Scott, Joseph William

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Edward D. Ives, “SCOTT, JOSEPH WILLIAM,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 14, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/scott_joseph_william_14E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Woodsman and song maker; b. 5 Feb. 1867 in Lower Woodstock, N.B., seventh of the nine children of John William Scott and Sarah A. Teeling; d. 22 June 1918 in Augusta, Maine.
    • Joe Scott probably had no more than a common-school education, and, being temperamentally unsuited to the farming life he had been born into, he left home as a young man for the greater excitement to be found in the lumber-woods of nearby Maine, where the burgeoning pulp-and-paper industry was creating a boom. He settled in Rumford Falls (Rumford), a raw paper-mill town that had been carved out of the wilderness only a few years before, and he worked up and down the Androscoggin River, where he was known as an expert woodsman and river-driver. In the early 1890s he fell in love with a beautiful young woman named Lizzie M. Morse, but, though the couple filed their intentions of marriage on 19 Oct. 1893, the marriage itself never took place. Lizzie jilted him for another, and that incident became the central and traumatic experience of Scott’s life. A marriage in 1899, to Emma Lefebvre on 22 July, lasted about a year, though there was never an official divorce. Except for a brief return to the Saint John valley for an unsuccessful try at farming and a short spell of homesteading in northern Quebec, he kept to the Maine woods until his death from syphilis. He is buried in Meductic, N.B., not far from his old home.
    • It was not a happy life, or on the surface of it a very distinguished one, but Scott was a song maker, and he made some of the finest and best-loved ballads that ever circulated in the lumber-woods and local traditions of Maine and the Maritimes. Nearly a century has passed since he wrote his most-noted pieces, but a dozen or so are still alive in oral tradition, and his name and skill are still remembered. His lush and leisurely style, replete with conventional natural descriptions of flowers and singing birds, was his hallmark, and his posterity has both appreciated and preserved it.
    • Scott the ballad maker is as clearly definable as an artist as are poets such as Yeats or Browning, and he is important to literary history because he demonstrates that art is not the province of an élite but exists on all levels of culture and society. His importance to folklore study is in showing that ballads are neither authorless nor made faceless by the process of “communal re-creation”; they are the products of individual craftsmen, whose individuality – in spite of a tradition that tends not to honour it – often shows forth and even helps to set new standards and directions for their métier.
  • Third Great Grandson of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=6709
  • Find a Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/105771671/joseph-william-scott