Helen Creighton may not have been anti-union. Her interest was in traditional balladry, and thereby hangs a tale.

One afternoon in the early 60s, I say with Helen and Sandy (Dr. Edward) Ives in a restaurant in Newcastle, NB. Sandy was working on his research for the book he wrote about Joe Scott, north woods songmaker. He was searching for a particular song of Scott's, only a fragment of which had he been able to recover. He asked Helen if she had ever recorded it from one of her singers. He gave her the text fragment that he knew, and Helen replied (and this is an almost verbatim quote), "Oh, yes. Someone started to sing that for me at one time, but I knew it wasn't a folk song, so I didn't take it down."

I imagine she would have felt the same way about a miner's recently created occupational song. I do hope that in her later collecting she allowed her singers to give her whatever song they cared about enough to offer.

Sandy