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ALTHOUGH CANADA is very rich in occupational songs, we have comparatively few industrial or labor songs. Broadly speaking, industrial songs would include those describing any form of work (the songs of sailors and fishermen, lumberjacks, farmers, and cowboys, as well as those of industrial workers), but we usually think of industrial songs in terms of work resulting from the Industrial Revolution-mining, railroading, and manufacturing. Similarly, almost any song about work could be called a labor song, but the term is generally used only for those growing out of conflict between workers and their employers. For much of our history, our main products were furs, fish, lumber, and wheat, and the industries that produced these were slow to become unionized. Fishermen and lumberjacks composed many songs about their work, but only rarely did they protest against their working conditions. Until recently the fishermen were independent or worked on a share basis rather than as employees of a large company. One song that has had quite a run in tradition tells of A Crowd of Bold Sharemen who went fishing for cod and turned on their captain when he refused to share the cod livers.' That might be considered a protest song, but more typical are the accounts of voyages in which the only complaints are about the weather or the food, as in Banks of or On the Schooner John Joe.2 Sealing is almost as important to Newfoundlanders as cod-fishing and has inspired as many songs. The owners who operate the sealing ships hire men to go out to the ice floes along the coast of Labrador each March, and among the many straightforward ballads about these expeditions are two describing a sealers' strike that took place in St. John's in 1902. Written by the popular Newfoundland bard
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