Bluegrass Messengers

 Geordie- Hatt (NS) 1952 Fowkes BK
 
[This version was collected by Helen Creighton, May 1952 at Middle River, NS from Nathan Hatt. It was first published in Creighton's Maritime Folk Songs p. 27. For a similar Noca Scotia version see also Creighton B from Dobson. Following are her notes on Nathan Hatt from Helen Creighton and the Traditional Songs of Nova Scotia.

R. Matteson 2013]

And she added another important source singer to her roster the next year. This was Nathan Hatt of Middle River, near Chester, on the coast west of Halifax. A dozen of the many songs that Helen collected from Nathan Hatt in 1952 would find their way into her subsequent publications, and she went so far as to write an article about him for Dalhousie Review. The following extracts from that piece, "The Songs of Nathan Hatt", give us a sense of the kind of rapport that Creighton developed with some of her informants as well as a picture of a fairly typical Nova Scotian traditional singer:

To see him you would not expect Nathan Hatt to be a singer. He is an old man now, turned eighty-seven, and spends his days sitting in his rocking chair with head bowed solemnly until something pleases him when he looks up and his whole face becomes alight. Occasionally he enjoys a magazine because the pictures interest him, but he has to pass the stories by, for he can neither read nor write. Yet his life is full of stories - stories in song. If he had the strength he could sing a whole night through and never repeat. His voice has been heard of a summer evening as he sat on his back porch and his neighbours listened from their homes all along the Middle River valley. Others remember him carting lumber to Beech Hill, a nine mile trip begun before dawn with a return at sunset, walking proudly in front of his ox team and singing all the way... As a young man he must have been very strong. He  owned and operated a mill first at Beech Hill and then at Middle River, which accounts for his nickname, Chippy. Then his world crashed about him and he has suffered for the last fifteen years from pernicious anaemia. Being deaf and illiterate a less resourceful man might have given up in discouragement, but not Nathan Hatt. He had his songs for recreation, and they have been  his constant companions.

[When I arrived at the Hatts' small white house] Mr. Hatt was sitting in a rocking chair in the room next the kitchen and seemed pleased to have a visitor. The doctor made the introductions and left immediately. I asked Mr. Hatt to sing. He started off in something less than a minute, but with head averted from shyness. As he got to know me better his head came gradually around, and he would break into merry chuckles when something in his songs amused him. His first song was "The Gay Spanish Maid", pleasant, tuneful and a love song with a sea motif. His voice for all his years and his manner of singing it were encouraging, but I had often taken this song down before, and wanted to hear more before jumping to any conclusion. He followed this with 'The Foot of the Mountain Brow" which was also tuneful, and one I had only recorded once before. But it was his third song that settled the matter... This was a variant of 'The Twa Brothers" found in Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads and in my Traditional Songs from Nova Scotia as well as a few other collections. It was so changed from my only other variant that at first I failed to recognize it although I knew it belonged to the category of songs known as Child ballads....

[T]he words set my eyes to dancing, as they always do when a rare ballad is discovered. The tune has not yet been written down.. ..For several days I worked with Mr. Hatt, adding more and more songs to my collection. Ten, twenty, thirty, where was it going to end? And what of the tape recorder in my car, useless in a house without electricity? Chester Light and Power finally solved the problem by running a cable some three hundred feet from the nearest house [although] the power was always disconnected at night and put on again in the morning. Fortyseven songs: could I get him up to fifty? Three more songs would do it, but that day he sang fifteen. To date he has sung seventy-two...[His daughter, Nellie McInnes] proved a great help [since] if Mr. Hatt sang a song in the evening that he had not thought of during the day, she would jot it down on the calendar. His mind apparently is at its best in the evening, but the power was always off then and we could not record. In fact we only worked three hours in the afternoon each day because he did not get up until noon, but that was enough. One afternoon we turned the recording machine off and plugged my radio in to listen to the E.B.E. program Folk Song Time. Singers love to hear their own songs, but it is seldom that two people sing them exactly the same. He listened to "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight" which he had sung a few days before, and then repeated it as soon as the program was over Other Child ballads sung by Mr. Hatt are "Geordie", "Bonny Barbara Allan", 'The Farmer's Curst Wife", 'The Cruel Mother", 'The Gypsy Laddie", and two verses of "Lord Bateman". He also sings "He's Young But He's Daily A-Growing".[24]

Nathan Hatt's repertoire was not limited to ballads, Child or otherwise, since he also provided Creighton with texts and tunes of a considerable number of folk lyrics. She would return to record him again in 1954, at which time he sang another Child ballad, "The Knight and the Shepherd's Daughter."

GEORDIE- From Folk Songs of Canada 2 pp.26-27 (1967 edition) edited by Fowkes w/music collected by Helen Creighton, May 1952 at Middle River, NS from Nathan Hatt. Creighton's Maritime Folk Songs p. 27  (See also Creighton B from Dobson, in NS)



As I walked over London bridge
Oh so early in the morning,
It was there I met a pretty fair maid
All lamenting for her Geordie.