Hi, George,

I'm just back from my expedition to your neighborhood, in particular Cape Breton Island and Prince Edward Island. On PEI I happened onto a performance by Clary Croft, whose biography of Helen Creighton I'd just bought and read.

His rendition of If I Were a Blackbird was the first for me, then on a video I bought about Helen Creighton, Raylene Rankin sang it. I'm now determined to learn it (and learn more about it).

Unfortunately, I can't get the midi to play for the DT #2 version above, for which the text looks like the Nova Scotia version; and on your link for the Nova Scotia version, I get the notes, but not the image which presumably has the text and tune. So... any help??

Also an alert to the quirks of Mudcat searching and perils of grammar -- if I search on "Blackbird" I get this thread, but I don't get the song in question. "If I Were A Blackbird" doesn't work either, and even though it's in the DT as "If I Was A Blackbird", that doesn't get you more than the Young Sailor Lad either. (And I wonder how the Armstrong twins of Sherwood, Nova Scotia, sang it in 1949... :-) )

The Traditional Ballad Index doesn't and won't have the Creighton-collected Nova Scotia version because it wasn't published, but this thread ought to cross-reference to this other thread with the background: History of the song ' Blackbird '. (None of the Creighton stuff is in the Ballad Index yet, but I'm working on that.)

~ Becky in Tucson