Lifetime Achievement Award 2004 Recipient

Becky Bennett

This year the St. John’s Folk Arts Council is happy to award it’s Lifetime Achievement Award to traditional singer, Becky Bennett. Born in St. Paul’s on the Great Northern Peninsula in 1908, Mrs. Bennett was one of Kenneth Peacock’s main source singers when he visited Newfoundland in the 1950's, collecting songs eventually published in his three volume anthology Songs Of The Newfoundland Outports. Mrs. Bennett now lives in a nursing home in Norris Point. Her singing has influenced many Newfoundland folk acts, including Figgy Duff, Christina Smith and Jean Hewson, and Daniel Payne.

________________________________________
photo © Canadian Museum of Civilization, photographer Kenneth Peacock, 1958, negative no. J-16263

The following is Daniel Payne's letter in support of Becky Bennett's nomination for this year's Lifetime Achievement Award.

Hi Jean,

The first thing for me to say about Aunt Becky is I wish I hadn't waited 24 years to go visit her. When I finally did, in the summer of 2001, that was my first thought. It just goes to show how sometimes you can be blind to what's right in front of your face - I had travelled around the island, across to Ireland and back and had pored over umpteen collections of traditional songs, all the while searching for the music that was waiting for me in St. Paul's, a five-minute drive from my home in Cow Head. I had grown up with one of Kenneth Peacock's most important source singers practically next door and it took me 24 years to go and visit her. I owned the Peacock collection, I knew her name and her songs, I simply didn't know she was still there.

Becky Bennett is one of the finest singers I have heard anywhere. She is my favorite. She represents a disappearing breed of performer here in Newfoundland - the traditional singer, performing without accompaniment, whose stage is the kitchen, the living room, the home. She sings with a genuine passion, a generosity of spirit, and a seemingly endless repertoire. One of my first visits lasted more than five hours - Becky stopped singing long enough to prepare us a meal of salt fish, potatoes and drawn butter - she didn't repeat a single song. She was ninety three then. It wasn't a matter of coaxing her, once she got started she went on by herself, and by the end of the visit I was trying to figure how to politely get her to take a break!

Becky has never lost her love of the music she sings, nor the willingness to share it, which she does more eagerly than any singer I've ever met. To be in her company and hear her sing is to catch a glimpse of the vitality and vibrancy of the oral tradition as it once was in St. Paul's and the surrounding area where her home was a haven for music and song, with her and her late husband Freeman leading the proceedings with As I Walked Forth In The Pride Of The Season, The Railway Boys, Maurice Kelly, and countless others. J.D.A. Widdowson, Herbert Halpert, Kenneth Peacock, Figgy Duff - Becky's house welcomed each of these over the decades - and through them she has made an immense and lasting contribution to the recording and revitalization of the Newfoundland tradition. To each her door was opened - how much might have been lost had they found it closed!  When I visited in 2001, the crowds of singers and listeners were no longer there, but the door was still open and the music remained. Even today at 95, Becky sings at the drop of a hat in her new home at the long-term care facility in Norris Point. She has spent a lifetime learning, singing, sharing these songs, making a place for them in the hearts and minds of her listeners. The attention and respect that she has given to these ballads, their stories, their humor or tragedy, and her unwavering generosity in performing them has been her gift to this tradition, her achievement. She deserves every accolade that a council dedicated to this culture can give her.

- Daniel Payne