Mary Travers-Bolduc - La Bolduc
Our new photo essay Song for the New Depression features the Montreal-based musicians Sabah Lachgar and Hassan El Hadi, performing Ça va venir – a song first made famous during the Depression years by Mary Travers. Known as La Bolduc, Travers attracted a huge following throughout French Canada with her catchy songs inspired by current events and everyday Depression life.
Born in 1894, she was raised in Quebec’s Gaspé region, inheriting a rich folk tradition from her Irish father and French Canadian mother. As a child, working as a cook at a logging camp, she would entertain lumberjacks with her vocal and instrumental skills – accompanying herself on the fiddle, accordion and harmonica.
By the time she was teenager, Travers had moved to Montreal in search of work, finding employment as a maid and factory labourer, and she was barely 20 when she got married and started a family of her own. She started making public appearances alongside other musicians in the 1920s – and her easy rapport with audiences lead to a recording contract.
Throughout the early 1930s, she toured extensively with her own ensemble, La Troupe du bon vieux temps, performing throughout French Canada as well as in French-speaking communities in the north-eastern US. She developed a distinctive style – writing songs that spoke directly to the everyday struggles of her audiences, embellishing her performances with “turluttes” – a kind of folk vocalese. She often used existing folk melodies as vehicles for her own comic lyrics on subjects that ranged from FDR’s New Deal to the birth of the Dionne Quintuplets.
La Bolduc died 1941, having recorded about 100 original songs – a legacy that’s earned her an enduring place within Canada’s social and musical history. To learn more about the woman who was often referred to as the unofficial poet laureate of Depression-era French Canada – visit the website of Library and Archives Canada.
Philip Lewis, writer-researcher
©2009 Le blogue PIB / The GDP blog
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