I don’t remember exactly when I first met Mercedes Barry, though it was undoubtedly through her long-time friend Agnes Walsh. I know it was during my first ten-month stay in St. John’s, and that I came to know her a bit better – though not nearly well enough – when I moved back for good. My strongest memories of Mercedes are of her dancing: Running the Goat, waltzing to Ron Hynes, feeling the music and the pulse of this place with an intuition and a passion that was real and raw. Mercedes was one of the people who taught me the Goat; she had, as Agnes Walsh points out, a fabulous understanding of the dance and a deep commitment to preserving and teaching it. She performed it with the Wisht-to’booneen Dancers (of Sheila’s Brush Theatre Troupe), went into schools to teach and perform the dances, and – more recently – had been teaching it in Bonavista. Agnes told me that once, in Vancouver, Mercedes taught the Goat to an all male square dancing group; I wish I’d been around to see that, or at least to hear her recount it.

And that’s a whole other set of memories – listening to Mercedes tell stories: of her childhood in Placentia, her early adulthood in Pennsylvania, her theatrical work, of her family from Merasheen or more traditional tales. Mercedes told a wonderful version of “Peg Bearskin” and had an integral part in the creation and performance of the play “Jack Meets the Cat,” as well as other folktale-inspired plays. She knew, Walsh notes, “how to go after a natural (spoken) rhythm and how to use pauses to show understated humour.” That came from observing old Newfoundlanders as a child and as an adult, and from her love of their manners and ways. “She had a great respect and a great interest in old Newfoundland,” says Walsh, “and we shared that. I remember when my father died and then her mother died and her father died. It’s not so much that our parents died; it’s that a whole way of life in Newfoundland had died and it might not be remembered.”

Barry remembered those ways, and celebrated them in her dancing, in her storytelling, and in the theatre for which she is better and deservedly known. She cared deeply about the culture of this place, and was not always happy with the way it was represented at the Folk Festival or in more commercial and tourist-oriented veues. She tried to counter that with her own work here in town and in rural Newfoundland, and especially in her work with young people.

One more memory: of a dinner at Agnes’s house a couple years ago, long after the meal and the candles still burning, Mercedes was singing “The Barque in the Harbour,” her father’s song. I remember her voice, which admittedly wasn’t the smoothest, but I remember more her face as she sang – how it seemed to hold the fullness, the beauty and the hardness, of that wonderful song, how it bore her deep and complicated love for those words, that music, that one man and all the others who sang those words, and for the place that inspired them.

Mercedes Barry died on October 30th, 2004. She will be greatly missed by the theatrical and the folk arts community of Newfoundland and Labrador.