In 1933, Elisabeth Greenleaf and Grace Mansfield's volume Ballads and Sea Songs of Newfoundland was published for the first time. This volume was reprinted in 1968 and in the thirty-six years which have since passed, interest in and research on vernacular song in Newfoundland has flowered.

"Beautiful Songs of love and larceny, crisis and celebration, bereavement and betrayal. This collection demonstrates how little the emotional map of Newfoundland has changed in 500 years. A family treasure." Sean McCann, Great Big Sea

"This book is a by-product of the so-called drudgery of school teaching. No one but a school-teacher could have obtained in so short a time a knowledge of the character and habit of thought of the Newfoundlanders. It is a tribute also to Dr. Grenfell's work, for the idea of such a book grew up form work under his summer mission." May 26, 1932 H. N. MacCracken

Newfoundland songs are diverse in origin. Vast numbers of them come from the British Isles, especially from England and Ireland; many are composed in Newfoundland, usually on English or Irish models; a lesser number of American, Canadian, and French songs are current. The ballads to be found in the Child collection are probably the oldest now sung. Then there are many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century broadside ballads, particularly English, and many nineteenth-century compositions. Such are the backgrounds from which the compilers of this volume have drawn their unusually interesting and delightful collection of ballad texts and ballad music. Expeditions to the island in 1920 and 1929 furnished the tunes; and a genuine interest in folk-literature assured the care and accuracy of the work.