When my father died nearly twenty years ago, I wound up with a little brass plaque that says "From the St. John's Folk Arts Council with Our Sincere Appreciation to Our Founding President Lewis R. Brookes 1970". Lewis Brookes was my father, and I suppose this is why the editors of The Broadside have invited me to offer my insights into how and why he founded the organization. Surely, the child who watched him at close hand over the family dinner table for years must have witnessed all the signals and documented all the important moments. Alas, I was not a very observant child.

When he, together with my mother, Paul O'Neill, Fred Raiment and others established the organization in 1966, I wasn't observing at all. I was away at theatre school studying a panoply of interesting dramas and drugs, and much as I would now like to offer some colourful, fly-on-the-wall anecdotes about the birth of the Folk Arts Council, I can't.

At the very least, I wish I could tell you that from an early age in his household I could see that my father was destined to be a champion of folk art. In fact, it was a complete surprise to me. When I left home as a surly teenager my father was a straight guy who worked at the salt fish marketing cooperative NAFEL, a gentle man with a moustache, a once-upon-a-time Newfoundland flyweight boxing champion who failed dismally to teach me his left hook in the basement on weekday evenings but successfully enchanted me with his other hooks -- Silver Doctors, Royal Coachmen and Parmachene Belles -- when he took me trout fishing on weekends. I remember that he and my mother were pretty crazy about set dancing but that's as far as I thought it went. ("I think he came to the dances because your mother dragged him to it," a friend of theirs remarked.) I left home confident that I was destined to be the artistic member of the family. I came back a few years later to see a guy in a Legion blazer, onstage at the Arts & Culture Centre hosting folk art festivals and hobnobbing with people like Emile Benoit. It was Dad. It made me wonder if I’d missed something?

Apparently I had. Over the years since, I've remembered some things, and accidentally discovered others, that should have tipped me off about the man my father would become.

There was the evening, for instance, when I was about twelve and Dad returned home from an emergency trip to Boston in his great glee. U.S. Customs, or maybe it was the American Health Department, had impounded a shipment of NAFEL salt fish on its way to the West Indies because they had found a fly egg on it. They had condemned the whole works and were refusing to allow the shipment to leave Boston harbour. My father was dispatched to fly up and sweet-talk the Americans. Somehow he managed to convince the inspectors that Newfoundland salt fish should be considered differently from other foodstuffs. Sure, it was meant to be eaten, he told them, but the production of Newfoundland salt codfish was an expression of our culture: a folk art. As such, he argued, it should be considered as a rare craft and put in a special category. The flies were a part of the art. Part of my father's art anyway, since he managed to convince the inspectors to give the shipment an exemption and to home the conquering hero. I wonder now if his “thing” for folk art started then.

Another signal I missed was the old ‘78’ transcription record lying at the bottom of my parents' record collection. It never got played when I was growing up, my parents preferring a musical diet of Harry Belafonte, Mantovani (Mantovani plays music for Dining, Mantovani plays Music for Relaxation, Mantovani plays music for Courage and Confidence) Johann Strauss and Charlie Kunz. They occasionally put on Ernesto Lecuana but I was a teenager getting into rock and roll at the time and my parents’ playlist mostly drove me up the wall. So I was not at all curious about the unplayed records at the bottom of their pile. After my father died, though, I took the delicate old disc down to CBC and put it on the only turntable I could find that would still accommodate a 16-inch disc. Out crackled the voice of my father in 1941 or '42, recorded for a radio program when he was in England with the Newfoundland Regiment. The program was apparently a BBC idea to give British listeners information about who these Allied servicemen in their midst were and what sort of a place they had come from. And there was Dad before he was “Dad”, co-hosting a program called Newfoundland Sailor with a corporal from Quebec, reading from a script and explaining what Newfoundland culture was about.

"...Songs bring a man's home back to him as quick as smells. You'd only have to strike up the Kelligrews Soiree and I'd be back in Newfoundland having a real time.
What exactly is a "soiree," Captain?
Well you know, jigs and dances and songs and all sorts. It can go on til morning. Somebody gets up in a mackinaw and a pair of old rubbers with a pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth and away he goes. Dancing a jig or a reel. Its jigs mostly for there's lots of Irish in Newfoundland. And somebody else gives a song and they bring more tea and the room turns blue with tobacco smoke. And the air you breathe is half fishermen's jerseys and half salt cod. And then they'll have another jig. And the women keep it up longer than the men..."

His 30-year-old voice goes on to correct the British presenter's pronunciation of "Newfindlend" and discusses why "The Ryans and the Pitmans" has the same tune as "Spanish Ladies."

For the kid who’d once imagined he would be the artistic guy in the family, listening to this record was certainly humbling. Not only was my Dad talking about culture before I was born, he was even on the radio long before I was born.

Much later, when I finally got into radio myself, I was digging through the CBC Radio archives, and came across a tape labeled "New Years Special: Centennial Year 1967." In 1964 the federal government had begun encouraging the formation of folk art councils across the country, and in 1967 had enlisted them in celebrating Canada's centennial. The St. John's Folk Art Council formed in 1966, and the mysterious archive tape number S69-30 turned out to be my father's voice describing what things looked like a year later when the SJFAC was still in its infancy.

"Well, good as it may have been in this Centennial year, as far as the folk art movement is concerned we're looking forward to the continued and successful growth of the folk arts program. Now I know there were other kids of Centennial projects, swimming pools and libraries and all that, but they all dealt with inanimate objects. This folk arts program dealt with people, it was by people, it was all about people. The impetus that's been given to us by this Centennial year has been tremendous, and we're deeply indebted to those people who back in 1964 had the foresight to provide for a folk art program to be included in all the Centennial celebrations. I only hope that those people in authority now will have the same foresight to see that it can be continued, and properly continued. Because I believe that out of this folk art program, out of the songs and the dances and the traditions of all of our forebears will come this truly Canadian culture that we've all been talking about. And it’s going to be a wonderful culture, that will be the envy and admiration of other nations, and we're all going to be proud to stand up and say "Thank god I'm a Canadian.” And that is what I think folk art is going to do for Canada.

Robert Chafe has just written a new play about Emile Benoit. It will be playing in Stephenville this summer. In it, Emile's character talks about the first time he played in a fiddle contest in Stephenville:

So I play the violin. I play it behind my back, I do the chin music, and the people laugh, they have a good time. But the people judging the contest do not see it like that. And they give me second place. They tell me I should spend less time clowning around and more time playing the violin.

Emile's character explains that the winner of the contest was supposed to go in to St. John's to perform. But a man asked me to come in to St. John's. He did not ask the winner of the contest. He asked me. Now, ain't that something!

I saw Emile Benoit for the first time in a big Folk Arts Council show at the St. John's Arts & Culture Centre more than thirty years ago. I think the man who fixed it for Emile to come in to play was the little guy in the Legion blazer who introduced him -- Lewis Brookes.