A folklore student at Newfoundland’s Memorial University, Posen was hired by the Mariposa Folk Festival to find performers for the festival. After travelling up-country, he landed in Chapeau, Quebec, a place where he was surprised to find a large collection of traditional songs and a number of talented singers.

Intrigued, Posen would return to the area years later for his PhD thesis. He interviewed singers, listened to them sing, and researched many traditional songs, including the region’s most famous tune, The Chapeau Boys. The book that emerged, For Singing and Dancing and All Sorts of Fun, remains the authoritative text on Chapeau’s musical culture.

On Thursday night, Posen reminisced on his Chapeau experiences in a talk put on by the Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network (QAHN), delivered over Zoom.

Posen said in the talk that the region differed from others that he had visited or even heard about, where singers were more dispersed. In Chapeau (and neighbouring communities of Chichester, Nichabau and Sheenboro), “Singing was commonplace, and expected,” he said.

Posen said during his first trip to the area, he discovered singer Loy Gavan, who along with his siblings were known as “Gavans’ Larks” for their singing that could be heard from several farms away. Posen brought Gavan to Mariposa to perform at the festival, only to find out when he got there that his colleague Edith Folk had come back from a similar mission only to bring Loy’s brother Lennox, who lived in Quyon.

“The two brothers didn’t know each other was coming, and neither did I. Loy and Lennox performed charmingly at Mariposa, and were my introduction to this place called Chapeau,” Posen said.

When Posen returned to the area a few years later for his PhD research, he spent time with many skilled Chapeau singers. But he was best acquainted with the Gavan family, spending time on their family farm in Nichabau and learning their songs.

He said many of the common songs in the region he had never heard before. “I found that many had been collected in the British Isles, but never in North America. And here they were in Chapeau.”

Aside from collecting individual songs, Posen also wrote about the culture surrounding music in the area. Wherever singing was taking place, whether it was at the family farm, a community hall, or at Fred’s Hotel, he said many singers wouldn’t sing without first being “coaxed.”

Posen said “coaxing” was part of a delicate dance that singers and their audience played. When an audience member wanted to hear a song, they would try to get the singer going by requesting a song, or even bribing them with alcohol.

“You didn’t want to sing unless you were sure you had an audience that wanted to hear you. Their responsibility was the signal to you that they did, by coaxing,” Posen said.

Now, over 50 years since Posen first came to Chapeau, singer Brian Adam said Posen’s book is one of the best resources on the area’s music, dissecting the Chapeau Boys song line by line and highlighting the culture that surrounded the music. “It’s a treasure,” Adam said.

Posen remarked at the time that Adam was perhaps the best singer of The Chapeau Boys, as he was able to sing the entire song from memory. Now 82, Adam said that art is being lost as many singers featured in Posen’s research have passed away. “We’re all dying off,” he said.

He said there are some younger people in the community that are “at least half-assed interested” in keeping the songs alive. He said a small group of people of his generation who grew up singing the songs like to sing them whenever they can – even though they might not always sing in tune, he joked.

“There’s still a cluster of people that not only know the songs, that are maybe not consciously protecting [them] but maybe incidentally protecting [them],” he said.

Several songbooks exist with some of these old tunes, both from Chapeau and the Ontario side of the Ottawa Valley. Songs Lennox Sings and Upper Ottawa Valley Shanty Songs and Recollections: The Rusty Leach Collection were both published by Pontiac Printshop, and continue to be for sale at the Printshop in Shawville.

Posen’s original recordings of many of these songs are available by request at the Canadian Museum of History.

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