4 
and Balkan peasants who are said to break into poetic outbursts 
when gathered together for group singing. If illiterate folk 
truly possess the gift of collective utterance, why not the Quebec 
singers as well as their forefathers or the Serbians or the negroes 
of the lower Mississippi? The writer has come to the conclusion 
that the theory of Grimm does not apply to Quebec, nor to 
France, where folk-singers do not create song, but only conserve 
and transmit them orally. 
Tabulating the first collection of records and comparing 
them with those of provincial France made it clear that perhaps 
nineteen out of twenty Quebec songs were fairly ancient ; they had 
come from overseas with the seventeenth century immigrants 
to enliven the new woodland homes. To this ancient patrimony 
new songs were added by rustic song-makers. These form tbe 
purely Canadian repertory, perhaps only ten per cent of the 
whole. All the others have come from France more or less in 
their present state. Some of them were composed during the 
last three centuries and brought into Canada in the form of 
broadsheets and books of canticles. Others, more recent, are 
truly in the folk-song vein; they are marching and college songs 
brought over orally after 1680 by soldiers, priests, and teachers. 
Then we come to the bulk of the repertory — the true folk- 
songs, those of the early immigrants of New France — between 
1608 and 1673. 
Thus we find three classes of songs: the genuine folk-songs 
of old France, those introduced here since 1680 and mostly com- 
posed or transmitted by way of writing, and, lastly, the true 
songs of French Canada. 
The singers themselves could give little information as to 
the origin of their heirlooms. Only a few of the most recent 
songs — election and political ditties and mournful songs on 
drownings and tragic deaths — could be traced back to their 
source. It was the singers’ habit to rehearse what had come 
down to them from the dim past. A composition five centuries 
old was sung next to another dating back two generations. 
Some Gaspe fisher-folk would call the age-worn complainte of 
“The Tragic Home-coming” by the name of Poirier — La chanson 
de Poirier. Poirier was still remembered by the elders, as if he 
were its author. Others claimed that the canticle of “Alexis” 
