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Dictionary of Miramichi Biography

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CALHOUN, JOHN (1845-1939)

CALHOUN, JOHN, songwriter; b. Parker's Ridge, 27 May 1845, s/o Andrew Henry Calhoun and Rachel Campbell; m. Frances Minnie Lister, of Fredericton; d. Gordon Vale, 2 Jan 1939.

My name is Peter Emberley

As you may understand

I was born on Prince Edward Island

Near to the ocean strand.

In eighteen hundred and eighty,

When the flowers were a brilliant hue,

I sailed away from my native isle

My fortune to pursue.

John Calhoun's claim to remembrance rests on his authorship of this and the other eight stanzas of "Peter Emberley," the best loved of Miramichi woods ballads, which recounts the dying words of a young man from Prince Edward Island who was fatally injured while working in the lumber woods near Boiestown in the winter of 1881. Calhoun was one of those who helped take the young man out to the settlement by horse and sled, and he heard him speak fitfully along the way of his Island home, his stern father, and his loving mother. This real-life tragedy prompted him to compose the well-known lyrics, which are sung to the tune of an old Irish ballad. The last stanza of the song, in which Peter Emberley expresses the hope that "some good holy father" will bless his "mouldering grave," is not Calhoun's. It was added by performers who felt that the ballad demanded a religious ending.

Calhoun lived at Gordon Vale, where he farmed and worked in the woods in the winter. He met his wife, Frances M. Lister, who was seventeen years his junior, when she came to teach school at Bloomfield Ridge. Because of his heartbreak over her death in 1895, at age thirty-three, he was said to have spent much of the rest of his life in solitude, writing verse for consolation. He supposedly had "a trunk full of manuscripts," but very few songs would appear to have survived.

Calhoun had three sons and two daughters living in 1939.

Sources

[b] tombstone [d] Leader 6 Jan 1939 / Daily Gleaner 15 Apr 1895; Manny (Ballad); Manny/Wilson


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