiguous relationship to the First Peoples, between the myth of good understanding and certain blind spots of our oral traditions.
Oral traditions that have developed the most in places that were meeting points between different cultures, points out Sébastien Langlois. “The figure of the traveler allowed us to talk about it. The development of culture is most often done through travelers, people who go to meet others. Who will be influenced and stimulated by these meetings. We wanted to emphasize the effect of encounters. »
Jean-François Létourneau agrees: “If we approach these questions through the prism of ethnic or overly narrow nationalism, wanting tradition to remain tradition and not change, I think we forget how it was formed and how it lives. Joséphine Bacon calls it “traveling speech”. And if we want the word to remain on the move, we have to share it, have encounters and update it. »