Songs from the Lost Villages
Pipe Street Records
2004
Twelve Songs about the Lost Villages of The St. Lawrence, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the flooding of these historic settlements to create the St. Lawrence Seaway. The CD features an extensive booklet with archival photos, anecdotes, and maps of the area.
Order it directly from the Lost Villages Museum.
James has produced more than 30 CDs as part of his Rhyme Capsules songwriting in the schools program. He visits a school for a week, each class writes a song with James' help, then on the final day a live recording is made of the students performing their songs. Often schools pick themes such as community, the environment, or local heritage. This growing body of work includes CDs from Massachussets, Ohio, New York, Nova Scotia, Manitoba, Alberta and many in Ontario. Highlights include "Mining For Songs" from Canmore, Alberta—a collaboration with the local school and the Canmore folk festival where seniors went in to the schools to tell stories of their coal mining heritage with the students. These tales became the raw material for songs, and the stories were so good James stole some for himself and contributed half a dozen tracks of his own to the album. A similar process happened with his "Songs of the Lost Villages," where survivors of the displayed villages along the St. Lawrence River in Eastern Ontario told their tales to the Ingleside School students.
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Song List
1. Aultsville Memories
2. Old Barbershop Days
3. Hydro Man
4. Mille Roches Girls
5. Ghosts Of Our Villages
6. No Road Home
7. Rosie And Clay
8. Mary Lynn Johnston's Chore
9. The Soul Of Moulinette
10. The Moccasin
11. Back in 1893
12. Sunday Afternoons
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